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  #1   ^
Old Fri, Jul-18-03, 18:44
Isphet's Avatar
Isphet Isphet is offline
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Plan: Atkins
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Thumbs down British Press says: ATKINS CAUSES BREAST CANCER

Yep, you read right. Today the British Press is having a bit of a field day with some new results that show women who eat lots of fat have twice the rate of breast cancer (concusming over 90 grams a day ... fat, that is, not cancer!). Having announced this result with an air of immense satisfaction, many reports instantly then launch into a condemnation of Atkins, saying the programme encourages so much fat intake that we're all going to expire the next instant from breast cancer! Then follows lots of piccies of Colista Flockhart (sp?) and Geri Haliwell and other celebs who are as thin as rakes and are undoubtedly harbouring nasty cancerous cells in their bosoms. All that was missing was the "Jaws" music in the background.

"I hope this makes women make better diet choices," intoned one sanctimonious talking head.

I am a tad sick of all these results coming out. We're all being scared just about every other day with some criticism of our lifestyle choices.

For my part, my health has improved so dramatically since being on Atkins that it is going to take a great deal more than this to make me run screaming for the carb-laden hills.

Now, where did my glass of scotch get to ...

Last edited by Isphet : Fri, Jul-18-03 at 18:46.
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  #2   ^
Old Fri, Jul-18-03, 19:06
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tagcaver tagcaver is offline
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Plan: Lyle Style FD
Stats: 143/124.5/123 Female 5 ft 4 in
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Progress: 93%
Location: Huntsville, AL
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Alot of the foods we do eat, and the supplements we take have antioxidants in them, which help to prevent cancer. I doubt a cheesburger and french fries (or even a bowl of wild rice) contain many antioxidant properties!

They just don't understand.

Joan
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  #3   ^
Old Fri, Jul-18-03, 19:37
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doreen T doreen T is offline
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Plan: LC paleo/ancestral
Stats: 241/188/140 Female 165 cm
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Location: Eastern ON, Canada
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Actually, the Canadian Broadcasters (CBC) today interviewed the British doctor from this study (name forgotten, sorry ) .. Her comments were that the study is inconclusive, but seems to suggest that a higher fat intake is associated with increased risk. She emphasized that (a) the study only suggests a link, and many other factors need to be considered .. and (b) more study is needed.

It's important to realize that this study was based on a daily diary kept by participants ... there was no mention of the carbohydrate intake. It is not realistic to apply statistics about a high-fat, high-carb diet to a nutritional program that is high fat, low carbs. The metabolic and hormonal processes in the body are completely different.

It is well known that high insulin and blood sugar levels are strongly linked to breast cancer ... also ovarian cancer and prostate cancer in men. Insulin exerts some growth hormone properties, and has been shown to stimulate the growth of cancer cells.

I have an extremely high risk of breast and ovarian cancer .. so you can bet I have studied and researched this to death!!! I am confident that a carb-controlled diet with plenty of fiber from veggies and low-glycemic fruits, plus natural fats from butter, olive oil, avocados, raw nuts, whole eggs and unprocessed meats .. is healthy and desirable.


Doreen
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  #4   ^
Old Sat, Jul-19-03, 05:11
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tholian8 tholian8 is offline
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Plan: CAD-ish
Stats: 232.5/199/168 Female 5'2"
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Progress: 52%
Location: London, UK
Angry enough already, UK press!

Quote:
Originally Posted by doreen T
It's important to realize that this study was based on a daily diary kept by participants ... there was no mention of the carbohydrate intake. It is not realistic to apply statistics about a high-fat, high-carb diet to a nutritional program that is high fat, low carbs. The metabolic and hormonal processes in the body are completely different.


Exactly! First of all, self-reporting diaries are well known to be extremely unreliable indicators of what was actually consumed! People just don't remember; they estimate badly; and most of all, the very act of self-reporting makes people change the way they eat, even if they don't realize it. IMO the only way to do a proper macronutrient study is to completely control what the participants eat. And that's much easier said than done.

Even more important, as you rightly point out, metabolism is so different on a keto diet that it is ludicrous to use this study as an anti-Atkins weapon.

