Could This Diet Mistake Raise Your Risk for Breast Cancer?

by Anna Maltby

Stephanie Foley
Stephanie Foley

We've talked before about how extra pounds and eating unhealthy stuff like bacon (ugh, nitrates!) may raise your risk for cancer, but science is still sorting out how other specific nutrients might affect your cancer risk. If you suspected that fatty foods might be bad in and of themselves, and not just because they contribute to weight gain, you might be right -- a new study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute finds a strong association between fat intake and certain types of breast cancer.

Experts have suspected for a long time that high fat intake increases breast cancer risk, but it's been tough to confirm because evidence has been inconsistent -- and after all, you can't stick a bunch of ladies in a lab for decades and watch what happens when one group eats healthfully and another group chows down on a bunch of fat. (Sounds like a horror movie, right?!)

So the researchers behind this new paper decided to use a prospective cohort study (a kind of study that follows a large group of individuals over an extended period of time) to find out how fat intake affects breast cancer risk.


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A little background: If you're not super well-versed in cancer terminology (it's OK!), breast cancer is clinically categorized by the types of hormone receptors it has -- and each type is a little different in prognosis, expression and treatment. The three big hormones that play into breast cancer categorization are estrogen (ER), progesterone (PR) and human epidermal growth factor 2 (HER2), with both positive and negative forms of each.

We'll skip the acronym soup and get straight to the conclusion, in which the researchers found that high saturated fat intake is associated with increased risk for breast cancer, but the link is much stronger for hormone-sensitive types than receptor-negative types.

Your bottom-line takeaway? While more research is needed to firm up the connection, minimizing your intake of saturated fats, which is a really good idea anyway, might not be a bad idea in terms of cancer risk, either.

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