What’s so cool about having this SUGAR SHOCK! Blog is that I can keep you current by telling you about new studies that point to the mounting evidence linking a diet with excess sweets with a host of health ailments. (Eating too many sugary foods is something most Americans do, as I’ve noted here often.) ailments.
So… Just out is yet another study that suggests a connection between a Western diet and cancer. In fact, I amply document a number of research studies concluding just that, in Chapter 14 of my book SUGAR SHOCK!
According to the new research, post-menopausal women in China whose diets are largely comprised of meats and sweets are at significantly higher risk of getting the most common type of breast cancer than women who eat mainly vegetables and soy, something I found out about, thanks to Joann Loviglio of the AP.
The study, which was published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, and Prevention, looked at 3,000 women from Shanghai, aged 25 to 64, half of whom have breast cancer and are subjects in a breast cancer study there.
The researchers interviewed the women about how often they ate 76 foods commonly found in Shanghai, and then they placed the women in either the meats/sweets category or the soy/vegetables group.
The meats/sweets eaters revealed that they eat a lot of candy and other desserts, as well as bread, milk, shrimp, and fish. The vegetable/soy eaters told researchers that they primarily consume beans, tofu, sprouts, vegetables, soy milk, as well as fish.
Researchers then concluded that post-menopausal meats/sweets eaters had a whopping 60% greater chance of developing the kind of breast cancer spurred on by estrogen than did their soy/vegetable counterparts.
Think about that — 60% greater risk for breast cancer! … And that’s just brought on by eating certain foods, namely meats and sweets.
Not suprisingly, the research team also found that being overweight played a role in raising cancer risk, too.
"We saw the clearest effect when we looked at post-menopausal women who were overweight, so it looks like there’s an interaction between a meat-sweet diet and being overweight," study co-author Marilyn Tseng, A.M., Ph.D. of Philadelphia’s Fox Chase Cancer Center told AP reporter Loviglio.
Asian women generally have lower cancer rates than women in Western countries, but those rates are climbing as Asian women eat more like Westerners, the AP’s Loviglio pointed out.
While AP’s Loviglio describes this study as "not definitive," I think that women everywhere should take some guidelines from this study and begin to curtail their intake of foods laden with sugar and other sweeteners, as well as quickie carbs and too many meats.
Thanks to Jennifer Moore for her help on this SUGAR SHOCK! Blog post