The study by Rowan T. Chlebowski and colleagues at Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, involved 2,437 women aged 48 to 79 who were diagnosed with early stage breast cancer and were treated at several medical centers. All the women had the standard treatments such as surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy and or tamoxifen therapy.

Within a year of the initial diagnosis the women were divided into two groups, one group was put on a low-fat diet and the other on a standard diet. The low-fat diet group was also given nutritional advice.

Women on the low-fat diet ate an average of 33.3 grams of dietary fat each day compared with 51.3 grams of fat for another group, and lost an average of four pounds each.

It was found that during a five-year follow-up, 9.8 percent of the women on the low-fat diet had a recurrence compared with 12.4 percent for those who were on the standard diet.

Those women in the low-fat diet group with estrogen receptor-negative breast cancer also had a 42 percent lower risk recurrence compared with the women on the standard diet.

Though it is unclear how a low-fat diet can help reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrence, some scientists theorise that it may be something other than the low intake of dietary fat.

A low-fat diet consists of more fruits and vegetables, which may be more a important factor than low-intake of fat in the reduction of risk.

The results, however they are interpreted, appear to show that women with estrogen receptor-negative breast cancer can greatly benefit from a low-fat diet.

The study was presented on May 16 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Orlando, Florida.

Alcohol-induced liver injury (ALI) can involve damage that ranges from mild to quite severe: fatty liver (fat buildup in liver cells), alcoholic hepatitis (an inflammatory condition) or cirrhosis (replacement of normal tissue with fibrous scar tissue).

Male and female rats were divided into groups and given either no alcohol (IC) or alcohol (AF) in a higher carbohydrate diet (LDC) or a low-carb, higher fat diet (NFO) for a total of eight weeks. Researchers determined injury to the intestine by measuring bacterial translocation and blood endotoxin levels, and also the degree of liver injury. Previous reports have shown that endotoxins, which are bacterial products that can escape from the intestine, appear to be a major factor in the development of ALI.

Female rats fed alcohol in the high fat fish oil (NFO) diet had significantly greater bacterial translocation (escape of bacteria from the GI tract to abdominal lymph nodes, in this example), higher blood endotoxin levels and more severe liver injury than male rats on the same diet or rats of either sex on the LDC diet (two-fold increase in total change), based on their intake of unsaturated fatty acids and alcohol. These results indicate that the intestines of the females had become permeable as a result of the alcohol-fish oil combination in the diet.

All rats that ingested alcohol demonstrated some degree of fatty change in their livers, but liver inflammation was evident only in females fed the NFO diet, and both female and male rats on the LDC diet showed fatty liver only, without bacterial translocation nor elevation of endotoxin levels.

"Our research suggests that women should be cautious about the amount of alcohol they consume, since they highly susceptible to more severe liver injury than men and thus to potentially serious complications," said Patricia Eagon, Ph.D., of the University of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh VA Medical Center and lead author of the study. "Our work also shows that in females, alcohol in the diet along with fish oil injures the intestine, which causes release of factors that contribute to liver injury."

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