A new study has recently revealed that adopting a plant-based diet may decrease the risk of developing breast cancer by 14%.
While previous research did prove that what we eat can prevent the development of cancer, until now, it’s been quite difficult to pinpoint exactly what foods we should include in our diet in order to reduce the risk of getting ill. However, recent research sheds some light on this issue, proving that the most important characteristic of our food should be how healthy it is.
The study was performed by a research team from the Center for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health at Paris-Saclay University and it analyzed data from approximately 65,000 women who were in their postmenopausal stage. The participants in the study were under observation for a period of almost twenty years and the results were almost the same in the case of most breast cancer types.
After analyzing the available information, researchers reached the conclusion that a healthy and nutritional plant-based diet had the potential to reduce the risk of breast cancer by 14%. At the same time, they found that an unhealthy plant-based diet had the exact opposite effect, increasing the risk of cancer by approximately 20%. Therefore, the most important feature of the diet was not necessarily that it was plant-based, but that it was a healthy diet.
According to SciTechDaily, Sanam Shah, the lead author of the study, presented its results at the NUTRITION 2022 LIVE ONLINE conference, an annual event of the American Society for Nutrition, where she declared that
These findings highlight that increasing the consumption of healthy plant foods and decreasing the consumption of less healthy plant foods and animal foods might help prevent all types of breast cancer. What is different about our study is that we could disentangle the effects of the quality of plant foods, which has not been the focus of previous studies on other dietary patterns. By scoring healthy, unhealthy, and animal-based foods, we comprehensively analyzed food intake by considering the ‘healthiness’ of food groups.
The study focused on analyzing the differences between healthy plant-based foods, such as whole grains, vegetables, fruit, legumes, nuts, tea and coffee, and unhealthy plant-based foods, like refined grains, potatoes, sugar-based beverages, desserts and fruit juices.
