Reducing Dietary Fat Prevents Prostate Cancer in Mice
The study, which appears in the April 15, 2008, issue of the journal Cancer Research, focused on fat from corn oil, which is made up primarily of omega-6 fatty acids, or the polyunsaturated fat commonly found in the Western diet. Omega-6 fats are found in high levels in baked and fried goods, said William Aronson, a Jonsson Cancer Center researcher and the study's senior author.
Researchers fed one group of mice a diet with about 40% of calories coming from fat, a percentage typical in men eating a Western diet. The other group received 12% of their calories from fat, a figure considered to be a very low fat diet. Researchers found there was a 27% reduced incidence of prostate cancer in the low-fat diet group. Aronson also studied cells in the prostate that were precancerous, or would soon become cancer, and found that the cells in the mice eating the low-fat diet were growing much more slowly than those in the high-fat group.