HOW FOODS CAN PREVENT BREAST CANCER: SHORTEN EXPOSURE TO ESTROGEN
Decreasing the total number of days that you are exposed to estrogen substantially decreases your risk. There are two potential ways of doing that. The first and most practical is to change the length of your menstrual cycle. Asian women have longer menstrual cycles than American women, 33 days instead of 28. Why is that important? If you have longer menstrual cycles, you will have fewer total cycles over the course of a lifetime. Fewer cycles means less exposure to estrogen. Can you lengthen your menstrual cycle? Dr. Ken Setchell, a pioneer in the use of soy protein, gave a group of American women 60 grams of textured soy protein daily. He was able to prolong the cycles of these women to 33 days, mimicking the longer cycle length of Asian women. Vigorous exercise also decreases the total number of lifetime menstrual cycles by lengthening the menstrual cycle.
Some doctors, such as New York University's Steve Goldstein, prescribe birth control pills for longer than the usual 21 days in order to achieve a longer cycle. Newer birth control pills that could increase cycle length to prevent breast cancer are in the planning stages. With the decrease in numbers of childbirths and in years of breast-feeding, women today may have over 200 more menstrual cycles than their forebears. All this extra estrogen exposure may account for a substantial part of the increased risk of breast cancer that American women face.
The second method of shortening estrogen exposure is to delay menarche, since the more years you ovulate, the more menstrual cycles you will have. Young women with menarche before age 14 have a 30 percent increased risk of breast cancer when compared to girls whose menarche is at age 15 or later. Girls eating high-calorie, high-fat diets who undertake little physical activity have earlier menarche than active girls on lower fat, more modest calorie intakes. Young women in rural China on a low-calorie, low-fat diet with lots of physical exercise don't reach menarche until age 17. The later menarche occurs, the lower estrogen levels will be over a lifetime.
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Womens health
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HOW FOODS CAN PREVENT BREAST CANCER: DECREASE ESTROGENS
Here's how to counter the ill effects of bad, recycled, chemical, and free estrogens.
Bad Estrogen
Even if you produce moderate to high amounts of estrogen, there is an emerging strategy to blunt its potency. You can actually channel your estrogen into good estrogen rather than bad estrogen by eating a diet high in cruciferous vegetables. Those include cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbage. Both exercise and low body fat also increase the production of good estrogen. Alcohol, polyunsaturated fats, and too much body fat all increase the production of bad estrogen.
Recycled Estrogen
When estrogen is transported from the bloodstream through the liver and into the bowel for disposal, it is assisted by large amounts of fiber in the bowel. That fiber binds to estrogen in the intestine so that the body cannot reabsorb it, ensuring that it is excreted with other waste products. However, when there is too little fiber in the diet, the estrogen remains free in the bowel and may be reabsorbed by the body into the bloodstream, raising the amount of estrogen in the bloodstream. A study at Tufts University showed that the more a woman's bowel movement weighed, the lower was her blood estrogen level. The assumption is that the increased weight of the bowel movement was due to the fiber.
Free Estrogen
The most effective way to decrease the amount of free estrogen in the blood is to build more of the carriers that bind estrogen in the blood and keep it from estrogen receptors. Lets look at the key strategies. The prime regulator of estrogen carriers is the hormone insulin, according to Banoo Parpia of the China-Cornell-Oxford Project. The lower you can drop your insulin, the more estrogen carriers your body manufactures. A low-fat diet also reduces the amount of free estrogen in healthy postmenopausal women. Soy also manufactures more carriers. A high-fiber diet helps to bind more free estrogen in your blood and keeps it at lower, safer levels. Many of these measures also decrease estrogen production, so you are cutting your cancer risk in at least two separate ways.
Chemical Estrogen
The most aggressive prevention includes avoiding animal and fish products with high fat contents that can pick up and concentrate large quantities of chemical estrogens and pesticides. The worst offenders and how to avoid them are found in the chapter "Step 8: Avoid Chemical Estrogens." Eating organic foods that have always been pesticide-free will help you to avoid contaminating breast fat. Washing all fruits and vegetables thoroughly will help remove pesticides. Since most women already have high stores of chemical estrogens in their breast fats there are two other strategies that have proved to be beneficial. First is breast-feeding, which flushes pesticides out of their storage site in breast fat. That does mean that your infant ingests milk with chemical estrogens, but pediatricians do not believe this is harmful. The most practical strategy of all is to consume large amounts of estrogen blockers such as soy, which block the effect of these chemicals at the estrogen receptors on breast cells.
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Womens health
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