Breast Cancer: A Diet Gone Awry?

If you live anywhere along the east coast, you can probably think of at least a half dozen Dunkin’ Donuts shops that dot your commute. I know I sure can. Occasionally, I’ll stop into a Dunkin’ Donuts shop to grab a bottle of water, and also to get an idea of how their doughnuts are selling. Let’s just say that based on the times I’ve been there over the past few months, they won’t be overhauling doughnuts in favor of organically grown fruits any time soon (Dunkin’ Dates has a nice ring to it).

But give Dunkin’ Donuts some credit: At the very least, they’re overhauling the hydrogenated oils they cook doughnuts with—the kind of oil that’s loaded with trans fat—in favor of a virtual trans fat free blend of cottonseed, palm and soybean oils.

This pin in the visor of Dunkin’ Donuts I’m offering isn’t meant to suggest you now have the green light to eat a few glazed doughnuts because they’re now healthy. Just three glazed doughnuts offer a whopping 57 grams of fat and 15 grams of saturated fat—84 percent of your recommended daily intake! In short, the rule still applies: they should remain off limits, particularly if you’re a woman.

Why do I specify women and not men? Men should too, but according to a study done by cancer researchers from Bethesda, Maryland, a diet high in fat significantly increases the chances a woman will get breast cancer.

In previous articles, I’ve mentioned how all studies aren’t the same, nor are they conclusive, based largely on their limited scope and sample size. But this one was considerably large (nearly 189,000 post-menopausal women tested) and over an extended period of time (4 ½ years). The researchers from the National Cancer Institute asked these women to make a note of what specific foods they were eating, how regularly, and the researchers then pored over these journals to see what, if any, conclusions could be reached.

After compiling their conclusions, researchers contacted the study participants four and a half years later to see who among them, if any, had acquired breast cancer. The results were convincing enough and consistent enough for the lead researcher to conclude there was and is a causal link between breast cancer and high fat intake. The results showed that women whose diets contained more than 40 percent calories from fat had a 15 percent greater chance of acquiring breast cancer than those women whose daily calorie content was 20 percent from fat. Further, even though saturated fat is the kind of fat nutritionists urge consumers to steer away from, in this study, the level of risk remained the same for polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat consumption.

Researchers not involved with this study have commented that the better route to avoid breast cancer risk is to control body fat—not necessarily fat intake. For those women who have a history of obesity in the family, I completely agree. But for others, whose diet directly determines whether or not they gain weight, it just plain makes sense to avoid the kinds of foods that are linked to obesity and, as this study indicates, the increased risk of breast cancer.

This study adds whole new meaning to the old cliché “you are what you eat,” doesn’t it?