How to optimize your breast cancer diet

While emphasizing fruits and vegetables and de-emphasizing alcohol, red meat and omega-6 fats may reduce the likelihood of breast cancer recurrence, it is possible to do more to maximize the chemopreventive benefits of your diet. Tailoring food choices to your circumstances and breast cancer subtype can maximize the potential to support your breast cancer treatment and help reduce the risk of recurrence.

This webpage is designed to enable you to customize your food choices using the information in the Food for Breast Cancer website. How to optimize your breast cancer diet — an example provides an illustration of how to use the instructions.

Your diet should depend on whether you are (A) at high risk for breast cancer (but never diagnosed with the disease); (B) in treatment; or (C) a breast cancer survivor finished with treatment. Each of these situations is addressed below. The overall goal is to bathe your normal cells with nutrients that promote healthy growth and cell division. Any breast cancer cells that do arise are to find themselves in an environment that promotes their death and inhibits their proliferation and migration.

Women at high risk for breast cancer should use the recommended, avoid and alphabetical food lists to select their foods. The goal is to consume a wide variety of chemopreventive foods while limiting cancer-promoting foods. While many breast cancer risk factors (such as early puberty or being tall) cannot be influenced by diet in adulthood, some risk factors can be mitigated. The links below are to webpages that provide detailed information and food recommendations for some high-risk circumstances. We have also included information on how to reduce the breast cancer risk of our children.

Breast cancer is categorized into two main histological types, ductal and lobular, as well the far less common mucinous carcinoma, adenoid cystic carcinoma and mixed tumors (e.g. ductal plus lobular). Within the ductal category are inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), medullary carcinoma, tubular carcinoma, Piaget's disease of the nipple, and metaplastic carcinoma.

Lobular, HER2 overexpressing (HER2+), and inflammatory breast cancer patients and survivors should take into account their types in determining their diets:

All breast cancer patients should take into account their ER/PR subtype in designing their diets:

Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) and lobular carcinoma in situ (LCIS) are noninvasive forms of breast cancer that have not infiltrated healthy surrounding tissue but have the potential to do so. DCIS and LCIS patients should also take into account their receptor subtypes in designing their diets, as well as any treatment they may be undergoing.

Women undergoing treatment for breast cancer should adopt a healthy diet that emphasizes the specific foods that have been found to increase the effectiveness of the treatments. Below are links to webpages that provide detailed information and food lists for specific treatments:

The food lists and other recommendations based on treatment should be combined with the lists for breast cancer type and other circumstances listed above, as well as the recommended and avoid lists. However, the treatment-based lists should take precedence. If you are undergoing more than one type of treatment, combine the lists, but do not consume any foods or supplements that are to be avoided while undergoing any of the treatments.

Women who are in remission for breast cancer should adopt a diet based on their breast cancer types. The goal is to reduce recurrence risk. However, note that breast cancer can recur with a different ER, PR and/or HER2 status than the initial primary tumor. In fact, discordance between the status of original tumors and corresponding metastases occurs in at least 25% of cases. This means it is important to continue to pay attention to the more general recommended and avoid lists.

It is important to enjoy your food. The idea is to replace elements of your current diet that promote breast cancer with foods that prevent it or are neutral. Adding beneficial foods to an unhealthy diet is not likely to make as much difference as an overhaul of your diet that substantially eliminates harmful foods. This can only happen if you enjoy what you eat. For example, if you do not like broccoli, do not eat it. But maybe you might enjoy broccoli sprouts, kale or watercress, which have many of the same chemopreventive characteristics.

Several studies have found that consuming a wide variety of foods is more beneficial in preventing breast cancer than consuming a limited selection. There are synergistic interactions between foods. For example, the combination of mushrooms and green tea appears to be more chemopreventive than consuming either alone. Also, simultaneously consuming olive oil and orange vegetables increases the bioavailability of the beta-carotene in the vegetables. There are likely to be other such beneficial synergies that remain to be discovered.

Vitamins and supplements can make sense for deficiency states. For example, it appears to be difficult for most of us to get enough vitamin D through exposure to sunshine and in the diet. Adequate vitamin D is important for breast cancer chemoprevention. However, note that relatively high doses might not be safe. Similarly, taking high quality fish oil could benefit some of those who wish to increase their ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fats, although note that taking fish oil is not always recommended during all phases of treatment.

However, it has been found that cancer can be promoted by large doses of some compounds that are chemopreventive when consumed in foods. One famous example is beta-carotene, which helps to prevent lung cancer when consumed in the diet but promotes lung cancer when take in high doses as a supplement. This is one reason why we tend to de-emphasize supplements. Often there appears to be a curve in which both low and high levels of a given micronutrient promote cancer. However, we do not have enough information to determine the dosage that aligns with the cancer-preventive sweet spot in the middle portion of the curve. It is not that we do not understand the attraction of genistein, DIM, ellagic acid, resveratrol, etc. However, based on the available evidence, consuming micronutrients in pill form whose safety and effective dosage have not been established could be harmful. See Supplements with warnings for breast cancer.

Food is best. However, note that we do not believe that any diet alone is able to effectively treat breast cancer (please see our articles on the raw food diet and food as cancer cure).

The information in this website, which is updated continually as new research becomes available, has been developed based solely on the results of academic studies. Clicking on any of the underlined terms will take you to its tag or webpage, which will provide more extensive information.