Resveratrol May Prevent Breast Cancer
Can a pill prevent breast cancer? Maybe. There’s a fairly new buzzword going around…Resveratrol. Haven’t heard of it yet? Well, neither had I. And while it’s still being tested for use in humans in order to gain FDA approval, the preliminary studies are showing all sorts of promising results, only one of which includes blocking estrogen toxicity, thereby preventing breast cancer.
Resveratrol is an antioxidant that occurs naturally in the skins of red grapes, red wine, red or purple grape juice, cranberries, peanuts, and blueberries, and cranberries. You can also find it in dietary supplements.
When used in test-tube studies, it’s keeping estrogen from causing breast cancer. This finding is huge considering that one of the major risk factors for breast cancer is prolonged exposure to estrogen. I know when my mom was diagnosed, she was said to estrogen-receptor-positive. Somewhere along the line her body got out of balance and breast tumors were the end result.
Eleanor G. Rogan, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Nebraska show that resveratrol may be a way to stop this from happening. They’ve shown that resveratrol decreases the processing of estrogen into the dangerous compounds that cause tumor growth, blocks interactions between estrogen metabolites and cellular DNA, and even increases production of an enzyme that destroys dangerous estrogen metabolites.
In a news release, Rogan stated that, “Resveratrol has the ability to prevent the first step that occurs when estrogen starts the process that leads to cancer. We believe that this could stop the whole progression that leads to breast cancer down the road.”
Of course as we mentioned, these findings were done in a lab, so it’s still going to be quite some time before it’s proven that resveratrol can actually prevent cancer in women.
A definite plus though? Resveratrol shows that it has anticancer effects at very low doses.
“This is dramatic because it was able to be done with fairly low concentrations of resveratrol,” Rogan says.
We’ve been hearing for many years now that it can be very beneficial to drink a glass of red wine every day to reduce breast cancer risk. Red wine has a resveratrol concentration between 9 and 28 micromoles per liter. According to the Rogan’s studies, a resveratrol concentration of 10 micromoles per liter was able to keep estrogen metabolites from interacting with DNA.
It should be mentioned however, that a 2007 study in the U.K. suggested that even very high doses of resveratrol don’t achieve blood concentrations as high as those needed for anticancer effects.
So, while many health claims are being made about resveratrol, the risks and benefits of taking this supplement haven’t been formally tested in clinical trials.