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World|science|February 2, 2016 / 03:42 PM
Dietary fiber in teen years may lower later breast cancer risk

AKIPRESS.COM - For girls and young women, getting a lot of fiber could pay off decades later with lowered risk of developing breast cancer, according to a large U.S. study.

Researchers analyzed data on more than 44,000 women participating in a long-term study and found those who ate the most fiber during high school and early adulthood were about 20 percent less likely to develop breast cancer by middle age than those who ate the least fiber in their youth, reports Reuters.

There’s reason to believe that dietary fiber could affect developing breasts in ways that impact long-term cancer risk, but no one has ever followed-up over such a long period, the authors note in the journal Pediatrics.

“Most of the studies that evaluated association between dietary fiber intake in midlife or later, have not noted any significant association,” said lead author Maryam Farvid of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. “Therefore, it seems high-fiber diet in early life would be important in terms of breast cancer prevention.”

Foods high in fiber contain many other nutrients, which may have played a role, but most known breast cancer risk factors as well as the overall quality of the women’s diets were taken into account, Farvid said. Yet the association with fiber remained.

The researchers used data from the Nurses’ Health Study II, which included more than 90,000 premenopausal women who completed a dietary questionnaire in 1991, when they were 27 to 44 years old. Eight years later, 44,263 of them also completed a questionnaire about their diets when they were in high school.

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