Fatty food linked to breast cancer

LONDON - Eating high fat milk, cheese, butter and meat may raise the odds of breast cancer, says a study.

Scientists at Britain's Medical Research Council and the charity Cancer Research UK found that women who had eaten more than 90g of fat a day had double the risk of breast cancer of those who ate half that amount.

Breast cancer is one of the biggest killers of New Zealand women. One in 10 women can expect to develop it.

Each year, more than 2000 cases are diagnosed and more than 600 women die of the disease.

The British study, published in the Lancet medical journal, is the second in less than a week linking a high-fat diet with breast cancer.

Scientists from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School reported similar results in a study of more than 90,000 young nurses in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The studies are highly controversial because many other large studies have failed to find a link between fat and breast cancer.

But experts say that the type of food survey used by earlier researchers may have masked the problem.

It is already known that being obese raises the risk of breast cancer, but these studies point the finger at fatty foods in particular.

"It is emerging evidence of a link," said Dr Sheila Bingham, deputy director of the MRC Dunn Human Nutrition Unit in Cambridge, England, which conducted the British study.

"The effect seems to be related particularly to saturated fat found mostly in high fat milk, meat and some cereals such as biscuits and cakes," she said.

Bingham and her team studied detailed food diaries of 13,000 older women in Norfolk in eastern England who took part in the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer and Nutrition study between 1993 and 1997.

"The women who were eating 90g of fat [each day] had a two-fold risk over those who were eating 40g," she said.

The study found women in the top 20 per cent bracket for consumption of saturated fats were roughly twice as likely as those women in the lowest 20 per cent bracket to develop breast cancer.

- REUTERS