You might have heard recently about the fact that a low-fat diet can save you from breast cancer. The entire media reported last week that a new study shows how such a diet helps women reduce the risks they have of dying from breast cancer. But is it true?
About 20,000 women of 50, 60, and 70 years old enrolled in the study. They were helped to change the diets in various ways during a minimum of eight years. Rowan Chlebowski works at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute. From the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, he explains that they wanted the women to reduce the fat intake. Moreover, they were asked to include more grains, fruits, and vegetables in their diets.
The study is, indeed, impressive. It included almost 50,000 women in total! Moreover, if you include the long-term analysis and follow-up, it added up to nearly 20 years. During the study, some of the women had received a breast cancer diagnosis.
A Low-Fat Diet Can Protect You From Breast Cancer
However, those who had been changing their diets appeared to have a risk lower by 21% of dying because of the disease.
Chlebowski added that this is the first study to target breast cancer and to notice a decrease in the deaths caused by this horrible disease. However, we have to ask if this doesn’t come against the current message we hear everywhere? Nowadays, we hear everywhere that we should eat healthy fats from olive oil, avocados, fish, and so on.
Finally, we need to keep in mind that this study was started at the beginning of the 1990s, where the low-fat era was trending. The conclusion is that researchers don’t know if the reduction in fat, in particular, helped save women’s lives, or was the total increase in the number of fruits, vegetables, or whole grains.
