Breasts: An Owner’s Manual: Every Woman’s Guide to Reducing Cancer Risk, Making Treatment Choices and Optimising Outcomes. Kristi Funk
tissue around the implant (capsular contracture), or persistent pain.
On the other end of the spectrum, you should also know that no link exists between breast reduction surgery (reduction mammoplasty) and breast cancer. In fact, you may actually see a decrease in breast cancer risk. Medical literature supports the notion that breast reduction surgery decreases risk consistently around 30 to 40 percent, with even higher numbers reported when removing two cup sizes (over six hundred grams) of tissue per breast.56 By removing additional ducts and lobules that carry the potential to become cancerous, there aren’t as many around to cause trouble.57 Another prevailing theory as to why reductions help suggests that removing fat (i.e., adipose tissue) favorably changes the world where breast cells live, called the microenvironment.58
While we’re on the topic, you should know that breast size doesn’t directly affect risk either; small-breasted women don’t have less risk of breast cancer than large-breasted ones. However, there’s one connection between breast size and cancer when analyzing the composition of your breast tissue.59 Remember, the more ducts and lobules you have (as opposed to adipose tissue), the more cells you possess that can become cancerous. To demonstrate, a prospective study compared self-reported bra size and cancer risk among of 88,826 premenopausal women followed for eight years.60 They held a number of factors constant so as to isolate the effect of breast size. After stratification by body mass index (BMI), they found a significant trend for increasing bra cup size and greater breast cancer risk in one and only one group—the leaner women. Among overweight or obese women, no association between bra cup size and breast cancer was found.
In other words, leaner women with generous breasts have more breast cancer precisely because they have very little fat, and therefore, a lot more glandular tissue. More glandular tissue simply equals more breast cancer risk. In this group of 420 leaner women with breast cancer, 96 percent wore smaller than a D-cup, so the subgroup of large-breasted lean women at risk due to size alone is small. The vast majority of large breasts are large because of all the fat surrounding the glandular tissue (and as stated, this fat is very unlikely to become cancerous). Conversely, small breasts generally have less fat, and potentially have the same net volume of glandular tissue as many larger breasts. Therefore, in the final analysis, women should have a similar incidence of breast cancer risk irrespective of their breast volume. The majority of studies attempting to correlate size to risk conclude that no such association exists.61
ACHOO! CAN YOU “CATCH” BREAST CANCER?
Wondering if you can catch breast cancer or give it to someone else—whether it’s by breathing it through the air, or from exposure to bodily fluids such as breast milk, blood, and saliva, or from sharing utensils, kissing, or having sex—might at first seem ridiculous. But this is actually a real question I’m asked. So here’s your real answer.
When the DNA within a breast cell mutates, that cell starts to grow and divide and spread without control or order; that’s how cancer happens. And that’s the only way it starts. Exposure to someone else’s mutated breast cell doesn’t do anything to your own cells’ DNA. Yet several studies have shown that many people believe breast cancer to be contagious; these findings suggest a pressing need to develop breast cancer educational programs.62
What’s encouraging is that in 1964, 20 percent of residents interviewed in Perth, Australia, believed that cancer is contagious; however, when that same interview was repeated forty years later, only 3 percent expressed that same belief.63 In other words, improved education about health issues can impact beliefs. We need effective community-based interventions that target the demographics most vulnerable to these faulty myths, which tend to be recent immigrants and those of lower socioeconomic status. Busting myths can change behavior and, in turn, improve cancer outcomes.
SEND ME YOUR BREAST MYTHS!
Heard of another myth and you just can’t figure out the truth? I want to hear about it! Head on over to pinklotus.com/breastmyths and tell me more. I choose the best myth submissions and debunk them for you on our Pink Lotus Power Up blog.
“Hey honey, can you run over to aisle five and grab a jar of flavonoids? You’ll see it next to all the polyphenols . . .” Though your ability to track down such cancer-kicking, life-giving antioxidants isn’t this obvious, I am about to make your life easier by showing you where to find the best food-based nutrients to support your breasts and body. I think you’ll love that they’re not found in obscure, disgusting, or pricey foods. They’re yummy, affordable, and located in every grocery store around the world.
When eating food, as opposed to supplements, we don’t consume individual nutrients, like swallowing a spoonful of one essential amino acid. We eat meals and snacks with combinations of ingredients inside a variety of foods. Therefore, an obvious difficulty arises when trying to arrive at a definitive, “Yes, consuming 5 milligrams of this decreases breast cancer risk by 50 percent.” Nonetheless, trends do emerge when one examines the body of literature related to this topic, so let’s be trendy, shall we?
THE MIGHTY PHYTOCHEMICAL (A.K.A. PHYTONUTRIENT)
The key to using food to protect yourself from breast cancer is to understand that food holds the power to alter the following factors inside of you: estrogen levels, growth factors, new blood vessel formation (angiogenesis), inflammation, and immune system function.
Each of these factors affects what we call a tumor’s microenvironment—the fluids and cells that bathe, support, and fuel potential cancers . . . or seek and destroy them. You choose. When your microenvironment cries out, “Pro-cancer!” cancer cells can form and multiply. I want you to regularly ingest foods that make your breast microenvironment unpleasant to tumors by shouting out, “Anticancer!” The ones that do so the loudest come naturally packed with phytochemicals. Phytochemicals are plant-derived molecules (phyto means “plant” in Greek) known to possess profound anticancer and anti-inflammatory properties that directly target the very processes that cancer cells use to develop a tumor.
Imagine a normal cell happily humming along when, unexpectedly, in a matter of days, what was normal becomes mutated by factors like the sun’s UV rays, cigarette smoke, or carcinogenic foods. This mutated cell transforms into a cancer seed. Whether or not that seed takes root and blooms into a full-blown cancer capable of destroying your life depends on the microenvironment—the soil in which cancer seeds either flourish or fail. In 1974, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded a study that showed that breast cancers implanted into female rats shed tumor cells into the bloodstream at dizzying rates. From one cubic centimeter of breast cancer—the size of a peanut M&M or sugar cube—cancers will shed 3.2 million malignant cells into the bloodstream every twenty-four hours.1 Kind of makes you catch your breath, doesn’t it? How, then, doesn’t every cancer story have a fatal ending? The majority of these cells are rapidly cleared from the blood by a functional immune system, and if breast cells do arrive in a foreign land like the liver, they usually stop dividing and perish—unless they find that soil conducive to growth.
How do we engineer soil that stops cancer seeds from sprouting? In the most comprehensive study of human nutrition ever conducted in the history of science, the China Study, the authors observed that nutrition is infinitely more important in controlling cancer growth (the soil) than the dose of the initiating carcinogen (the seed maker).2 In other words, healthy cells can wear nutritional armor that protects against mutations when they get exposed to bad