Food, Fat and Estrogen
Fatty foods affect the body in many ways and have a strong
influence on hormonal activity in the body. First, high-fat
diets increase the amount of estrogens, the female sex
hormones, in the blood. It is known that many breast tumors
are "fueled" by estrogens. Estrogens are normal and
essential hormones for both women and men, but the more
estrogen there is, the greater the driving force behind some
kinds of breast cancer. On high-fat diets, estrogen levels
increase. When women adopt low-fat diets, their estrogen
levels drop noticeably in a very short time.
Vegetarians have significantly lower estrogen levels than
non-vegetarians, in part because of the lower fat content of
their diet. In addition, they have more of certain carrier
molecules, called sex hormone binding globulin, which
circulate in the blood and have the job of holding onto sex
hormones, keeping them inactive until they are needed. Fatty
foods do the reverse: they increase estrogens and reduce the
amount of the carrier molecule that is supposed to keep
estrogens in check.
Animal fats are apparently a bigger problem than vegetable
oils. Paulo Toniolo of the New York University Center
compared the diets of 250 women with breast cancer to 499
women without cancer from the same province in northwestern
Italy. The two groups ate about the same amount of olive oil
and carbohydrates. But what made the cancer patients
different was that they had eaten more meat, cheese, butter,
and milk. Women who consumed more animal products had as
much as three times the cancer risk of other women.
Even though cross-cultural comparisons have pointed a finger
at animal fat as the principal problem, vegetable oil is
also under some suspicion. Vegetable oils can probably
affect estrogen levels and, as we will see below, increase
the production of cancer-causing free radicals. So it is no
good just replacing fried chicken with fried onion rings.
The best diet eliminates animal products and keeps vegetable
oils to a minimum as well.
Certain foods have special benefits. Soybeans, for example,
contain natural compounds, called phytoestrogens. These are
very weak estrogens which can occupy the estrogen receptors
on breast cells, displacing normal estrogens. The result is
less estrogen stimulation of each cell. Soybeans are a
mainstay of Asian diets and may be an additional reason why
these countries have low cancer rates.
Source: Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
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