I am getting sick and tired of the British media's attitude to LC. They try to discredit it every chance they get. They trumpet forth anything that supposedly shows it to be "bad," and mostly ignore anything "good" about it, including massive amounts of weight lost, health improvements etc, reported by so many individuals. The same tired old myths about LC are repeated over and over again, complete with warnings from self-righteous doctors and nutritionists.

I'm sure many of the UK lowcarbers remember the "Diet Trials" series which was aired earlier this year--when it turned out that the Atkins diet was not damaging kidneys, causing cholesterol to skyrocket, or fulfill any of the other dire predictions made about it, I swear the "health pros" involved were actually DISAPPOINTED! Since they couldn't criticize it on health grounds, they made repeated enormous points about how horrible your breath would smell, how monotonous your food would be, and how you would have to eat nothing but bacon for the rest of your life or you'd gain it all back in an instant. Oh, and every other word used about Atkins was "controversial." I found the level of bias rather sickening. In fact, IMO they slightly shortchanged the amount of time devoted to the other diets, to concentrate on bashing Atkins.

One day this past spring, I was working out on the elliptical trainer at my gym, and idly watching a daytime talk show to pass the time. They were interviewing some woman who had lost about 3 stone on the Atkins diet, and IIRC she had kept it off for at least a year. They showed the before pictures and she really had lost a tremendous amount. All her blood numbers were better, blood sugar was controlled, and her general health was massively improved. And--amazingly--they trotted out some doctor who told the audience that while she applauds any time someone loses weight, that LC was a "controversial fad diet" which should not be used. She repeated the whole anti-LC litany including cancer risk, cholesterol, rapid weight regain etc. What stunned me was that she was doing this in the face of a living denial of her claims! The doctor pooh-poohed the vast improvement in this woman's health, stating that it was only due to the weight loss and would have happened on any diet.

All this in the country where the government has seriously proposed forcing obese people to sign contracts with their doctors which would limit their access to medical care unless they lose the weight....

Emily

Last edited by tholian8 : Sun, Jul-20-03 at 04:38.
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  #5   ^
Old Sun, Jul-20-03, 08:43
corvus corvus is offline
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Plan: Protein Power
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Barry Groves took a look at this issue and wrote what he found:

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/an...ast_cancer.html
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  #6   ^
Old Sun, Jul-20-03, 08:47
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tholian8 tholian8 is offline
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Plan: CAD-ish
Stats: 232.5/199/168 Female 5'2"
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Location: London, UK
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Thanks for the link, corvus. I wish this sort of thing would get on the BBC instead of the other crap.

Emily
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  #7   ^
Old Sun, Jul-20-03, 16:14
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acohn acohn is offline
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tholian8,

Since the producers of the BBC hit piece probably have e-mail addresses, you can copy and paste Groves' material (or send along the link) in an e-mail to them. If you're really ambitious, call the producers and recite a few choice bits from Groves analysis to them.
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  #8   ^
Old Mon, Jul-21-03, 11:31
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gotbeer gotbeer is offline
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Default "Studies link fatty diet, breast cancer"

Studies link fatty diet, breast cancer

British report targets food diary; nurses quizzed for U.S. finding

07/21/2003

From Wire Reports


link to article

A new study from Britain, and separate data from the Nurses Health Study, may add to the debate over whether women who eat high-fat diets increase their risk of breast cancer.

The British study, published in last week's Lancet medical journal, found that women who average more than 90 grams of fat a day have roughly double the risk of those who eat just 37 grams. The study was conducted at Cambridge University in England and involved 13,070 women who kept diet records from 1993-97.

The finding is likely to be controversial – it contradicts many large, careful studies that found no link between what women eat and their risk of this common cancer.

Researchers who conducted the Cambridge study argue that theirs is better than previous work, because it used a more precise method of measuring women's typical diets. But others said the study is too small to overturn the research suggesting diet plays little or no role in breast cancer risk.

In the separate U.S. study, heavy animal-fat consumption during young adulthood was associated with an increased risk of breast cancer.

The findings from the Nurses Health Study, a long-term look at the lifestyles of more than 90,000 female nurses, showed that those women who ate the most red meat and high-fat dairy products were 33 percent more likely to develop breast cancer than the women who ate the least of such foods.

"What this study says is: diet counts," says Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.

