STATES CHRONICLE – A new study on teenage girls has linked fat diet to breast density. Having higher breast density might later lead to health problems.

The study has been published in the Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers, and Prevention journal and it’s called Dietary Fat Intake During Adolescence and Breast Density Among Young Women.

Seungyoun Jung of the University of Maryland, lead author of the study says that having an appropriate diet during teenage years might lower breast density and possibly breast cancer risks. Other risks like obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease are also, of course, prevented.

Denser breasts gained mainly through high levels of saturated fats, or low levels of mono and polyunsaturated fats can have a high risk of associated cancers.

Dairy foods like butter, cheese or meat have saturated fats, while avocados, nuts, vegetable oils, and seeds have unsaturated fats.

The study was conducted on 177 teenage girls aged ten to eighteen who took part of the Dietary Intervention Study in Children. With the help of an MRI scanner, researchers measured the density of the girls’ breasts when the girls had grown up to reach twenty-five to twenty-nine years old.

The results showed that the girls with a diet based on many saturated fats and less unsaturated fats had higher breast density fifteen years later. Whether or not breast density leads to cancer later in life, it cannot be said, but breast cancer represents an increased associated risk.

A 2006 meta-analysis showed that women with low dense breasts had four times less associated risk to develop breast cancer than those with the densest breasts.

The researchers want to confirm their observations on a more diverse pool of participants (the girls studied were mostly Caucasian) and a larger population and admit the study is limited not only because of these factors but because of the dependence of the self-reporting method as well.

Another study recently published showed that teenage girls who have a diet based on lots of fruit and veggies have a lower risk of developing breast cancer than those who do not frequently consume these nutritious products.

Breast density is given by the proportion of fatty tissue in the breast. The glandular breast tissue is sensitive to the many developmental changes occurring during adolescence.

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