A new study suggests that women who follow a traditional Mediterranean diet, a popular type of diet ordinarily mentioned on healthy eating sites, may have a lower risk of developing breast cancer after menopause than women with different eating habits.
Among 14,800 Greek women followed for a decade, researchers found that those who kept most closely to the region’s traditional diet were less likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer than those who have eating habits that were least Mediterranean-like.
The link was seen only among women who were past the menopausal stage and not on younger women. Among postmenopausal women, those with the higher Mediterranean diet scores were 22 percent less likely to develop breast cancer during the study than those with the lower scores.
The findings, as reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, do not prove that the diet itself offers protection against breast cancer. However, the authors estimate that if all the women in their study population had closely adhered to a traditional Mediterranean diet, about 10 percent of the 127 postmenopausal breast cancers in the group would have been avoided—if such a link is proven in future studies.
In spite of the preliminary nature of the findings, they add to research tying the traditional Mediterranean diet to lower risks of certain cancers such as cancer of the stomach and colon and heart disease.
The Mediterranean diet is rich in olive oil, fish, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and legumes and is relatively low in red meat and dairy in general. Researchers have long speculated that the diet may help explicate why countries in the Mediterranean region have historically had lower rates of some cancers, including breast cancer and heart disease, compared with other European countries and the US.
Until now, only two other studies have looked at the relationship between Mediterranean-style eating and the risk of breast cancer which were both done in the US. Although each found a connection between the diet and the lower breast cancer risk, in one of the researches the link was limited to breast cancers that fall short of receptors for the hormone estrogen—which account for about one-quarter of breast tumors.
Research has found, for instance, that women who closely follow the Mediterranean diet tend to have lower levels of estrogen, which fuels the growth of majority of the breast cancers, than other women do. Other studies in the lab suggest that the fats found in the diet—both the omega-3 fats in oily fish and olive oil—may slow the growth of cancer cells.