HEALTH WATCH: Fighting cancer with lifestyle changes

By Michael Gregger M.D.

AFTER DIAGNOSIS, women with breast cancer may cut their risk of dying nearly in half by just instituting simple, modest lifestyle changes—5 or more servings of fruits and veggies a day and walking 30 minutes a day, 6 days a week.

But what about preventing breast cancer in the first place?

If we follow the advice of the official dietary guidelines for cancer prevention, does it actually reduce our risk of cancer? If we manage our weight, eat more plant foods, less animal foods, less alcohol and breastfeed, based on the largest prospective study on diet and cancer in history, we may significantly lower our risk of breast cancer, endometrial cancer, colorectal cancer, lung cancer, kidney cancer, stomach cancer, oral cancer, liver cancer, esophageal cancer, and all cancers combined.

Of all the recommendations, the “eat mostly foods of plant origin” appeared the most powerful. For example, a study in the UK found that in just one year in Britain there were 14,902 excess cases of cancer caused by something participants were exposed to 10 years earlier. What was that something that ended up causing thousands of cancers?  Deficient intake of fruit and vegetables.

If that was instead, some chemical spill causing 14,000 cancers, people would be up in arms to ban it—but instead when that killer carcinogen is not eating their “fruit and veg” (as the Brits would say), it hardly gets anyone’s attention.

What if we throw in smoking, too? Researchers created a healthy lifestyle index, defined by four things: 1) exercise;  2) a dietary shift away from the standard American diet high in meat, dairy, fat, and sugar towards a more prudent dietary pattern—for instance more green and yellow vegetables, beans, and fruits;  3) avoidance of tobacco; and 4) avoidance of alcohol. Young women scoring higher on those four things cut their odds of getting breast cancer in half, older women cut their odds of breast cancer by 80%!

Red Wine Or White?

We’ve covered how even light drinking can increase breast cancer risk but for women who refuse to eliminate alcohol, which is less carcinogenic: red wine or white? Some studies, , actually suggest less or even no risk from red wine, and we may have just figured out why. Remember how mushrooms were the vegetable best able to suppress the activity of aromatase, the enzyme used by breast tumors to produce its own estrogen? Well, if we run the same human placenta experiments with fruit, strawberries get the silver, but grapes get the gold.

But what kind of grapes? The wimpy green grapes used to make white wine barely worked compared to those used for making red.  Bottom line: “red wine may serve as a nutritional aromatase inhibitor, which may ameliorate the elevated breast cancer risk associated with alcohol intake.” But why accept any elevated risk? Just eat whole grapes! And if you do, choose ones with seeds