Miso Soup, Soy Compound Lowers Breast Cancer Risk

Women in Asian countries have only a fraction of the risk of breast cancer seen in Western countries, and the current findings add to a growing body of evidence that suggests isoflavone intake might help explain why.

In Japan, for instance, women typically consume approximately 700 times more isoflavones than U.S. whites.

Still, more studies are needed to determine whether the soy ingredient does, in fact, reduce breast cancer risk, study author Dr. Seiichiro Yamamoto of the National Cancer Center Research Institute in Tokyo told Reuters Health.

"The evidence level of isoflavone/soy and breast cancer is elevated from 'possible' to 'probable' by our study," Yamamoto said. "But it is still not convincing."

However, eating a little extra soy couldn't hurt, the researcher added.

"Because no harmful evidence about soy intake is reported and Asian people eat a lot of soy, it is not bad to recommend to eat soy and isoflavone in Western countries," Yamamoto said.

Many researchers have investigated the link between eating soy and developing breast cancer, but previous studies have shown mixed results, with some suggesting that soy and isoflavones offer no benefits in protecting women against breast cancer, according to the Journal of the National Cancer Institute report.

In the new study, the researchers asked more than 21,000 middle-aged women living in Japan how much soy and soy-containing products they ate, then followed them for 10 years and noted who developed breast cancer.

During the study period, 179 women developed breast cancer, the authors write. Women who reported eating miso soup and foods that contain isoflavones were less likely to be diagnosed with the disease than others.

Those women who consumed the most isoflavones typically drank at least two to three cups of miso soup daily and also ate soy-containing foods such as soybeans and tofu almost every day.

These soy-containing foods alone, however, did not influence breast cancer risk in the same way as miso soup or total isoflavone amount.

Interestingly, women who ate the least amount of isoflavones still consumed around 250 times more of a type of isoflavone called genistein than U.S. white women.

And the highest rate of breast cancer -- seen in women who ate the least amount of isoflavones -- was still lower than that seen in similarly aged women living in Western countries, the authors report.

Yamamoto and colleagues suggest that conflicting reports of the influence of isoflavones on breast cancer risk may have resulted from errors in measuring how much of the compound women ate, or from comparisons involving non-Asian women, who may show only small differences in the amount of isoflavones consumed by breast cancer patients and those who are cancer-free.

SOURCE: Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2003;95:906-913.

Fried Food Ingredient Mutates DNA, Study Finds

Swedish researchers caused a global furor in 2000 when they reported that acrylamide, used to purify water and in other industrial processes, could be found in a range of baked and fried foods.

The chemical seems to be formed by exposing high-carbohydrate foods to high temperatures such as those used in baking and frying.

Acrylamide can cause cancer in laboratory animals, but has never been linked to human cancer.

In the new study, Ahmad Besaratinia and Gerd Pfeifer of the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California, found that acrylamide can mutate DNA in mouse embryonic cells.

Cells exposed to acrylamide had more adducts -- specific types of mutations in the DNA -- than unexposed cells, they report in this week's issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

They note that they treated mouse cells only, and not human cells. They said the best way to find out if acrylamide causes cancer in people is to do epidemiological studies -- studies of populations to see whether people who eat more foods containing acrylamide have higher rates of cancer.

One such study, published by U.S. and Swedish researchers last January, found no link between acrylamide consumption and the risk of bladder or kidney cancer.

Acrylamide experts Fredrik Granath of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and Margareta Tornqvist of Stockholm University in Sweden, said the risk to any one person from eating acrylamide is small and they would not recommend changing nutritional guidelines.

"However, the situation for vulnerable groups, (for example), pregnant women and children, should always be carefully considered," they write in an editorial published with the new report.

But a U.S. public advocacy group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, is lobbying for limits on acrylamide in food.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has tested baby food, cereals, cookies, crackers, infant formulas and other foods, and found the levels of acrylamide vary greatly.

CDC Makes Dire Diabetes Prediction for U.S. Children

The majority of these cases will be adult onset, or type 2 diabetes, which is strongly associated with obesity and a lack of exercise.

The disease results from the body's inability to correctly use insulin, which leads to excessively high blood sugar levels that can increase the risk of blindness, kidney disease and amputations.

"Over the last ten years the proportion of people with diabetes has gone up almost 40 percent between 1990 and 1999," said Dr. K.M. Venkat Narayan chief of the CDC's diabetes epidemiology section, who spoke at the American Diabetes Association's annual meeting here.

The most likely reason for the increase is an increasingly sedentary and overweight population in the U.S.

"Americans are becoming more overweight and get much less physical exercise," Narayan told attendees of the meeting.

And if trends continue, a girl born in 2000 has a 39 percent chance of developing diabetes in her lifetime and a boy born the same year has a 33 percent chance of developing the disease in his lifetime, according to Narayan.

The rates for Hispanics are even higher, according to Narayan, who noted that "a Hispanic male has 45 percent chance and female has 53 percent chance of developing diabetes in their lifetime."

Narayan based his prediction on data collected from the National Health Interview Survey. More than 300,000 Americans were interviewed as part of the survey between 1984 and 2000, he said.

"Diabetes is a very serious disease and our estimates also suggest that there is a lot of life years lost because of diabetes," added Narayan.

A man diagnosed with diabetes at age 40 will lose approximately 12 years of life and a female about 15 years of life, he explained.

TIME TO SHIFT FOCUS

Over the past few years, Narayan noted that diabetes has received a very high degree of attention in the national media, which has helped raise national awareness of the skyrocketing epidemic.

