Breast health: a gynecologist's advice comes from her personal struggle with breast cancer - includes related article about herbs - Special Women's Health Issue

Vegetarian Times, July, 1997 by Barbara Joseph

Progesterone cream, derived from wild yam and/or soybeans, has been very helpful to many women who make too little progesterone in their bodies due to stressful lifestyles and have too much estrogen not only from what is made in their bodies but from exposure to estrogen-like environmental chemicals (such as PCBs) and hormone-laced, commercial food products. An imbalanced ratio of estrogen to progesterone, the female sex hormones responsible for fertility, is a major risk factor in a variety of breast conditions, inducing breast cancer. Talk to your practitioner about this if you are concerned.

MAMMOGRAPHY: EARLY

OR LATE DETECTION?

By the time a mammogram is able to pick up breast cancer, the cancer may have been growing in your body for six to eight years -- so, mammograms aren't really early detection, as we've been told. In fact, it's questionable whether all women (40 and older) should have mammograms.

A recent panel of experts convened by the National Institutes of Health concluded that it could not recommend that all women in their 40s have mammograms. Yet three months later, another government panel supported mammograms for women in their 40s. And just weeks after that, a third panel said that breast cancer is not one but three diseases, and manimography may not prolong lives in any of the three categories.

Michael Swift, M.D., director of the Institute for the Genetic Analysis of Common Diseases at New York Medical College, has done research with a gene carried by as many as I percent of the population that confers increased sensitivity to the carcinogenic effects of radiation. Swift is concerned that women with this gene, as well as women in the general population, may accumulate too much radiation exposure over the years, resulting in an excess of radiation-induced cancers. Swift says that, "While mammography doses in recent years have been reduced, making screening tests safer, the effects of X-ray studies accumulate over a lifetime, possibly contributing to the breast cancer epidemic." The bottom line: Mammograms are not a panacea. Make your personal choice, weighing the risks and benefits.

NUTRITION'S ROLE IN

CANCER PREVENTION

Diet has a major influence on cancer, especially breast and other cancers of women's reproductive organs. A cancer-preventive diet has been urged by both the government and leading health organizations such as the American Cancer Society and the American Health Foundation. All recommendations agree on the protective value of low-fat diets with plenty of fresh vegetables, fruits and fiber-rich whole grains, soy foods and legumes. This diet is not only protective against cancer, but against most chronic diseases.

Fiber

There is convincing evidence from hundreds of scientific studies that whole grain cereals, fruits, vegetables and other foods naturally high in fiber are protective for breasts, according to Ernst Wynder, M.D., president of the American Health Foundation, based in New York City. Dietary fiber increases excretion of estrogen, decreasing the amount of the hormone in our bloodstream. Fiber also binds carcinogens from our food and the environment, facilitating their excretion from the body and helping to keep the intestinal tract healthy.