The 33 percent increased risk means that about one in every 20 cases of breast cancer is caused by animal-fat intake in young adult women, says Dr. Patrick Remington, a public health professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical School. That could be up to 10,000 women this year, based on the cancer society's estimate of breast cancer diagnoses in U.S. women.

"In an area of breast cancer research that has yielded often starkly different findings, we have illustrated that there may be stronger support for lowering overall animal fat intake, especially during a woman's early adult life," says Eunyoung Cho, lead author of the study and an instructor at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School.

The new nurses study results, appearing last week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, are the first based on premenopausal women.

Methodology questioned

In the British study, the researchers set out to discover whether the reason the previous follow-up studies found no link between diet and breast cancer was that the method they used to examine dietary habits – a food frequency questionnaire – was inaccurate. They also had the women keep a daily diary in which they recorded everything they ate.

By 2002, 168 of the women had developed breast cancer. Each of those cases was matched with four healthy women of the same age who had filled out the questionnaires and diaries around the same time as the women who developed breast cancer had.

The total group was divided into five equal categories of about 170, according to how much fat they ate each day. Two methods were used to place the women in one of the five categories – one based on the questionnaire and one on the daily diary.

The researchers calculated separately for both methods the difference in breast cancer risk between the women who ate the least fat and those who ate the most fat.

"The effects just weren't seen with food frequency questionnaires," says investigator Sheila Bingham, deputy director of the human nutrition unit at Cambridge. She called the questionnaire a "very crude method" that was not reliable.

However, when the food diaries were used to categorize the women, those who ate the diet highest in saturated fat were more likely to develop breast cancer as those who ate the least.

Of those in the lowest category, 14 percent developed breast cancer, compared with 20 percent in the highest class. The more fat that was consumed, the higher the risk of breast cancer.

Women who ate a higher-fat diet were not necessarily fatter; but once the researchers adjusted the results to eliminate skewing by other factors promoting breast cancer, such as body weight and total calories eaten, the women who ate the most saturated fat had twice the breast cancer risk as those who ate the least.

Most of the fat in the women's diets was saturated fat, so findings for total fat intake were similar.

Researchers disagree

Marji McCullough, an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, says researchers disagree over whether a questionnaire or food diary is more accurate.

Furthermore, the number of cancer cases in the latest study is small as such research goes. A recent analysis combined over 7,000 cancer cases in eight studies and found no risk from fat.

"If you consider all the evidence right now, you would assume there is a very small or no effect of fat on breast cancer," she says.

However, Dr. Elio Riboli, a nutrition and cancer expert, says, "These results reopen entirely the issue of the importance of investigating more, and with better data, the saturated fat-breast cancer hypothesis."

The chance of a woman developing breast cancer sometime during her life is between 8 percent and 11 percent, according to the World Health Organization.

"This article is a major step in the tortuous process of identifying the dietary determinants of breast cancer," says Dr. Riboli, who works with the U.N.'s International Agency for Research on Cancer. Doubling or reducing the risk "by 50 percent would make a huge impact on the suffering of tens of thousands of women each year."

Early studies

Many early studies that looked back at the diets of breast cancer patients and compared them with the eating habits of healthy women of the same age found that a diet high in fat, or saturated fat – fat that comes from animal-based food such as meat, fish and dairy products – was weakly associated with a modest increase in breast cancer risk.

Experiments in lab animals also indicated that high fat intake could increase the likelihood of breast cancer. However, most of the recent studies, which followed groups of healthy women over time, failed to find a link.

Unlike many of the known risk factors for breast cancer, such as age, race or having relatives who have had the disease, women can control their dietary fat.

In the U.S. study, Dr. Cho and her colleagues questioned the nurses, ages 26-46, about their diet every two years from 1991-99. In those eight years, 714 of the women developed breast cancer.

The researchers divided the nurses into five groups based on their consumption of foods rich in meats and high-fat dairy products such as butter, cheese and whole milk. They observed more cases of breast cancer in the group that reported eating the most of such foods. Since that relationship has not been consistently observed in postmenopausal women, the researchers suggest that the age at which high levels of animal fat are eaten might be key.

The Associated Press and Knight Ridder Tribune contributed to this report.
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