"But, what we now need to do is change that message and make it more action oriented," he said.

Recent studies have shown that even relatively small amounts of physical activity can cut the risk of diabetes substantially, he noted.

"Walking, for instance, is a very effective way of reducing one's risk," he said. "Just doing thirty minutes of walking or physical activity five times a week, can reduce your risk for developing diabetes by as much as 58 percent."

Those findings are based on the Diabetes Prevention Program, a clinical trial that found that people who made moderate changes -- increasing exercise and losing some weight -- were more likely to keep diabetes at bay.

"These lifestyle changes worked for people of every racial and ethnic group who participated in the study and they were particularly successful in older Americans, who happen to have the highest risk for developing type 2 diabetes," said Dr. Judith E. Fradkin, of the National Institutes of Health, who spoke at a press conference with Narayan.

Best of all Fradkin points out that you don't have to achieve your ideal body weight in order to reap benefits.

"People in the diabetes prevention program did not get down to their ideal body weight, they simply lost, on average, seven percent of their body weight -- for a person who weighs 200 pounds that would be a 15 pound weight loss and it is that level of weight loss that reduced diabetes by 58 percent," she said.

More than 17 million Americans currently have diabetes, according to the researchers.

Elderly Do Well After Breast-Sparing Cancer Surgery

According to the study authors, older age has not been considered a deterrent to breast-sparing surgery, but research suggests older women are less likely to receive this more conservative treatment.

They say their findings suggest doctors should offer older women the breast-sparing approach as a "reasonable alternative" to mastectomy more often than they traditionally have.

For the study, Dr. J. C. J. M de Haes, of the Academic Medical Hospital in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, studied survival, treatment preference and quality of life among patients having either a mastectomy or removal of the tumor only. Women in the latter group were also treated with [drugs].*(brand name removed)

All patients were at least 70 years old.

The authors found that although there was no difference in survival between the two groups, those who got breast-sparing surgery had fewer arm problems and tended to have a more positive body image. And more of these patients thought the treatment they received was preferable to the alternative -- 72 percent, versus 62 percent in the mastectomy group.

The findings are published in the European Journal of Cancer.

"The results of this study," the authors conclude, "suggest that surgeons should propose (tumor removal) and tamoxifen to older breast cancer patients as a reasonable alternative to mastectomy in a more systematic manner than is currently the case."

SOURCE: European Journal of Cancer 2003;39:945-951.

Study Finds Antioxidant Vitamins Useless

Many experts say the finding, published this week in The Lancet medical journal, settles the issue of antioxidant vitamins for heart health.

But others argue that the pills might still prove useful if started earlier and that while they do not seem to prevent heart attacks and premature death, further studies may show they help to delay the onset or progression of heart disease or other blood vessel problems.

Antioxidant nutrients, especially vitamin E, were widely recommended a few years ago as a way of keeping the heart healthy. However, several recent large studies failed to show any benefit, and a few raised the possibility that the pills might be harmful for some.

The latest research, conducted by scientists at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, analyzed the pooled results from 15 key studies involving nearly 220,000 people.

"The public health viewpoint would have to be that there's really nothing to support widespread use of these vitamins," said Dr. Ian Graham, a professor of cardiology at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

Most of the participants in the studies either already had heart or blood vessel disease or were at increased risk of such problems. Seven of the studies involved vitamin E alone or in combination with other antioxidants. Eight involved beta carotene alone or with other antioxidants. The follow-up period ranged from one to 12 years.

The researchers found that vitamin E did not reduce death from cardiovascular or any other cause and did not lower the incidence of strokes.

Beta carotene was linked with a 0.3 percent increase in the risk cardiovascular death and a 0.4 percent increase in the risk of death from any cause by the end of the study.

"For heart health, we've answered the question and one is potentially hazardous," said one of the investigators, Dr. Mark Penn, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist.

Alice Lichenstein, nutrition spokeswoman for the American Heart Association, agreed.

"I think there are enough studies that have looked at a diverse enough group of individuals that it's unlikely that we're going to have a flip-flop," said Lichenstein, a professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University who was not connected with the research.

The idea that antioxidant vitamins might ward off heart trouble was plausible. Test tube studies indicated that antioxidants protect the heart's arteries by blocking the damaging effects of oxygen. The approach works in animals, and studies show that healthy people who eat vitamin-rich food seem to have less heart disease.

However, experts say that perhaps antioxidants work when they are in food, but not when in pills. Some even think antioxidants may have been a red herring and that maybe people who eat vitamin-rich food generally take better care of themselves and that's why they have lower heart disease risks.

However, Jeffrey Blumberg, a professor of nutrition and chief of the Tufts antioxidants research lab, maintained that scientists should not write off antioxidants for heart health just yet.

"If in a six-year study, the same number in the vitamin E group and the control group died, but the ones in the vitamin E group died a little later in that six-year period, that is something that needs to be looked at," Blumberg said.

"Some of the studies showed benefits in other areas, such as ... cardiac arrythmias, which suggested there were some benefits in some subsets of groups," he said.

John Hathcock, vice president of scientific and international affairs at the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade group for makers of antioxidants and other dietary supplements, noted that although animal studies and observations in humans suggested the pills would best be used in healthy people, the key studies were done in people who were already either sick or at elevated risk of heart disease.

"Ultimately, the end points of deaths and heart attacks are valid, but if you start when the person is already at high risk or has disease, then it may be too late for the benefit to occur," Hathcock said.

Goes to show nothing replaces a balanced diet. Keeping your heart and arteries healthy includes many other nutritional components besides the anti-oxidents!

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