Mushrooms, green tea, and soy consumption may decrease breast cancer risk, but how many mushrooms, how much green tea, and what’s the best soy strategy?
Why Do Asian Women Have Less Breast Cancer?
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Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.
Mushrooms appear to work in the lab to suppress breast cancer growth—but, what about in the real world? Though breast cancer is the most common cancer among women around the world, the rate in some areas of the world, such as Asia, is up to sixfold lower than in North America.
Maybe it’s the green tea and soy? If anything, green tea may only drop risk by about a third. Soy works better—but only, it appears, if you start young. Soy intake anytime is associated with decreased breast cancer risk, but the strongest, most consistent effect was for childhood intake—cutting the risk of later breast cancer by as much as half. But, if you don’t start consuming soy until teens or adulthood, it’s only associated with a more kind of green tea-type 25ish% drop in breast cancer risk. The best is actually when we do soy throughout our life, though, as “soy intake during childhood and adolescence might provide lifelong protection against breast cancer…and sensitize for greater protective effects as an adult…”
Combined, though, green tea and soy consumption would only account for maybe about a twofold difference in breast cancer risk—not sixfold. So, researchers looked into what else Asian women were eating. They already had that intriguing laboratory mushroom data, and, so, asked a thousand breast cancer patients how many mushrooms they ate. Then, they asked the same question to a thousand healthy women, who they tried to match to the cancer patients as closely as possible—age, height, weight, exercise, smoking status, etc.
Based on those answers, they calculated that women who averaged at least a certain daily serving size of mushrooms appeared to drop their odds of getting breast cancer 64%. What was that average serving size? A half a mushroom a day. Who eats half a mushroom? Well, that was averaged over a month. So, compared to women who didn’t regularly eat any mushrooms, those who ate just fifteen or more a month appeared to dramatically lower their risk. Similar protection was found for dried mushrooms.
And if you combine mushrooms with green tea, sipping a half a teabag worth of green tea every day, along with that half a mushroom, was associated with nearly a 90% drop in breast cancer odds.
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- Zhang M, Huang J, Xie X, Holman CD. Dietary intakes of mushrooms and green tea combine to reduce the risk of breast cancer in Chinese women. Int J Cancer. 2009 Mar 15;124(6):1404-8.
- Hilakivi-Clarke L, Andrade JE, Helferich W. Is soy consumption good or bad for the breast? J Nutr. 2010 Dec;140(12):2326S-2334S.
- Parkin DM, Fernández LM. Use of statistics to assess the global burden of breast cancer. Breast J. 2006 Jan-Feb;12 Suppl 1:S70-80.
- Wu AH, Butler LM. Green tea and breast cancer. Mol Nutr Food Res. 2011 Jun;55(6):921-30.
- Grube BJ, Eng ET, Kao YC, Kwon A, Chen S. White button mushroom phytochemicals inhibit aromatase activity and breast cancer cell proliferation. J Nutr. 2001 Dec;131(12):3288-93.
Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.
Mushrooms appear to work in the lab to suppress breast cancer growth—but, what about in the real world? Though breast cancer is the most common cancer among women around the world, the rate in some areas of the world, such as Asia, is up to sixfold lower than in North America.
Maybe it’s the green tea and soy? If anything, green tea may only drop risk by about a third. Soy works better—but only, it appears, if you start young. Soy intake anytime is associated with decreased breast cancer risk, but the strongest, most consistent effect was for childhood intake—cutting the risk of later breast cancer by as much as half. But, if you don’t start consuming soy until teens or adulthood, it’s only associated with a more kind of green tea-type 25ish% drop in breast cancer risk. The best is actually when we do soy throughout our life, though, as “soy intake during childhood and adolescence might provide lifelong protection against breast cancer…and sensitize for greater protective effects as an adult…”
Combined, though, green tea and soy consumption would only account for maybe about a twofold difference in breast cancer risk—not sixfold. So, researchers looked into what else Asian women were eating. They already had that intriguing laboratory mushroom data, and, so, asked a thousand breast cancer patients how many mushrooms they ate. Then, they asked the same question to a thousand healthy women, who they tried to match to the cancer patients as closely as possible—age, height, weight, exercise, smoking status, etc.
Based on those answers, they calculated that women who averaged at least a certain daily serving size of mushrooms appeared to drop their odds of getting breast cancer 64%. What was that average serving size? A half a mushroom a day. Who eats half a mushroom? Well, that was averaged over a month. So, compared to women who didn’t regularly eat any mushrooms, those who ate just fifteen or more a month appeared to dramatically lower their risk. Similar protection was found for dried mushrooms.
And if you combine mushrooms with green tea, sipping a half a teabag worth of green tea every day, along with that half a mushroom, was associated with nearly a 90% drop in breast cancer odds.
Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.
- Zhang M, Huang J, Xie X, Holman CD. Dietary intakes of mushrooms and green tea combine to reduce the risk of breast cancer in Chinese women. Int J Cancer. 2009 Mar 15;124(6):1404-8.
- Hilakivi-Clarke L, Andrade JE, Helferich W. Is soy consumption good or bad for the breast? J Nutr. 2010 Dec;140(12):2326S-2334S.
- Parkin DM, Fernández LM. Use of statistics to assess the global burden of breast cancer. Breast J. 2006 Jan-Feb;12 Suppl 1:S70-80.
- Wu AH, Butler LM. Green tea and breast cancer. Mol Nutr Food Res. 2011 Jun;55(6):921-30.
- Grube BJ, Eng ET, Kao YC, Kwon A, Chen S. White button mushroom phytochemicals inhibit aromatase activity and breast cancer cell proliferation. J Nutr. 2001 Dec;131(12):3288-93.
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Title
Why Do Asian Women Have Less Breast Cancer?
LicenseCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Content URLDoctor's Note
For background on the role mushrooms may play in suppressing breast cancer growth, see Vegetables Versus Breast Cancer, and Breast Cancer vs. Mushrooms. Which type of tea is best? See Antimutagenic Activity of Green Versus White Tea. And, what may be the best way to prepare it? See Breast Cancer Survival and Soy. However, it may be possible to overdo it; see How Much Soy Is Too Much?
For further context, check out my associated blog posts: Ergothioneine: A New Vitamin?; Mushrooms for Breast Cancer Prevention; Why Less Breast Cancer in Asia?; The Best Way to Prevent the Common Cold?; and Go Nuts for Breast Cancer Prevention.
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