Excitement over fish oil
By Sheryl
July 13, 2010
We all want as much control over our health as we can manage. Immediately following my diagnosis, my mind went right to the things I could do to prevent cancer from ever greeting me again. Which foods should I eliminate from my diet? Which should I make sure I eat more of? Were there supplements I should be taking? Others I should shy away from?
Answers came to me slowly and erratically, for it seemed that as soon as something was touted as being THE secret to cancer prevention, it was disproven by (yet another) group of researchers. Case in point: in the new study I’m referring to (below), certain supplements which were at one time thought to perhaps have some anticancer benefits were found to have none: glucosamine, chondroitin, grapeseed, black cohosh, soy, dong quai, St. John’s wort, coenzyme Q10, garlic pills, ginkgo biloba, ginseng, melatonin, acidophilus and methylsulfonylmethane.
| Fish oil may – and the word here is MAY – help guard against breast cancer. |
Now, there’s news on fish oil and breast cancer: the growing evidence that supplements may play a role in preventing chronic disease.
In the Vitamins and Lifestyle (VITAL) cohort study, researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle Washington asked over 35,000 postmenopausal women without a history of breast cancer to fill out a 24-page questionnaire about their use of non-vitamin, non-mineral “specialty” supplements.
After following up for six years, they found a link between the use of fish oil supplements and a reduction in breast cancer. This is the first study to suggest this link. Women who reported taking fish oil at the start of the study were roughly half as likely to develop ductal carcinoma (the most common form of breast cancer) during the follow-up years. During the study, the scientists accounted for various factors that might have influenced cancer risk (age, body weight, fruit and vegetable consumption, aspirin use, smoking, age at which they first gave birth and age at onset of menarche).
Fish oil may – and the word here is MAY – help guard against breast cancer. One important thing to note is that it did not decrease the risk of the less-common form of breast cancer, though, known as lobular breast cancer.
While the exact mechanisms for this protective effect are not altogether known, one theory is that it may be linked to its ability to inhibit inflammation, which, in many studies, is linked to cancer.
Fish oil and Vitamin D are now being researched at Harvard Medical School in a five-year randomized trial of 20,000 people, to examine to effects they have on the risks of cancer as well as heart disease and other ills.
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