Dr. DeOreo writes...

Hormones: Up Close and Personal, Part 3

By Dr. Kathleen DeOreo Naturopathic Doctor

The Hormone Healthy Diet

Sadly, breast cancer is on the rise. We have to look at our individual lifestyle and assess the cause and effect when our body has a weak constitution (illness). There are so many foods that actually are beneficial when it comes to fighting t cancer in the body. The key part of this protective diet is a low-fat, plant-based diet. A research study done in 2004 out of the International Research Conference on Food, Nutrition and Cancer described how scientists drew blood from women before and after placing them on this low-fat, plant-based diet for only two weeks. Pre-diet blood showed high levels of growth hormones that promote breast cancer. Post-diet blood showed a dramatic reduction in those same hormones. And, in fact, when the researchers dripped the blood onto live human breast cancer cells, after just two weeks on this plant-based diet, the blood of those women reduced the cancer growth rate by twenty percent. That’s really huge. That’s only two weeks. A high-fiber diet definitely can reduce serum estrogen levels in premenopausal women. It was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 1991.

And what is a high-fiber diet? The typical American diet may be 3 grams, 4 grams of fiber a day, depending on your breakfast cereal. What we’re looking for is over a 50 gram intake of fiber. When we do that, we have about a fifty percent reduction in breast cancer risk, and that’s because a high-fiber diet can bind up and escort out huge amounts of circulating hormones that promote breast cancer.

This amount of fiber looks like this: whole grain, beans, legumes, fresh fruits, not fruit juice. It’s going to look like fresh vegetables and seeds and nuts, flax seeds and sea vegetables. The International Journal of Cancer back in 2005, a study was published by Harvard researchers that had followed over 90,000 women for over a decade in terms of their dietary behaviors and risk for breast cancer. Those women who are eating two to four servings a week of beans or lentils or legumes cut their risk of breast cancer by twenty-five percent, as compared with those who had them only once a month or never. Fiber is so important is that it actually can reduce our risk of constipation. When we have sluggish bowel function, we have higher risk for breast cancer as well as some other hormone-dependent cancers and other cancers that are non hormone dependent, but specifically as relates to the hormone-dependent cancers. The longer that the fecal matter can lie in contact with the bowel wall, the greater the opportunity for those secondary bio-acids to get absorbed through systemic circulation and back into the breast where they can promote tissue changes in the direction of malignancy. A high fiber, low fat diet can be extremely important at maintaining our good health that it pays to pay attention to it.

So what will you choose?