In honor of breast cancer awareness month, let’s nutrition myth bust. My street cred here is that up until this past spring, I was the clinical dietitian at a breast cancer center here in New York for about 6.5 years. In other words, I lived and breathed nutrition related to breast cancer for quite some time, and have busted many a myth.
In fact, I’d estimate at least 40% of my time was spent explaining why I wouldn’t recommend eating/supplementing/drinking what your great aunts naturopath/healer/random internet person/Dr. Oz said would “cure” your cancer. And that’s no fault to the wonderful patients I worked with - there’s just a lot of BS out there when it comes to nutrition and breast cancer, and when you’re vulnerable and scared it’s much easier to believe things that are a little (or a lot) misinformed. Like:
Taking X supplement will treat or cure breast cancer
Claims like this enrage me for reasons beyond just being wrong, because they can cause harm (and I’ve seen it first hand, many times). Now, I know Western medicine and specifically the U.S. healthcare system is far from perfect. But, advances in medicine and meaningful research is lifesaving, especially when it comes to breast cancer (there are more breast cancer survivors than any other cancer!). On the other hand, there is zero research existing in the world suggesting any vitamin or herbal supplement should be used as a treatment for breast cancer. What’s more, many of them can interact with medications and treatments that do work, like chemotherapy, and essentially make them less effective. Dietary supplements are also not regulated by the FDA, meaning there is no one monitoring what goes into supplements before we ingest them, unless they are third party certified. There’s also no one monitoring claims on supplement packaging, the claims made by various internet persons or alternative practitioners, even though their advice can directly cause harm. How this is legal is beyond me. If you’re thinking of taking any kind of dietary supplement and you have breast cancer, make sure you run it by your oncologist or RD.
Soy causes breast cancer
The majority of breast cancers are hormone sensitive, which means that breast cancer cells need the hormones estrogen and/or progesterone to grow, and women naturally produce both. However, contrary to a lot of misinformation on the internet, no food contains estrogen like the estrogen we make in our bodies. That means you can’t eat a certain food and increase the amount of estrogen circulating in your body. However, there are some foods that have a plant-based form of estrogen, called a phytoestrogen. These foods include soy and flaxseeds. Phytoestrogens have been extensively studied in relation to breast cancer because early on there was a concern about whether they did cause estrogen-like activity in the body, and in women with breast cancer, bind to estrogen receptors on a breast cancer cell and promote growth. All of the research to date points to soy and other phytoestrogen containing foods not to be harmful in women with or at risk for breast cancer. If anything, they may be protective against breast cancer. So if you like tofu, tempeh, soy milk, etc., have at them as part of a varied diet.
You should only eat organic if you have breast cancer
There is so much confusion about what organic actually means when it comes to foods in our food system, and even more when it comes to health. Here is a general guide on what an organic label on foods means, but even this can be confusing. If an ingredient is prohibited in organic foods, like an artificial color or preservative, it’s common to think that therefore it’s “bad” or a social media favorite term, “toxic.” Or bringing it back to breast cancer, that certain ingredients or pesticides are cancer-causing. Neither are the case, because only food ingredients generally recognized as safe (GRAS) are in the food system. That’s not saying they are all the most nutritious, nutrient dense ingredients, but certainly are not toxic nor have they been linked to any increased risk of breast cancer.
Important point
In my experience, the desire to change the diet drastically after a breast cancer diagnosis often comes from a place of control when everything else around you feels like it’s going haywire. When that happens, it can become another big stressor among a long list of stressors, which usually isn’t helpful. Even though I’m not working with breast cancer patients anymore, I still have a deep desire to be the voice of reason and a guide towards using nutrition as nourishment in the short and long term, and a useful tool for helping the body handle treatment as best as it can. Hopefully this was helpful… stay tuned for a part 2.
For more information on working with me, please visit my website to schedule a free discovery call.
*posts likes this are for educational purposes only and are not meant to serve as individual medical/nutrition advice