HOW FOODS CAN PREVENT BREAST CANCER: BLOCK THE ESTROGEN RECEPTOR

We've looked at how powerful estrogens that your body makes and chemical estrogens can act as "keys" that easily fit into the "lock" or estrogen receptor on breast cells. The most logical question to ask is this: "Gee, even if you produce too much estrogen, can't you just block that estrogen when it gets to the breast cell's receptor?" The answer is a resounding yes, you can block that tidal wave of estrogen before it gets to the receptor. This may be the most powerful and logical strategy of all.

It's a strategy that oncologists caught on to early. In fact the drug tamoxifen, given to early-stage breast cancer patients to prevent a recurrence, works exactly that way. Tamoxifen blocks the estrogen receptor. Evidence shows it works, providing 85 percent disease-free survival after five years in early-stage breast cancer patients. But tamoxifen is a powerful drug with significant side effects not something you'd want to take before you got cancer. Fortunately there are foods that perform exactly the same function. They are plant-derived substances that mimic the action of estrogens and also fit into the estrogen receptor. However, they do not have the strength of estrogens made by the body and are up to 1,000 times weaker. This means when they fit into the estrogen receptor they bring little power to the receptor and so have little effect on the cell's DNA or on breast cell growth. When a large amount of these "weak" estrogens block the receptor, stronger estrogens and chemical estrogens cannot gain access. In this way, a large enough quantity of weak estrogens can greatly dilute the effect of all the natural and chemical estrogens. If weak estrogens occupied most of the estrogen receptors in the breast, the estrogen effect would be cut enormously. The two most important sources of weak estrogens are soy and flax, which are covered in the next chapter.

How protective are they? Premenopausal Chinese women had a 50 percent decrease in breast cancer rates on a high-soy diet. Keep in mind that these women already have 80 percent less cancer than American women so that's a much more dramatic effect than you might expect. But the most stunning study to date is that of Lilian Thompson, who has been able to show that the tumors of women who've been diagnosed with breast cancer and who take flax for the usually short period between diagnosis and surgery, no more than several weeks, actually decrease in size!

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Womens health