Scientists studying the benefits of a low-fat diet for patients recovering from Cancer have come across some additional good news – especially for women. It appears to be another chapter in the big book of supporting evidence in favour of the widely recommended Mediterranean diet…
Long-term follow-ups show that older folks – particularly women – enjoy
significant health benefits from following a low-Fat diet…
Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in the U.S. undertook a very long-term study of how a low-Fat diet would effect participants’ risks of developing several different cancers.
What they did
They wanted to see how a low-Fat regime would effect the health of participants over not days, weeks or months, but after decades. Team Leader Dr. Ross Prentice and his colleagues in the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) originally launched the Dietary Modification Trial in 1993. The study involved nearly 49,000 postmenopausal women across the U.S. to test whether a low-fat dietary pattern would reduce the risk of breast and colorectal cancers and coronary heart disease.
To do so, they asked test subjects to follow a specific low-Fat diet and compared their health status to that of non-study participants at regular intervals.
What they found
After nearly nine years of dietary change, they found that the low-fat diet did not significantly impact outcomes for the targeted conditions. However, after longer-term follow-up of nearly 20 years, researchers found that significant benefits, derived from modest dietary changes, emerged and persisted including:
- A 15-35 percent reduction in deaths from all-causes following breast cancer
- A 13-25 percent reduction in insulin-dependent diabetes
- A 15-30 percent reduction in coronary heart disease among 23,000 women without baseline hypertension or prior cardiovascular disease
The takeaway
“The latest results support the role of nutrition in overall health, and indicate that low-fat diets rich in fruits, vegetables and grains have health benefits without any observed adverse effects,” Prentice concludes.
“The sheer number of new diets and nutrition trends can be overwhelming to people who simply want to know, ‘What should I be eating?'” says Study Co-Author Dr. Garnet Anderson. “While there are many diets that provide short-term benefits like weight loss, this study scientifically validates the long-term health effects of a low-fat diet.”
My take
Okay.. Now, I want to see how a similar low-fat diet effects men’s health over similar periods of time. There must be plenty of data out there gathered in long-term surveys of other groups under wide-scope data collection efforts. Any average 15-30 percent reduction in the incidence of a major community health threat – let alone three – should be treated as major news and trumpeted as widely as possible. The main significance of this study’s findings is that anybody can take advantage of the advantages Dr. Prentice and his team found for the long-term low-Fat diet should get off their duff and start eating better. And the ubiquitous Mediterranean Diet is right there for them to adopt.
~ Maggie J.