phytoestrogens Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Eating THESE Seeds May Reduce Breast Cancer Mortality, Study Shows

AHA Publisher — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 07:00:47 +0000

Stephanie Woods via NaturalHealth365 – Breast cancer is the second most common cancer in women in the United States, coming just behind skin cancer. It also falls just behind lung cancer as the second leading cause of death in women. An estimated 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. And, while – conventionally speaking – doctors promote mammograms as a “helpful” diagnostic tools to detect the presence of tumors, they do nothing to decrease the risk of developing breast cancer. Thankfully, nature provided various plants that contain compounds with cancer-fighting properties. One such example is flaxseed, which according to studies may reduce the mortality rate by as much as 70%. High Concentrations of Lignans Make Flaxseed a Cancer-Fighting Superfood Flaxseed is chock full of phytoestrogens called lignans. These plant estrogens act as antioxidants in the body. You can find lignans in many common foods: Beans Pumpkin seeds Broccoli Sesame seeds Grains like oats, wheat, barley, and rye Sunflower seeds While these are all great sources, flaxseed tops them all with amounts that are much, much higher. And it seems that a high concentration of lignans is precisely what is needed when fighting breast cancer. Impressive Research Shows Flaxseed Reduces Tumor Growth A review of research on flaxseed and breast cancer from the University of Toronto highlights some exciting discoveries that could mean very good news for cancer patients. Observational studies showed a reduced breast cancer risk (primarily among postmenopausal women) in connection with the intake of flaxseed, urinary excretion, or serum levels. A 33% to 70% reduction in breast cancer mortality was attributed to lignans. Most animal studies maintaining a diet that is 2.5% to 10% flaxseed, flaxseed oil, or the equivalent amount of lignans reduces the growth of tumors. Clinical trials found that tumor growth in breast cancer patients was reduced after patients were given 25 grams of flaxseed a day for 32 days. That’s not all! Flaxseed boosts brain health as well which helps with mental health issues like depression and anxiety. Flaxseed Protects Women From Breast Cancer in MULTIPLE Ways Science has identified several ways that flaxseed can help protect women from breast cancer: It decreases the proliferation of tumor cells Lignans block the blood supply to the tumor It lowers the risk of metastasis Lignans block estrogen receptors and lower excess estrogen production Study after study shows that flaxseed is not only a powerful cancer fighter, but it can also reduce your risk of cancer. Best of all, it is something you can start adding to your diet today. Here Is How to Incorporate Flaxseeds Into Your Diet Most of the studies found that 2.5 tablespoons of flaxseed, just 25 grams, is effective in fighting cancer. Postmenopausal women can safely have up to 40 grams a day. But how do you do it? Flaxseed isn’t that tasty on its own, but you can still get the benefits by adding it to foods you are already eating such as: Oatmeal Mashed sweet potato Smoothies Salad Yogurt Cereal Soups Muffins Bread Naturally, you should look for organic brown or golden flaxseeds to ensure purity and avoid varieties that may be polluted with agrochemicals. Grinding your flaxseed will make it easier to incorporate into your foods, but when it is ground it does go rancid fairly quickly. You want to grind about a week’s worth of flaxseed at a time and store it in the refrigerator or freezer in an airtight container. It is also recommended that you work up to at least 2 tablespoons but give your body time to get used to all the fiber by incremental increases. Making this small change to your diet could save your life. Sources for this article include: Cancer.org GreenMedInfo.com AICR.org To read the original article click here.

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Soy Phytoestrogens for Menopausal Symptoms

AHA Publisher — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 07:00:45 +0000

