Delicious news. You can add tasty, crunchy walnuts to the types of foods that might just help lower your risk of getting breast cancer. A just released study supports earlier work that suggested one of the benefits of eating walnuts as a regular part of your diet each day is that they can significantly cut your risk of breast cancer.
Walnuts can even help you combat the disease once you've been diagnosed. Figures show that one in eight women will deal with breast cancer over the course of her lifetime.
Risks for breast cancer that you can't control include your age, being female, having a family history of disease, a genetic defect, your menstrual history or having been treated with radiation at a younger age.
However, there are risk factors you can control - things you can do something about. Like how much alcohol you drink (maximum of 1-2 alcoholic drinks a day), when you have your children, if you take hormone replacement therapy and of course, if you're carrying too much weight.
The research on breast cancer and walnuts was done on mice, with the researchers following the lifespan of the mice. They monitored the mother's diet when she was pregnant as well as the diet of her offspring through their lives.
The mice were divided into two groups, one that were given the equivalent of 2 ounces of walnuts a day in their daily diet, the second group following a typical diet but with no walnuts.
The team saw that mice who had been given walnuts had a significant lower risk of breast cancer, and for those that did they had fewer and smaller tumors.
The latest study found a 50% reduction in the quantities of mice who got breast cancer when eating walnuts every day.
The researchers feel that this warrants a recommendation of adding walnuts to your diet on a daily basis.
It's likely the omega-3 fatty acids are what make these tasty snacks so helpful. Experts recommend a maximum of 2 ounces (8 to 10 halves) per day of walnuts be added to your diet, because they are also high in calories.
Interesting that walnuts are also rich sources of a particularly beneficial form of vitamin E, and it may well be a combination of the good fats and the beneficial vitamin that brings benefits in terms of breast cancer.
This combination has also been shown to be especially helpful in terms of heart problems. Yet, despite this, few U.S. adults have made walnuts a daily addition to their diet - only 5.5% get about 1.25 ounces of tree nuts each day.
Walnuts are also a source of a phytonutrient that is not in other commonly found in other foods.
It's easy to get walnuts at your local store, a benefit in terms of freshness. This delicious nut can be chopped and added to a salad, veggie dishes, stuffing recipes, sprinkled over fruits, yogurts or desserts. You should try to include the skin, a white sometime waxy, flaky outer part of the walnut you'll see after it's been shelled - 90% of the beneficial phenols in walnuts come from the skin.
It's hard to deny the many benefits of eating walnuts, even if the most recent research of lowering the risk of getting breast cancer was done on mice and not on people.
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