TENNESSEE – Breast cancer specialist, Dr Sonya Reid, says diet and lifestyle choices play a key role in breast cancer care, albeit 90 per cent of breast cancer cases do not have a clear cause for their development.

Speaking during Tuesday night’s online breast cancer forum, which was hosted by the Sarah’s Children Foundation, Reid, a breast medical oncologist at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University Medical Centre in the United States, said there is not enough data to conclusively say that diet plays a role in the development of breast cancer.

“Obesity is linked to higher incidents of certain types of breast cancer, so that is lifestyle and dietary influence. The big question is, ‘What do I do, going forward? Do I go green-juicing, do I cut out red meat?’ Those are some of the big questions we always get, and I think we do not have enough solid evidence to point us in a particular direction to say that this diet is better than that diet,” said Reid.

“When patients show up at my clinic, one of the first things they start doing is try to dial back, and they say, ‘What did I do wrong? It must have been the deodorant I was using, or it must have been that I started eating a lot of burgers recently’. What we know is that for 90 per cent of breast cancers, we do not know why you develop breast cancer,” stated Reid. “You have the genetic causes, the 10 per cent of persons that have the gene and for whom we can say it is because you have hereditary breast cancer, but for the majority of cases, we do not know why. We know there are things that increase risk, but we also know some patients can have the worst lifestyle and never get cancer.” (Jamaica-gleaner) …[+]