Michael Greger M.D. FACLM via Nutrition Facts – Does soy food consumption explain why Japanese women appear to be so protected from hot flash symptoms? When women hit menopause and their ovaries shut down, the estrogen level in their body drops 95 percent. This is good news for the endometrium, the lining of the uterus. Otherwise, the constant estrogen signaling could eventually result in endometrial cancer. In fact, that may be why menopause evolved: to protect the uterus from cancer. Lower estrogen levels are also beneficial for lowering breast cancer risk. In postmenopausal women, relatively high blood levels of estrogen are associated with a more than double increased risk for breast cancer. But why do estrogen levels drop 95 percent at menopause, but not all the way down to zero? Because estrogen can be made by other tissues, like our own fat cells, and “this probably explains the increase in [breast cancer] risk in obese postmenopausal women.” More fatty tissue means more estrogen production. In my earlier video How to Block Breast Cancer’s Estrogen-Producing Enzymes, I discussed how soy phytoestrogens can block the production of estrogen, such that drinking a glass of soy milk with each meal can cut estrogen levels in half in premenopausal women. But estrogen levels in postmenopausal women are already down 95 percent, and, because of that, many women, approximately 8 in 10, suffer from hot flashes. Might lowering levels even further with soy make menopausal symptoms even worse? That’s the subject of my video Soy Phytoestrogens for Menopause Hot Flashes. Estrogen treatment reduces menopausal symptoms very effectively, but, unfortunately, its downsides include not only the uterine cancer, but blood clots, strokes, and cognitive impairment, as well. Taking progesterone-type compounds with the estrogen prevents uterine cancer, but increases the risk of heart attacks, more stroke, breast cancer, more clots, and dementia. What’s a woman to do? The 80 percent hot flashes figure is not universal. Eighty to 85 percent of European and American women may experience hot flashes, but as few as 15 percent of women may be affected in places like Japan. In fact, there isn’t even a term for it in the Japanese language, which supports how relatively rare it is. Could the phytoestrogens in soy be helping? Researchers examined the “association between soy product intake and the occurrence of hot flashes” by following a thousand Japanese women over time, from before they started menopause, to see who developed hot flashes and who didn’t. As you can see at 2:34 in my video, those women eating around four ounces of tofu a day appeared to cut their risk in half, compared to women only eating an ounce or two a day, suggesting soy products are protective. But, could it be that soy intake is just a marker for a healthier diet over all? A study in China found that consumption of “whole plant foods” in general seemed to be associated with decreased menopausal symptoms, so in order to see if soy had a special role, you’d have to put it to the test. As you can see at 3:10 in my video, soy phytoestrogens in pill form showed extraordinary results, including a significant decrease in hot flash “presence, number [frequency] and severity.” At the start of the study, 100 percent of women suffered hot flashes, and that dropped to only 31 percent by the end of three months. The average number of hot flashes also dropped, from about 120 a month down to only 12 in 90 days. Exciting findings, but the problem with this study and some others like it is that there was no control group to control for the placebo effect. If you look at all the hormone trials, even the women who got the placebo sugar pills had up to around a 60 percent reduction in hot flashes over the years. That’s why any “therapies purported to reduce such symptoms must be assessed in blinded trials against a placebo or a validated therapy because of the large placebo effect…and also because…menopause symptoms often decline” on their own over time. To illustrate this point, see the findings of a study I show at 4:00 in my video. Researchers gave women a soy protein powder and saw a nice drop in hot flashes over the next 12 weeks. Those results on their own make the soy supplementation look pretty effective, but those were results from the placebo powder group. The study subjects who actually got the soy achieved results significantly better than placebo, which demonstrates how important it is to recognize how powerful the placebo effect can be. Over the past 20 years, more than 50 clinical trials have evaluated the effects of soy foods and supplements on the alleviation of hot flashes. Compiling the best ones together, the placebo groups got about a 20 percent drop in hot flash severity, while the soy groups achieved about a 45 percent drop. So, on average, the soy did about 25 percent better than control, as you can see at 4:31 in my video. There have been two studies that compared soy phytoestrogens head–to–head against hormones. In one study, they actually seemed pretty comparable, in terms of reducing hot flashes, muscle and joint pain, and vaginal dryness, compared to placebo, as you can see at 4:50 in my video. In the other study, however, soy did better than placebo, but estrogen and progesterone therapy did better than both. But, soy has “the benefit of no increased risk of breast and uterine cancer or cardiovascular disease,” such as heart disease and stroke. KEY TAKEAWAYS After menopause, a woman’s estrogen level drops by 95 percent, which benefits her endometrium, the uterine lining, and lowers breast cancer risk. Soy phytoestrogens can block estrogen production, such that drinking a glass of soy milk at each meal can halve estrogen levels in premenopausal women. Although estrogen treatments may effectively reduce symptoms of menopause, they have myriad downsides, including uterine cancer, blood clots, strokes, and cognitive impairment, and taking it with progesterone-type compounds may also increase heart attack, stroke, breast cancer, clot, and dementia risks. Hot flashes are suffered by approximately 80 percent of postmenopausal European and American women, but only about 15 percent of women in Japan, for example. Researchers found that those eating around four ounces of tofu a day appeared to halve their risk of hot flashes, compared to those who only ate one or two daily ounces, suggesting soy products are protective. More than 50 clinical trials have studied the effects of soy foods and supplements on hot flashes, and the best studies found about a 25 percent improvement by soy over placebo controls in the severity of hot flashes. Of the two studies comparing soy phytoestrogens against hormones, one determined soy to be fairly comparable with regards to reducing hot flashes, muscle and joint pain, as well as vaginal dryness, compared to placebo, while the other found that soy did better than placebo but the estrogen and progesterone therapy exceeded both in effectiveness. Soy, however, provides the benefit without the increased risks of cancers of the breast and uterus or heart disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular disease. Why does soy help some women, but not others? See my video How to Convert Into an Equol Producer. I discuss more about the risks of hormone replacement therapy in How Did Doctors Not Know About the Risks of Hormone Therapy?. What about Plant-Based Bioidentical Hormones? Check out the video and find out. For more on soy, see: Is Soy Healthy for Breast Cancer Survivors? GMO Soy and Breast Cancer Flashback Friday: Who Shouldn’t Eat Soy? In health, Michael Greger, M.D. To read the original article click here.

