Three easy ways to help prevent breast cancer
October is breast cancer awareness month!
Here’s the sad truth about breast cancer treatment. Despite billions of research dollars committed to the cure of breast cancer, the death rates due to malignant breast cancer have not changed. For one-third of women who are diagnosed with malignant breast cancer, the disease will be fatal.
Instead of waiting for breast cancer, how about working to prevent it all together? Treatment is important, but prevention is even more important. So that’s where we should focus our efforts. Let’s be proactive about breast cancer and not merely reactive.
Let’s start young. If a girl starts birth control pills when she is younger than 18, she triples her lifetime risk for breast cancer. Women who have their first child before 24, decrease their lifetime risk by as much as five times.
Let’s think about nutrition. Yes, what you eat affects your weight and your risk of breast cancer. A diet high in trans fatty acids, partially hydrogenated oils, sugar, refined carbohydrates but low in fruits and vegetables provides a favorable environment for cancer growth. Additionally, high exposure to Xenoestrogens (pesticides and hormones) in non-organic foods can provide a favorable environment for cancer growth.
Let’s talk about “estrogen dominance.” When a woman stops ovulating, the decreased progesterone in her body will promote unregulated breast tissue growth. Decreased progesterone leads to estrogen dominance. It occurs in menopausal women, overweight women, women with the rapidly increasing diagnosis of polycystic ovaries, and all young girls in their first 2-3 years of menstruation.
These are three easy steps women can take to avoid letting their bodies become a favorable environment for breast cancer.
- Proper nutrition and use of organic foods
- Elimination of birth control pills except for contraception
- Correcting estrogen dominance with progesterone
Let’s be proactive, not just reactive.
(Special thanks to MesserWoland for providing copyright permission of the pink ribbon through Wikipedia.)
