You’ve been told time and time again that if you want to avoid chest cancer, you should maintain a healthy body weight
And it seems like logical advice. There’s certainly enough scientific research to support the notion that overweight women face a higher risk of chest cancer.
But what if the connection between excess pounds and chest cancer isn’t that clear-cut, after all?
What if chest cancer’s true targets aren’t just overweight women, but women who appear outwardly “in-shape” too?
Well, that may be the case…
The latest study from researchers at Cornell University and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is turning everything we thought we knew about the relationship between chest cancer and weight on its head by showing us that the women in danger are the ones you’d least expect…
The scary truth about weight and chest cancer
Researchers at Cornell University and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center recently made an alarming finding when they analyzed chest tissue and blood samples from 72 women with healthy Body Mass Indexes (BMIs)…
They found that 39 percent of these women had inflammation in their br**sts… a sign that they’re at risk for developing chest cancer.
Now, as a quick refresher, body mass index is a figure calculated by dividing your weight in kilograms by your height in meters. It’s supposed to tell you whether you’re at a healthy weight.
Of course, not everyone thinks BMI is all it’s cracked up to be when it comes to gauging your weight or your health. But it’s still one of the few tools we have to measure whether someone is overweight or not…
And the women in this study definitely were not. Their BMIs were under 25, which means they were in the normal, healthy weight range for their height.
So why were there chest tissues inflamed?
Thin women face chest cancer double threat
Well, researchers found that women of a healthy weight face a couple of unique challenges when it comes to chest cancer…
Firstly, these women have a tendency to develop large fat cells in their chest tissue, even if they don’t have a lot of fat elsewhere in their body.
When these enlarged fat cells in the chest die or become sick, they release substances into the chest tissue and bloodstream that call white blood cells to the scene to clear out the waste they leave behind.
Unfortunately, once these white blood cells show up, they trigger an inflammatory process that can lead to cancer.
More specifically, they found that this inflammatory process causes heightened levels of the enzyme aromatase — an enzyme that helps produce estrogen.
When the body has too much aromatase, it also produces too much estrogen, which can fuel hormone-sensitive chest cancers.
Secondly, researchers also found that insulin and glucose levels were high in healthy weight women with chest inflammation… two factors that have been shown in previous research to increase chest cancer risk and lower survival rates.
“It is similar to prediabetes, which is traditionally considered to be associated with overweight or obesity,” said study lead author Dr. Neil Iyengar, a medical oncologist in the chest Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. “We call it metabo-inflammation, which means there’s inflammation in the fat that has metabolic consequences even in these normal weight women.”
The battle against chest cancer goes beyond weight
If you’ve learned anything from this research, it’s that you should never let a slim physique give you a false sense of security — especially when it comes to a serious disease like cancer.
Just because you’re thin doesn’t mean you’re healthy, and it doesn’t mean your risk for serious diseases is always lower either…
That’s why your first priority should be maintaining good health, and you should never get fixated on the number on the scale.
However, there are some other numbers you may want to pay more attention to — like your insulin and glucose levels. Based on this and other studies, they seem to be more important to your chest cancer risk than how well you fit into a pair of skinny jeans.
Fortunately, there are a few simple ways you can balance your blood sugar and reduce your chest cancer double threat, like:
Taking the herb milk thistle
Fasting for at least 12 hours per night before and while you sleep
Cutting back on carbohydrates and sweets
Eat more tomatoes, along with other fresh fruits and vegetables
Drinking more green, oolong or black tea
source: Easyhealthoptions
No comments:
Post a Comment