One may have assumed that once a woman gets past menopause and is overweight though, any subsequent weight loss may not help her chances of avoiding the cancer.

However, new research suggests this is not true, and that losing weight, even if it’s weight loss after menopause, can significantly reduce your chances of developing breast cancer.

Most researchers and scholars believe the reason for the increased breast cancer risk with obesity and overweight women is because an overweight woman has excess body fat. Fat is a major facilitator of excess estrogen in the body, since estrogen is essentially stored in body fat in women.

This is just a hypothesis though, but most doctors do believe that excess estrogen storage is a breast cancer risk in itself, although the single hormone itself cannot be 100% conclusively linked to the contraction of the breast cancer.

Basically, any doctor will tell you weight loss is of a benefit anyways, and maintaining a trim figure with less fat benefits your health in so many more ways than just for breast cancer prevention, so this should be followed as a general rule of thumb to begin with.