Preventing breast cancer - It’s all in the jiggle
by Lane Sebring MD
Rarely is there any good news about breast cancer, but this is some of the best news I've ever heard. Being a man, I take a personal interest.
I recently encountered research into a possible cause of breast cancer that was actually published in 1995.
It’s long been hypothesized that wearing a bra increases a woman’s risk of developing cancer – some observers noticed that a chart showing the increase in bra wearing in the last century was followed by a very similar chart several decades later, depicting the increase in breast cancer.
The researchers looked at 4700 women, approximately half of whom had developed breast cancer, and asked about their bra-wearing habits. They broke them into four groups:
- The first group never wore a bra.
- The second group took theirs off as soon as they got home.
- The third group took theirs off when they went to bed.
- The fourth group wore theirs through the night.
When you compared the women who wore their bra through the night to those who never wore a bra, they were 125 times more likely to get breast cancer – stunning numbers. Wearing an underwire was worse for each of the last three groups.
Bound to happen.
What’s the mechanism of wearing a bra that may increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer? The best answer is that a bra greatly restricts lymphatic drainage.
The breasts produce their own estrogen, and also attract and bind estrogen floating in the bloodstream. They have two kinds of receptors for estrogen, an alpha receptor that tells breast cells to grow and multiply, and a beta receptor that, among other things, tells cancer cells to self-destruct. (That’s why women are eight times more likely to get breast cancer after menopause, when estrogen levels fall.)
Estrogen has two metabolic pathways it can travel to be broken down and eliminated from the body through the bile and out the intestinal tract. Which of these two metabolic pathways it goes down is of great importance.
The preferable pathway, used 90% of the time, converts estrogen into a molecule that actually protects the DNA of the cell by binding to it lightly and protecting it from free radicals and oxidation.
The other pathway produces a molecule that binds to DNA very tightly, and when it gets knocked off it pulls off DNA base pairs, causing genetic mutations. This mechanism has in recent years emerged as the most likely mechanism for the development of breast cancer.
If undesirable breakdown products of estrogen aren’t allowed to be carried away from the breasts by a healthy lymphatic system because the breasts are tightly circumscribed by a bra, they will accumulate and markedly increase genetic mutations.
You can promote breast health and decrease the risk of developing cancer by taking omega-3 fish oil, which increases the enzymes in the preferred protective metabolic pathway. Cruciferous vegetables do the same thing. As I discovered, so does estradiol (estrogen). A good probiotic that supplies acidophilus for the intestinal tract helps to prevent reabsorption of bad breakdown products dumped into the intestinal tract, and breast massage can promote lymphatic drainage.
The breasts were never designed to be bound up, though. Good lymphatic drainage is promoted by the natural movement of the breasts in a woman’s daily activities – and by the natural jiggle of the breast.
The paper published in 1995 demonstrates quite powerfully how we can take a beautiful metabolic system and thoroughly screw it up, even to the point of causing cancer. Why isn’t this being scrolled along the bottom of the screen of all the news shows?
What a woman does with this information is, appropriately, her choice – but if she doesn’t know about it, there is no choice.
Dr. Lane Sebring of the Sebring Clinic specializes in natural health empowerment, personalized nutritional counseling, and bioidentical hormone replacement. Offices are located in Wimberley at 16811 Ranch Road 12 and in Austin at 13680 Hwy. 183 N. (at 620). (512) 847-5618. www.sebringclinic.com
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