Washington, D.C. - American Institute for Cancer Research - infoZine -Experts at the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) in Washington, the nation’s leading authority on the diet-cancer connection, said today that the studies seem promising.
Their findings will need to be published to allow the research community a chance to review them in detail, but the results reported in the media corroborate (and enlarge upon) research funded by AICR and other cancer research organizations.
AICR cautioned, however, that even if the new results are confirmed, they do not suggest that soy and fish are “magic bullets” against cancer. Loading up on any food, no matter how healthful, is not advisable.
Rather, these results offer further evidence that diets high in a variety of plant foods and low in red meat play an important role in protecting against cancer.
Soy in Childhood, Early Adolescence and Breast Cancer Risk
Populations with high soy consumption have been associated with lower risk for breast cancer for decades, and many laboratory investigations involving breast cells and tissue have uncovered important connections to explain how soy may be protective.
The evidence from observational studies and human trials, however, has been less consistent.
The new study is important because it is the first to examine how childhood intake impacts breast cancer risk later on in life. It is a relatively large case-control study, involving 597 Asian-American breast cancer patients (cases) and 966 Asian-American women without the disease (controls).
In the study, women who reported eating the most soy foods such as tofu and miso between ages 5 and 11 had a 58 percent lower risk for breast cancer than women who ate the least. Among adolescents and young adults, smaller reductions in risk were observed.
A growing body of evidence suggests that certain cells are more sensitive to dietary influences at specific stages of life. Laboratory studies involving soy and breast cancer funded by AICR have demonstrated that, in animal models, such “windows of opportunity” occur during childhood and early adolescence, while breast tissues are developing.
Fish and Colorectal Cancer in Men
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The latest results from the Physicians’ Health Study, which involves 22,071 men, suggest that those who said they ate fish five or more times a week had 40 percent lower of risk of colorectal cancer than participants who said they ate it rarely or never.
Washington, D.C. - American Institute for Cancer Research - infoZine -The Physician’s Health Study began as a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study originally intended to study how aspirin and certain supplements influence cancer. To derive the new results, researchers reanalyzed data that the participants provided on a single food-frequency questionnaire shortly after the study’s outset.
As such, one of the central assumptions of the resulting cohort study is that the men consistently maintained the diets they reported eating over the many years (nearly 20 years, on average) that the study progressed.
Nevertheless, the reported results are closely in line with published research. Omega-3 fatty acids (contained in fatty fish like salmon, tuna, sardines, bluefish, ocean trout, herring and mackerel) have been shown, in laboratory studies, to combat the kind of inflammation often associated with cancer development. These fatty acids have also stopped or slowed the growth of several different kinds of tumors, in animal models.
Additional explanations for the observed protective effect exist. People who consume more fish tend to eat less red meat (an established cancer risk factor) and also tend to be leaner, more physically active, and to eat more plant foods. This overall behavior pattern has been linked to lower risk for cancer and other chronic diseases.
Additional research presented at Tuesday’s meeting included a cohort study suggesting that high levels of dietary vitamin E helped protect smokers against the kind of damage that can lead to lung cancer, and a study linking low blood cholesterol levels in prostate cancer patients to improved outcomes.
NOTE: The studies were presented at the Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in Boston. AACR is a large professional organization with a membership comprising thousands of cancer researchers. It is not affiliated with the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR), which is an independent cancer charity that fosters research on the diet-cancer link and educates the public about the results.
