According to the researchers, apples, bananas and grapes are particularly high in fiber and flavonoids, which might be the cancer-fighting keys.
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Commenting on the studies, Catherine Priestley, clinical nurse specialist at the charity Breast Cancer Care, said: “While this United States study offers a new take on healthy eating, a link between eating specific fruits during teenage years to help lower breast cancer risk is a long way from being fact”.
They used data from a study that followed 90,000 nurses over 20 years. Parents could do a great job in providing a plenty of fruits and vegetables at home and encouraging teens to adopt healthy eating habits including an emphasis on diet rich in fruits and vegetables.
Maryam Farvid from the Massachusetts General Hospital and her colleagues at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have chose to conduct their BMJ published study on a younger pool of subjects.
But researchers say eating more fruit itself may not be the whole story.
Consumption of apples, bananas, and grapes during adolescence was strongly associated with a drop in breast cancer risk.
At the end of the analysis after nearly two decades, the researchers found higher fruit intake to be linked with lower risk of breast cancer. Fruit juices are not counted nor seen as something that would render the same benefit.
Still, Farvid cautioned that “due to the observational nature of the study, we could not provide evidence of cause and effect”, only an association between fruit consumption and a drop in breast cancer risk. They found that high fruit consumption during adolescence was associated with a roughly 25 percent lower risk of breast cancer diagnosed in middle age. On the other hand, another report explains how the excessive consumption of alcohol might end up increasing the risk of the disease among women, even though the risk of heart disease may get reduced. The association for fruit intake during adolescence was independent of adult fruit intake.
In another study, a group of Danish researchers tested the effect of a change in alcohol consumption on the chances of contracting breast cancer and heart disease.
By 2013, 3,235 women had received a diagnosis of invasive breast cancer, and 1,347 of these had completed a questionnaire about their diet while they were 13-18 years old.
Vuthijumnonk said each animal responded to environmental stress differently, so she couldn’t say that eating blueberries would prevent breast cancer in humans.
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However, results for women who decreased their alcohol intake over the five year period were not significantly associated with risk of breast cancer or coronary heart disease. While we know many breast cancer risk factors, few of them are easily modified.
