Sunday June 30, 2013 (foodconsumer.org) -- A new study released in Public Health Nutrition suggests that eating a healthy diet can substantially cut the risk for developing breast cancer - a disease that kills about 40,000 American women every year.

The study led by Z. Karimi from Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences and Health Services in Tehran, Iran and colleagues shows that those who ate the highest amount of healthy foods were 75% less likely to develop breast cancer whereas the risk for the disease was 7.7-hold as high in those who ate the highest amounts of unhealthy foods as those who ate the lowest amounts.

For the study, the researchers defined a diet consisting of vegetables, fruits, low-fat dairy products, legumes, olive and vegetable oils, fish, condiments, organ meat, poultry, pickles, soya and whole grains as a healthy diet.  And they defined a diet full of soft drinks, sugars, tea and coffee, French fries and potato chips, salt, sweets and desserts, hydrogenated fats, nuts, industrial juice, refined grains, and red and processed meat as a unhealthy diet.

Involved in the study were 100 female patients aged 30-65 years with breast cancer and 174 female controls who attended Shohada Teaching Hospital in Tehran, Iran for medical care. The participants were surveyed for their dietary information through a food frequency questionnaire.

The researchers concluded "A healthy dietary pattern may be negatively associated with breast cancer risk, while an unhealthy dietary pattern is likely to increase the risk among Iranian women." (reporting by Jimmy Downs)