Period Pain: How “Going Green” Stops You “Seeing Red”

When you’re on your period, a whole host of symptoms can affect your wellbeing and make you feel like bursting into tears or chucking plates at the wall. One of these lovely symptoms is breast pain, but at least with this one you may be able to find relief – with the help of your diet.

In the 70s cyclical mastalgia (breast pain accompanying your period) was dismissed as ‘merely an expression of psychoneurosis.’ If you were one of these unlucky women, breast pain wasn’t to do with physical wellness. Oh no, women with breast pain were labelled ‘frustrated unhappy nulliparae,’ which meant they were just upset that they hadn’t given their husbands children yet. Poor loves.

Luckily, now we know different. Not only is breast pain all too real, but it can be severe enough to interfere with daily activities. About 60 to 70% of women experience some type of breast pain at some stage of their lives, which is severe in 10 to 20% of cases. However, while it’s normal to feel some tenderness in your breasts during your cycle, it’s not normal to experience breast pain – at least, not in other parts of the world.

In Asian countries, where the average diet is lower in fat than in the West, as few as one in six women suffer from breast pain in their lifetimes. Further, women eating traditional plant-based diets all their lives, like rural Bantu African women, have lower prolactin levels (a hormone which women with breast pain tend to have high levels of). When these women spent a few weeks eating a Western diet — involving meat, butter, milk, eggs, bread and sugar —they experienced a significant rise in prolactin, so we know it’s not a genetic thing.

Since then, researchers have undertaken a “crossover” study, in which meat-eating women went on a plant-based diet for two cycles, and then were told to switch back to their regular diet with some placebo supplement to show changes before and after dietary improvement. However, the researchers discovered a problem; several participants felt so much better that they refused to go back to their regular diet, violating the study protocols. Yet the researchers concluded that a plant-based diet may offer relief from breast pain, as well as ‘significant reductions in menstrual pain duration, pain intensity, and duration of premenstrual symptoms related to concentration, behavioral change, and water retention [bloating].’

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