 After diagnosis, women with breast cancer may cut their risk of dying nearly in half estrogen receptor positive, estrogen receptor negative, just by instituting simple, modest lifestyle changes. Five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day, and just like walking 30 minutes a day, six days a week. But what about preventing breast cancer in the first place? If you actually follow the advice of the official dietary guidelines for cancer prevention, does it actually reduce your risk of cancer? If you manage your weight, eat more plant foods, less animal foods, less alcohol, and breast feed if you're a woman. Based on the largest prospective study in diet and cancer in history, it may significantly lower your risk of breast cancer, endometrial cancer, colorectal cancer, lung cancer, kidney cancer, stomach cancer, UADT cancer. You do not want to get cancer in your UADT, believe me. No, that basically means oral cancer. As well as lower risk for liver cancer, esophageal cancer, and all cancers combined. Of all the recommendations, the eat mostly foods of plant origin appeared the most powerful. For example, a study in the UK found that in just one year in Britain, there were 14,902 excess cases of cancer, caused by something they were exposed to 10 years earlier. What was that something that ended up causing thousands of cancers? Deficient intake of fruits and vegetables. If that was instead some chemical spill or something causing 14,000 cancers, people would be up in arms to ban it. But instead, when that killer carcinogen is not eating your fruit and veg, as the Brits would say, hardly gets anyone's attention. What if you throw in smoking too? Researchers created a healthy lifestyle index defined by four things. Number one, exercise. Number two, a dietary shift away from the standard American diet, high in meat, dairy, fat, and sugar, towards a more prudent dietary pattern, for instance, green ale, vegetables, beans, fruits. Number three, avoidance to tobacco. Number four, avoidance of alcohol. Young women scoring higher on those four things may cut their odds of getting breast cancer in half, and older women may cut their odds of breast cancer 80%. We've covered how even light drinking can increase breast cancer risk, but for women who refuse to eliminate alcohol, which is less carcinogenic, red wine or white? Well, some studies, such as the Harvard Women's Health Study, suggest less or even no risk from red wine, and we may have just figured out why. Remember how mushrooms were the vegetable best able to suppress the activity of aromatase, the enzyme used by breast tumors to produce their own estrogen? Well, if you run the same human placenta experiments with fruit, strawberries get the silver, but grapes get the gold. What kind of grapes? Well, those wimpy green grapes used to make white wine didn't work compared to those used for making red. Bottom line, red wine may serve as a nutritional aromatase inhibitor, which may ameliorate the elevated breast cancer risk associated with the alcohol intake in the red wine. But why accept any elevated risk by instead just eating the grapes? And if you do, choose ones with seeds, if you can, as they may work even better.