If you want to improve your overall wellness, and guard your wellbeing against developing certain types of cancers, anyone will tell you that eating a plant-based diet rich in grains, fruits and vegetables is a very positive step towards reaching this goal. However, poor environmental wellness could undermine your efforts to maintain a healthy diet, and actually increase your risk of developing breast cancer.
According to the latest research from the American Association for Cancer Research, a toxic chemical that is widely dispersed in the environment and affects your food and water supply may make agriculture crops less healthy than you’d like. This toxin, cadmium, is a component of many farm fertilizers and has been linked to an increased risk of developing breast cancer. Though it naturally occurs in the earth’s crust and waters, when you are exposed to certain forms of the mineral it can produce a toxic effect.
So how are you exposed to these toxic forms of cadmium? Mainly, atmospheric deposition and the use of fertilizers, which leads to higher uptake in plants, are responsible for higher concentrations of cadmium over what occurs naturally. When you ingest this form of the mineral in your diet, it can have some oestrogen-like activity and affect your oestrogen receptor signalling, and this has been related to the high rates of hormone-related cancers, such as breast cancer or endometrial cancer.
Agneta Akesson PhD, an associate professor at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, has studied the effects of dietary cadmium on both breast and endometrial cancers. Most recently, she found that women who have the highest exposure to cadmium through diet have a 21% increased risk of developing breast cancer. She explained that ‘because of a high accumulation in agricultural crops, the main sources of dietary cadmium are bread and other cereals, potatoes, root crops and vegetables (especially leafy greens).’
Aside from these healthy foods, you can also find cadmium in shellfish due to contaminated sea water and in the meats of animals that eat cadmium-containing plants, so what on earth do you eat? According to Dr Akesson, ‘It’s possible that this healthy diet to some extent can counteract the negative effect of cadmium, but our findings need to be confirmed with further studies. It is, however, important that the exposure to cadmium from all food is low.’ Remember; a healthy and varied diet full of vegetables, fruits, whole grains and beans can protect against a range of other types of cancers, including those of the mouth, oesophagus, stomach, lung, pancreas, and prostate, and poor nutrition can be detrimental to your wellbeing.
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