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18 December 2006
Lower Dietary Fat Decreases Breast Cancer Recurrence 
The Journal of the National Cancer Institute has reported that reducing dietary fat intake may decrease the risk of breast cancer recurrence in women who have been treated for early-stage breast cancer. The new study, running over five years, monitored 2,437 women who had been treated for early-stage breast cancer. They were randomly assigned to a dietary intervention group (40 percent), or a control group (60 percent). The goal of the dietary intervention was to reduce dietary fat to 15 percent of total calories. At the beginning of the study, both groups consumed similar amounts of calories from fat (around 56 grams of fat per day (about 30 percent of total calories)). After 1 year, the women in the dietary intervention group were consuming an average of 33 g/day (20 percent of total calories) compared with 51 g/day (29.2 percent of total calories) in the control group. The difference between the two groups was maintained throughout the trial.
The results showed that around 10 percent of the women in the intervention group had some form of relapse, compared with 12 percent in the control group. For the women in the intervention group, this equated to a 24 percent lower risk of relapse than those in the control group. However, the researchers caution that the study relied on self-reports of dietary fat intake. Also, the reduction in body weight in the dietary intervention group may have had an effect on breast cancer recurrence, rather than dietary fat intake on its own. Source: Journal of the National Cancer Institute
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