Apr 10
6
Body Fat and Breast Cancer : A Real Threat?
Some controversial news, or shall I say opinions, recently surfaced this week on recommendations by healthcare panels to prevent breast cancer – even up to one third of the cases of breast cancer here in the US, or perhaps the world. Their recommendation was that women eat less and exercise more. Because obesity is associated to a higher risk for breast cancer, and exercise has been associated with a lowered risk (perhaps because it helps prevent obesity), they are making these recommendations as a prevention measure.
They have treaded these types of issues lightly in the past, and who can blame them (the medical establishment). It is easy to come off like they are blaming patients for getting breast cancer because of their lifestyle or because they are overweight. However, what the point is, is that there is a real correlation between increased estrogen levels and higher body fat. Why?
Because estrogen is actually stored mostly in the fat of the body. The more body fat you have, the more estrogens you have running rampant in your body, and this means the higher your breast cancer risk is typically going to be, since breast cancer is typically associated with estrogen.
There are also strong links to genetic factors as well though, so you could theoretically do everything by the book and still get breast cancer if it’s just a strong genetic predisposition. However, even with this predisposition, there are still things you can change in your life which help to lower the risk. One is to exercise more. This helps convert more of your body fat into muscle tissue, which means you are housing less estrogen by allowing it to stay in less fat.
Also, eating less reduces the amount of fat you have on your body, or at least decreases the size of you fat cells, which also gives estrogen less refuge in your body and therefore should theoretically lower your risk of cancer. The researchers who made the recommendations we speak of today actually theorized that we could reduce the world’s cases of breast cancer by up to 30% if all women adhered to this type of lifestyle which minimizes the fat on the body.
That’s pretty impressive. I know for me, it’s a matter of an overall lifestyle to try to do these things anyways, so it’s something that I will always practice in my life.