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How Phytoestrogens Can have Anti-Estrogenic Effects

AHA Publisher — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 08:00:53 +0000

Michael Greger M.D. FACLM via Nutrition Facts – When the Women’s Health Initiative study found that menopausal women taking hormone replacement therapy suffered “higher rates of breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, and overall harm,” a call was made for safer alternatives. Yes, the Women’s Health Initiative found that estrogen does have positive effects, such as reducing menopausal symptoms, improving bone health, and reducing hip fracture risk, but negative effects were also found, such as increasing the blood clots in the heart, brain, and lungs, as well as breast cancer. Ideally, to get the best of both worlds, we’d need what’s called a selective estrogen receptor modulator—something with pro-estrogenic effects in some tissues like bone but at the same time anti-estrogenic effects in other tissues like the breast. Drug companies are trying to make these, but phytoestrogens, which are natural compounds in plants, appear to function as natural selective estrogen receptor modulators. An example is genistein, which is found in soybeans, which happen to be structurally similar to estrogen. How could something that looks like estrogen act as an anti-estrogen? The original theory for how soy phytoestrogens control breast cancer growth is that they compete with our own estrogens for binding to the estrogen receptor. As more and more soy compounds are dripped onto breast cancer cells in a petri dish, less and less actual estrogen is able to bind to them. So, the estrogen-blocking ability of phytoestrogens can help explain their anti-estrogenic effects. How do we then explain their pro-estrogenic effects on other tissues like bone? How can soy have it both ways? The mystery was solved when it was discovered there are two different types of estrogen receptors in the body and the way in which a target cell responds depends on which type of estrogen receptor they have. The existence of this newly discovered estrogen receptor, named “estrogen receptor beta…to distinguish it from the ‘classical’ estrogen receptor alpha,” may be the “key to understanding the health-protective potential of soy” phytoestrogens. And, unlike our body’s own estrogen, soy phytoestrogens preferentially bind to the beta receptors. For instance, within eight hours or so of eating about a cup of cooked whole soybeans, genistein levels in the blood reach about 20 to 50 nanomoles. That’s how much is circulating throughout our body, bathing our cells. About half is bound up to proteins in the blood, so the effective concentration is about half the 20 to 50 nanomoles. What does that mean for estrogen receptor activation? In my video Who Shouldn’t Eat Soy?, I feature a graph explaining the mysterious health benefits of soy foods. Around the effective levels we would get from eating a cup of soybeans, there is very little alpha activation, but lots of beta activation. What do we find when we look at where each of these receptors are located in the human body? The way estrogen pills increase the risk of fatal blood clots is by causing the liver to dump out extra clotting factors. But guess what? The human liver contains only alpha estrogen receptors, not beta receptors. So, perhaps eating 30 cups or so of soybeans a day could be a problem, but, at the kinds of concentrations we would get with just normal soy consumption, it’s no wonder this is a problem with drug estrogens but not soy phytoestrogens. The effects on the uterus also appear to be mediated solely by alpha receptors, which is presumably why no negative impact has been seen with soy. So, while estrogen-containing drugs may increase the risk of endometrial cancer up to ten-fold, phytoestrogen-containing foods are associated with significantly less endometrial cancer. In fact, protective effects are found for these types of gynecological cancers in general: Women who ate the most soy had 30 percent less endometrial cancer and appeared to cut their ovarian cancer risk nearly in half. Soy phytoestrogens don’t appear to have any effect on the lining of the uterus and can still dramatically improve some of the 11 most common menopausal symptoms (as compiled by the Kupperman Index). In terms of bone health, human bone cells carry beta estrogen receptors, so we might expect soy phytoestrogens to be protective. And, indeed, they do seem to “significantly increase bone mineral density,” which is consistent with population data suggesting that “[h]igh consumption of soy products is associated with increased bone mass…” But can soy phytoestrogens prevent bone loss over time? In a two-year study, soymilk was compared to a transdermal progesterone cream. The control group lost significant bone mineral density in their spine over the two years, but the progesterone group lost significantly less than that. The group drinking two glasses of soymilk a day, however, actually ended up even better than when they started. In what is probably the most robust study to date, researchers compared the soy phytoestrogen genistein to a more traditional hormone replacement therapy (HRT) regimen. Over one year, in the spine and hip bones, the placebo group lost bone density, while it was gained in both the soy phytoestrogen and HRT estrogen groups. The “study clearly shows that genistein prevents bone loss…and enhances new bone formation…in turn producing a net gain of bone mass.” The main reason we care about bone mass is that we want to prevent fractures. Is soy food consumption associated with lower fracture risk? Yes. In fact, a significantly lower risk of bone fracture is associated with just a single serving of soy a day, the equivalent of 5 to 7 grams of soy protein or 20 to 30 milligrams of phytoestrogens, which is about a cup of soymilk or, even better, a serving of a whole soy food like tempeh, edamame, or the beans themselves. We don’t have fracture data on soy supplements, though. “If we seek to derive the types of health benefits we presume Asian populations get from eating whole and traditional soy foods,” maybe we should look to eating those rather than taking unproven protein powders or pills. Is there anyone who should avoid soy? Yes, if you have a soy allergy. That isn’t very common, though. A national survey found that only about 1 in 2,000 people report a soy allergy, which is 40 times less than the most common allergen, dairy milk, and about 10 times less than all the other common allergens, such as fish, eggs, shellfish, nuts, wheat, or peanuts. This article has been modified. To read the original article click here. For more articles by Dr. Greger click here.

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