Fatty Food Does Not Affect Breast Cancer Survival

By Leslie Gevirtz

BOSTON (Reuters) - In a finding that challenges conventional wisdom, researchers reported Wednesday that a low-fat diet does not improve the chances of survival for women with breast cancer.

But Brigham and Women's Hospital researchers report in the journal Cancer they did find a diet rich in proteins from poultry and dairy products significantly lowered the risk of death for breast cancer patients.

“Despite popular belief, we found that eating a diet low in fat did not significantly improve a women's chance of survival when diagnosed with breast cancer,” Dr. Michelle Holmes, the study's lead author, told Reuters.

Her team based its findings on the landmark Nurses Health Study that began in 1976. Some 121,000 women are involved in the ongoing study, which asks its volunteers to fill out questionnaires on a regular basis.

“We followed almost 2,000 women with breast cancer for up to 18 years,” Holmes said, adding she “studied the women's diet after diagnosis because that's what a woman who is actually facing breast cancer can change.”

In the journal Cancer, Holmes wrote “a diet rich in proteins from poultry -- chicken and turkey -- as well as dairy products, but not red meat, appears to play a role in increasing survival for breast cancer patients.... There was an approximately 30-35 percent lower risk of death found among those who ate the most poultry and dairy products.”

Eating more vegetables also proved beneficial to survival, but only in those whose cancer had not spread beyond the breast, she said.

Holmes said more study was needed to evaluate the role nutrition plays in breast cancer. “This is just the beginning. Other than fat in foods, the other nutrients have not been looked at,” she said.

Separately, Holmes' colleagues report in Wednesday's issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that women who eat two to three servings of whole grains daily cut their heart disease risk by 27 percent.

“By simply choosing to make a sandwich with two slices of whole wheat bread, instead of white, a woman will get the beneficial two servings of whole grains she needs to protect her heart,” Dr. Meir Stampfer said in a statement.

Stampfer's group followed 75,521 women, also from the Nurses Health Study, aged 38 to 63, over 10 years and found that women who ate a lot of whole grains smoked less, exercised more and were more likely to receive hormone replacement therapy.

But even taking those factors into account, researchers found that a higher intake of whole grain foods was still associated with a lower incidence of heart disease.

Reprinted from Yahoo 1999