 Unfortunately, as the traditional diets of East Asia westernize, their breast cancer rates have risen, which some have linked to a quadrupling of animal product consumption. This is the breast cancer rate of Japanese women in Japan. If they emigrate to the United States, within 10 years they're up to here, and if they hang around long enough, here's the risk of resident Japanese Americans living in the United States. Note, though, that's still somewhat lower than the U.S. national average. This may be because some of the dietary habits may carry with them, such as soy consumption, green tea, maybe eating more mushrooms, but maybe partly it's the seaweed. We've known for over a decade that in vitro, in a petri dish, broth is effective at clearing cancer cells. Here's three different types of human breast cancer, measuring cancer cell death. Here's what a widely used chemotherapy drug can do, and here's seaweed, worked even better, and, unlike the chemo, didn't harm normal, non-cancerous breast cells. But what about outside of the test tube in people? Well, a population study comparing women with breast cancer to women without found that consuming a single sheet of nori a day may cut a woman's odds of breast cancer in half. We think it's because seaweed favorably alters estrogen metabolism, likely due to a modulation of the woman's gut bacteria. It appears that the more seaweed you eat, the less estrogen you have in your system, which may lower breast cancer risk. This may be because of all the fiber and sea vegetables, or it may block the enzymes that undermines our body's attempt to flush out excess hormones or even somehow interfere with estrogen binding to estrogen receptors. Either way, to effectively lower one's estrogen levels, Asian women may be able to get away with maybe one sheet of nori a day, but American women are so much bigger that may take closer to two. There's lots of yummy seaweed snacks out there to make it a tasty experience, just to try to get some low-fat, low-sodium ones. Wacame, the seaweed used fresh in seaweed salads, unfortunately did not appear to reduce breast cancer risk, though it has been found to rather dramatically lower blood pressure and hypertensives. Just two teaspoons of seaweed salad a day for a month dropped their blood pressure 14 points, and after two months was associated with up to a 2-inch skinnier waistline. As I've mentioned before, though, I recommend avoiding hijiki, which tends to have too much arsenic and kelp, which tends to have too much iodine. In fact, too much seaweed of any type may actually increase one's risk of thyroid cancer because of the amount of iodine you'd be taking in, but there does not appear to be increased risk at the levels of consumption I'm talking about, like, you know, a sheet of nori a day. And a study of seaweed eaters in California actually found decreased risk, but again, we're talking, you know, kind of modest levels of intake. You know, I've frequently talked about the benefits of dietary diversity, eating different families of fruits and vegetables, eating different parts of individual plants, like, you know, beets and beet greens. If we just stick to land plants, though, we're missing out on all the plants from the other 70% of planet Earth. Sea vegetables have phytonutrients found nowhere else, types of fiber and unique carotenoids and polysaccharides and various polyphenol defense compounds, each of which may have anti-cancer properties. So I encourage everyone to try experimenting with sea vegetables until you find one you like, even if that just means sprinkling some powdered dulse on your food.