Breasts: An Owner’s Manual: Every Woman’s Guide to Reducing Cancer Risk, Making Treatment Choices and Optimising Outcomes. Kristi Funk

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СКАЧАТЬ and paternal family histories count equally. Even doctors get this wrong. So when assessing familial risk, don’t just pay attention to your maternal lineage. Look at first-, second-, and third-degree relatives on both sides: parents, siblings, and your own children; grandparents, aunts/uncles, nieces/nephews, your own grandchildren; great-grandparents, great-aunts/great-uncles, first cousins, grandnieces/grandnephews, and your own great-grandchildren. When reviewing your father’s side, look for breast and ovarian cancers hiding in the women of more distant generations. Especially when the family tree lacks ladies, pay attention to mutation-associated cancers that show up more frequently in men than breast cancer, such as early-onset colon, prostate, and pancreatic cancers.

      And speaking of the guys, most think they can’t get breast cancer, but since they actually do have breast tissue, they’re susceptible too. Male breast cancer accounts for approximately 0.8 percent of all breast cancer cases, about 2,470 men annually.² In American men, the lifetime risk of breast cancer approaches 1.3 in 100,000.³ Interestingly, stage for stage, men survive cancer at the same rates as women; however, due to a lack of awareness that male breast cancer is even a possibility, their diagnoses usually come at later stages, increasing overall mortality rates.

      Another erroneous myth about breast cancer relates to age—that it only happens to older people. While certainly less common among premenopausal than postmenopausal women, breast cancer does not discriminate when it comes to age. In the United States, 19.7 percent of all breast cancers and 11 percent of all breast cancer deaths occurred in women under fifty years old (specifically, 48,080 invasive breast cancer diagnoses, 14,050 in situ cancer diagnoses, and 4,470 breast cancer deaths befall women under fifty years old).⁴ In fact, the median age of breast cancer in the US is sixty-two years old, which means that exactly 50 percent of breast cancers are diagnosed under age sixty-two, and 50 percent are diagnosed at or over age sixty-two. No matter what your age, cancer cells shrink at the sight of healthy living, so we can employ the anticancer strategies in this book during all decades of life.

      Finally, the misunderstood stat that all women have a 1 in 8 chance of getting breast cancer is one of the most commonly quoted statistics out there. While it’s correct, truth be told, you don’t walk around every day of your life with 1 in 8 odds of getting breast cancer! If that were true, you’d probably have cancer by next month. Breast cancer risk increases as you get older. A woman’s chance of being diagnosed with breast cancer during her twenties is 1 in 1,567 (not 1 in 8); her thirties, 1 in 220; forties, 1 in 68; fifties, 1 in 43; sixties, 1 in 29; seventies, 1 in 25; finally reaching the oft-quoted 1 in 8 as a cumulative lifetime risk once she hits eighty.⁵ You know those pictures with a lineup of eight “woman” icons like the ones you see on a public restroom door? They sport a caption that reads, “One in eight women will develop breast cancer in her lifetime.” Really, the icons should not be youthful triangles. We need a few canes and wheelchairs in there to more accurately reflect risk as it pertains to age.

      FACT: YOUR DIET MATTERS—A LOT

      Frankly, one of the most dangerous falsehoods circulating out there states that your diet doesn’t impact breast health, which is completely bananas and wrong. What you put into your body influences estrogen levels, inflammation, blood vessel formation, cellular function, and destructive free radicals, to name a few cancer-related processes. What’s more, the core genetic mutation within a cancer cell cross-talks with hundreds of other genes, turning them on or off to suit the cancer’s survival instincts. Cancer growth isn’t the handiwork of a single gene; it’s the product of a network of genes. A human study in men with prostate cancer proved that by using only diet and healthy lifestyle interventions, the cross-talking chatter got turned down in 453 bad genes, and turned up in forty-eight good ones.⁶ Oh yes, nutrition matters, you can bet your life on it. I’ve devoted the next two chapters to foods that work to enhance breast health or flat-out destroy it, but a few phony food rules come up so often that I’d like to take a moment to slam them down.

      First up, wake up to coffee. A lot of the women I meet believe that coffee causes breast cancer, but absolutely no link exists between your sacred cup of joe and breast cancer.⁷ In fact, mounting evidence suggests that coffee might actually have a preventive effect.⁸ That being said, the caffeine in coffee isn’t always a plus for your breasts, as it can increase breast pain and breast cysts, particularly in young women with fibrocystic breast changes—but that’s not cancer. So if your breasts don’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt your breasts to love a latte.

      And speaking of lattes, the idea that dairy causes breast cancer is unproven. Evidence from more than forty case-control studies and twelve cohort studies does not support an association between dairy product consumption and breast cancer risk.⁹ It sounds intuitive to say that the presence of hormones, growth factors, fat, antibiotics, and chemical contaminants often found in dairy would lead to a proliferation of cancer cells, especially hormonally sensitive breast cancer cells, but the evidence contradicts our intuition. That being said, dairy is a major source of saturated fat, so you must be mindful of how fat influences your risk, which we discuss in chapter 4.

      At first blush, the evidence seems to point toward the fact that no causative link exists between the consumption of red meat, white meat, total meat, or fish and breast cancer.¹⁰ Hit the brakes and screech to a skidding stop! Ladies, it took my writing this book to live inside the hundred-plus confusing and contradictory breast/meat studies and really figure it out. Meat is so toxic to your breasts that even the slightest consumption of it nullifies a measurable difference between “high” and “low” meat consumers. Only when you compare zero/zippo meat consumption to any meat consumption might you arrive at the truth. Minimize meat. See you in chapter 4 to understand why.

      Finally, I hear from a lot of my most nutrition-savvy patients that acidic foods alter the body’s pH balance to the extent that it could cause breast cancer. But here’s the thing: your body tightly regulates your blood pH to be 7.35 to 7.45 no matter what you eat, and even minor changes to this range would cause severe symptoms and life-threatening illness. According to the American Institute for Cancer Research, this myth clashes with everything science teaches about the chemistry of the human body. There isn’t much wiggle room, since a pH outside of 6.8 to 7.8 equals certain death. And don’t be fooled by test kits said to rate your body’s acidity through urine. If you check the pH of your urine, and it’s not a perfect 7.35, that’s because your body constantly fine tunes excess acid or base to maintain proper blood pH balance, and it does so by excreting the excess in your urine.

      That said, it’s true that cancer cells flourish in acidic microenvironments.¹¹ However, it’s the cancer itself that creates the acid it bathes in, so consuming low pH foods doesn’t provide a happy place for cancer; cancer doesn’t even need you for that.¹² Besides, stomach juices are pure acid at pH 1.5 to 3.5. Your alkaline water slides down the esophagus and splashes right into an acidic bath; it will not change your body’s pH, and it will not neutralize a cancer cell’s acidic little world. I will say that the foods (nuts and veggies) you would consume in a (futile) effort to change your pH to more alkaline actually pack a massive punch to cancer cells via high antioxidant levels, DNA–damage control, and immune system support, but it’s not from making you alkaline.

      BOGUS LIFESTYLE BELIEFS

      We’ll dive into the lifestyle changes that matter most in chapter 5, but I’d like to first clear the decks on certain popular myths so you don’t think I’m skipping these.

      Let’s talk bras. They don’t start or stimulate breast cancer, thankfully, because we need their unwavering support. Underwire bras, tight bras, sleeping in a bra, or wearing a bra more than twelve hours a day has no connection to risk. I’ve heard the claims, and initially СКАЧАТЬ