A new study confirms something I read earlier that regular exercise reduces your chance of recurrence. Apparently a good diet combined with exercise reduces the chances of dying by 44%!
Several studies have shown that diet and exercise may each contribute to breast cancer survival, but little research has looked at the effect of both diet and exercise together. Pierce, director of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Moores UCSD Cancer Center, in La Jolla, California, and his team looked at the combined effects of diet and exercise for breast cancer survivors.
They studied 1,490 women who had been treated for breast cancer 2 years earlier, on average.
Overall, only 30 percent of these women maintained the healthiest type of lifestyle, including eating five or more servings of fruits and vegetables daily and engaging in physical activity equivalent to a half-hour of brisk walking six days a week.
These women had a 44 percent lower risk of dying within a 10-year period than did their peers, Pierce and his team report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
What's more, this lower risk of death remained true regardless of whether the women were obese, study findings indicate. The effect of physical activity and diet was "so strong it wiped out the body mass index effect," Pierce said. However, obese women were less likely than nonobese women to report such healthy habits.
A similarly reduced risk of death was not apparent among non-physically active women who consumed the highest amounts of fruits and vegetables or among physically active women who did not eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, the investigators note.
"Doing each one alone didn't do it," Pierce said. "There was no benefit from each one alone, but there was a benefit from both together."
SOURCE: Journal of Clinical Oncology, June 10, 2007.
Interesting statistics.It seems like a no-brainer that diet along with exercise promotes wellness and longevity, (for both healthy people and those battling illness) but it needs to be said just the same.
Posted by: dawn | July 21, 2007 at 10:32 PM