Thin ‘healthy’ women face breast cancer double threat

You’ve been told time and time again that if you want to avoid breast 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 breast cancer.

But what if the connection between excess pounds and breast cancer isn’t that clear-cut, after all?

What if breast 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 breast 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 breast cancer

Researchers at Cornell University and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center recently made an alarming finding when they analyzed breast 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 breasts… a sign that they’re at risk for developing breast 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 breast tissues inflamed?

Thin women face breast cancer double threat

Well, researchers found that women of a healthy weight face a couple of unique challenges when it comes to breast cancer…

Firstly, these women have a tendency to develop large fat cells in their breast tissue, even if they don’t have a lot of fat elsewhere in their body.

When these enlarged fat cells in the breast die or become sick, they release substances into the breast 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 breast cancers.

Secondly, researchers also found that insulin and glucose levels were high in healthy-weight women with breast inflammation… two factors that have been shown in previous research to increase breast 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 Breast 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 breast 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 breast 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 breast 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

Sources:

1. “Women with healthy BMI may have higher risk of breast cancer.” MedicalXpress. https://medicalxpress.com. Retrieved April 10, 2017.

2. M. Iyengar, et al. “Metabolic Obesity, Adipose Inflammation and Elevated Breast Aromatase in Women with Normal Body Mass Index.” Cancer Prevention Research, 2017.