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Lisa Schneider-Cipriano: The latest about breast cancer news and the correlation of
what we eat may be, well it could either enhance the risk of getting breast cancer or help
to keep it at bay. Do you want to start with that?
Dr. Jay K. Harness: I certainly do. What you are alluding to is an article published in
the Journal of the National Cancer Institute looking at fruits and vegetable consumption
and whether it could lower the risk of breast cancer in general. Now, this is what we call
a cohort study, meaning that there have been other groups, multiple different groups in
fact in this situation, there are 20 different cohort groups who have been studied Lisa prospectively,
followed anywhere from 11 to 20 years and in this particular sort of amalgamated report
if you will, there are over 900,000 women who have been followed and still what the
researchers were doing and these cohort groups, they have data, you know dietary data, weight
data, blood pressure data, I mean these all sorts of things that they have and so there
has been this discussion for some period of time that if we increase vegetables and fruit
in our diet, would it lower the overall risk of breast cancer and from this particular
report, the answer is what is called estrogen receptor positive breast cancers, which is
the majority of breast cancers, the answer is no, does not seem to have an impact, but
what's interesting and what's important about this study is that in estrogen receptor negative
breast cancers, in other words those that have no hormone sensitivity if you will, that
it does have an impact on lowering the risk of estrogen receptor negative breast cancer.
Lisa Schneider-Cipriano: This is such important information especially those who were diagnosed
with the estrogen receptive negative versus positive because you always hear after you
had your surgery and you had your mastectomy or your lumpectomy, if you are ER negative,
okay what else can I do and so I think the fact that what we eat can also keep it at
bay for the people who are ER negative that's terrific, if you are ER positive, then okay
you have your tamoxifen and like we have talked about the radiation, but this is terrific.
Are there certain foods, I mean I have heard spinach, broccoli, asparagus, have you heard
any others for those who were diagnosed with the estrogen receptive negative?
Dr. Jay K. Harness: Well, first of all, at least in this report, there is not a breakdown
specifically in the types of vegetables. What's called the subset analysis that actually ends
up that the impact of vegetables is greater than fruits. Now, Lisa I think we need to
put all this in perspective. One of the things that we know is that breast cancer is more
common in industrialized societies. So what we have in general in industrialized societies.
We have refined fruits, we have higher incidents of obesity, we are probably consuming less
of the desirable foods if you well. When I read this, I sort of smiled to myself and
said remember what mom always said, eat your vegetables.
Lisa Schneider-Cipriano: It's so true. Oh I know and make sure that they are fresh if
you can. Right?
Dr. Jay K. Harness: Absolutely correct and now and so one of the things, this reminds
me of is that we have got our good friends at the University of Arizona in the integrative
medicine department and we have had them on Breast Cancer Answers in the past. This would
be a wonderful invite the expert to dissect this kind of study more. One of the things
that we know from Victoria Maizes and the others at the University of Arizona is, we
want a lower inflammation in our body and there has been a fair amount of research and
work done especially by the folks of Arizona and elsewhere that lowering inflammation has
a positive effect not only on our good health, but may also lower the risk of cancer in general
or in other words, put it the other way around that inflammation in our body created by an
inflammation type diet if you will could increase the incidents of cancer and this is true for
men with prostate cancer as well as women with breast cancer and so you really asked
a good question about what we can do dietary wise to not only keep cancer at a bay, but
also once we were diagnosed, how do we help ourselves.