The effects of vegetarian diet on the risk of breast cancer

Background and Objective: Breast cancer starts when cells in the breast begin to grow out of control. After skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in women. As diet and lifestyle have close relationship with inflicting different kinds of cancer, we decided to prepare a review article about the effect of vegetarian diet on breast cancer. Search Method: Electronic English databases (Google scholar, PubMed, and Scopus) were searched without any time limit to identify 23 published articles reporting the connection between breast cancer and vegetarian diet. Findings: Participants in one British cohort who followed a vegetarian dietary pattern overall didn’t experience a lower risk of breast cancer as compared with non- egetarians. In a cohort study in Taiwan, there were no significant differences in risk of inflicting breast cancer between the two groups with the same age, education, family history, oral contraceptive usage, or regular exercise but different dietary pattern. Most of the other surveys concur this result, too. Conclusion: The reviewed articles indicate that there is no significant difference in breast cancer risk between vegans and meat eaters, but we suggest that other researchers investigate more about this issue.

Keywords:

Breast cancer risk , Dietary pattern , Vegetarian diet