High Fat Diet, Cholesterol Strongly Linked to Breast Cancer

Love to Eat| Researchers at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson say that tests in mice demonstrate that elevated fat and cholesterol levels found in a typical American-style diet play an important role in the growth and spread of breast cancer.

Previous studies in humans have demonstrated conflicting results, causing cancer biologist Philippe G. Frank, Ph.D to turn to a highly-controlled study in mice.

In the group fed a diet that contained 21.2 percent fat and 0.2 percent cholersterol, the tumors were almost double and were 50 percent larger than mice that ate a normal diet that had only 4.5 percent fat and neglible amounts of cholesterol.