Research suggests that eating a diet high in fat and being overweight or obese increases the risk of breast cancer. In the study reviewed here, women who ate a high-fat diet had a greater risk of breast cancer during the more than four years of follow-up compared to women who ate a low-fat diet.
Women who got more than 40% of their calories from fat were 32% more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer than women who got less than 20% of their calories from fat. This study was very large (almost 190,000 women), so the findings are worth noting.
Still, it's important to consider that the study looked at fat in what the women ate, NOT the amount of body fat they had or whether they were overweight or obese. These three variables can influence each other. But this study suggests that even if her weight and body fat percentage are normal, a woman still may have a higher breast cancer risk if she eats a diet high in fat.
Managing both the fat in your diet AND your weight are two important steps you can take to better your overall health and possibly lower your breast cancer risk.
For more information on how to create a diet that's low in fat, visit the breastcancer.org Nutrition Section.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A large study of middle-age women with a wide range of fat in their diet shows that eating a high-fat diet raises the risk of developing invasive breast cancer.
The findings, reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, stem from the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study, in which 188,736 postmenopausal women reported detailed information on their diet in the mid-1990s.
During an average follow-up of 4.4 years, 3501 women developed breast cancer.
Based on responses to a 124-item "food frequency" questionnaire, researchers found that women who got 40 percent of their calories from fat had about a 15 percent increased risk of developing breast cancer compared with women got 20 percent of their calories from fat.
Using a more precise 24-hour dietary recall questionnaire, "we found a 32-percent increased risk of breast cancer" among women with a high level of fats in their diet, study chief Dr. Anne C. M. Thiebaut from the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, noted in a telephone interview with Reuters Health.
The increased risk of breast cancer associated with a high-fat diet was seen for all types of fat (saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated) and seemed to be confined to women who were not using hormone replacement therapy at the start of the study.
The suggestion that hormone therapy mediates the association between dietary fat intake and risk of breast cancer should be studied further, the authors suggest.
Thiebaut noted that "other studies have also found these associations; the higher the fat intake, the higher your risk for breast cancer." Nonetheless, there is ongoing debate about the association between dietary fat and the risk of breast cancer, she noted.
In a commentary on the study, two researchers from Harvard School of Public Health in Boston think that focusing on controlling body fat, rather than fat intake, would be more effective in preventing breast cancer.
The "modest associations" that have been observed between high-fat diets and increased breast cancer risk "stand in sharp contrast to the robust evidence for a strong link between (body fat) and the risk of postmenopausal breast cancer," write Drs. Stephanie Smith-Warner and Meir Stampfer.
SOURCE: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, March 21, 2007.
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