Low-fat diet helps reduce risk of dying from breast cancer, study finds

[nitpicker]

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/low-fat-diet-helps-reduce-risk-dying-breast-cancer-study-n1005381

Low-fat diet helps reduce risk of dying from breast cancer, study finds

A 20-year study shows a significant drop in deaths from breast cancer among women who consumed less dietary fat.

May 15, 2019, 5:17 PM EDT

By Erika Edwards

Eating a low-fat, plant-based diet could help significantly lower a woman's risk of dying from breast cancer, and the key appears to be changing eating habits before tumors have a chance to develop, according to a study released Wednesday.

The new findings are from a long-term analysis of the federally funded Women's Health Initiative, and included data on more than 48,000 postmenopausal women across the U.S.When the WHI study began in 1993, the women were in their 50s, 60s and 70s, and had never been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Nearly 20,000 of those women spent the next eight years carefully logging what they ate, aiming for less dietary fat, such as red meat and full-fat dairy products, and more fruit, vegetables and whole grains.

The women were tracked for 20 years, through 2013. Researchers from the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center who analyzed the data found that women who stuck to the low-fat, plant-based diet had a 20 percent lower risk of dying from breast cancer.
(snip)

[Dream Girl]

1. Was it the protective properties of the plants based diet or the low fat?

[Nay]

2. Exactly. That's the problem with studies like this -- we don't get enough info to be able

to tease out why they think the one over the other. Do nations that consume lots of full-fat dairy (Iceland, Finland, France, etc.) have more breast cancer? I don't think they do.

My own personal feeling is that the standard American diet is loaded with so many additives (usually to make the food cheaper to manufacture) that it is somewhat cancer-causing just because of that.