Mediterranean Diet With Olive Oil May Reduce Breast Cancer Risk, Science

Scientists show that a Mediterranean diet is healthy, especially with extra virgin olive oil. It can bring down the risk of developing breast cancer.

Huge quantities of plant-based foods, fish, and olive oil lead to health benefits, the most significant one being the reduction of breast cancer, explains the JAMA Network Journals.

The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

Two groups of women were studied. One of the teams consumed the Meditteranean diet supplemented with olive oil while the other one used nuts. Scientists tested women from Spain. When compared with other women following a low-fat diet, data was used from the PREDIMED (Prevención con Dieta Mediterránea) trial, including 4,282 women between the ages of 60 and 80 years, who faced the high risk of heart disease.

The researchers also checked 35 other women who showed newly-diagnosed malignant breast cancer during a median period of five years. Those women who ate a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra virgin olive oil seemed to show a 68 percent reduced risk of developing breast cancer compared to the other women. On the other hand, the women in the group that ate the diet with nuts showed no dip in breast cancer risk compared to the control group.

"The results of the PREDIMED trial suggest a beneficial effect of a MeDiet [Mediterranean diet] supplemented with EVOO in the primary prevention of breast cancer. Preventive strategies represent the most sensible approach against cancer. The intervention paradigm implemented in the PREDIMED trial provides a useful scenario for breast cancer prevention because it is conducted in primary health care centers and also offers beneficial effects on a wide variety of health outcomes. Nevertheless, these results need confirmation by long-term studies with a higher number of incident cases," the authors concluded, according to hngn.