Vitamin and calcium supplements slash breast cancer risk

Wednesday, May 05, 2010 by: S. L. Baker, features writer

(NaturalNews) It's common for mainstream medical doctors to declare there's no reason to take nutritional supplements. After all, this line of reasoning goes, you are supposedly getting all the nutrition you need from a typical American diet. However, evidence continues to mount disproving this idea. And scientists are documenting that an optimum intake of nutrients can, in fact, have enormous benefits to health. A case in point: a new study indicates taking multi-vitamins and calcium supplements can dramatically slash the risk of breast cancer.

Scientists at the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico investigated 268 women with malignant breast tumors and 457 healthy controls to look for possible causative factors for breast cancer. The results, which were recently presented by Jaime Matta, Ph.D., at the American Association for Cancer Research's 101st Annual Meeting held in Washington, D.C., showed vitamin supplements reduced the risk of breast cancer by about 30%.

"It is not an immediate effect. You don't take a vitamin today and your breast cancer risk is reduced tomorrow. However, we did see a long-term effect in terms of breast cancer reduction," Dr. Matta, who headed the study, said in a statement to the press. "We're not talking about mega doses of these vitamins and calcium supplements, so this is definitely one way to reduce risk."

Dr. Matta explained that his research team's findings also suggest that calcium supplements help protect against breast cancer because they enhance DNA repair capacity. This is important because DNA repair is a complex biological process involving more than 200 proteins that, if disrupted, can cause malignancies, including breast tumors.

"This process involves at least five separate pathways and is critical for maintaining genomic stability," Dr. Matta noted in the media statement. "When the DNA is not repaired, it leads to mutation that leads to cancer."

Although breast cancer is a disease women tend to fear, the new study is one of many that gives credence to the idea women can take control of their health and use natural therapies, including nutrition, to help prevent and even treat breast cancer. For example, NaturalNews recently reported that a vegetable commonly eaten in China and India, bitter melon, stops breast cancer cells from growing (http://www.naturalnews.com/028256_b...).

In addition, a Mediterranean diet rich in fruits and vegetables, fish, and olive and sunflower oils has been found to reduce the incidence of post-menopausal breast cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/027598_M...). Two more documented breast cancer fighters: eating beans and getting adequate vitamin D through supplements or sunshine exposure (http://www.naturalnews.com/025614.html).