 What new developments are there in the battle against breast cancer? Well, most breast tumors are estrogen receptor positive, meaning that they respond to estrogen. Estrogen makes them grow. The problem for tumors in post-menopausal women is that there isn't much estrogen around, unless of course you take it in a drug like Primerin, made from pregnant mare's urine, found not to affect the quality of women's lives, the quantity, increasing the risk of strokes, heart attacks, blood clots, and breast cancer. Thankfully, millions of women stopped taking it in 2002, and we saw a nice dip in breast cancer rates, but unfortunately those rates have since stagnated. Hundreds of thousands of American women continue to get this dreaded diagnosis every year, so what's next? Well, with no estrogen around, many breast tumors devise a nefarious plan. They'll just make their own. 70% of breast cancer cells synthesize estrogen themselves using an enzyme called aromatase, which converts testosterone to estrogen, blue to pink. And so drug companies have produced a number of aromatase inhibitor drugs that are used as chemotherapy agents. Of course, by the time you're on chemo it can be too late, so researchers started screening hundreds of natural dietary components in hopes of finding something that targets this enzyme. Now to do this, you need a lot of human tissue. Where are you going to get it from? To study skin, for example, researchers use discarded human foreskins. They're just being thrown away, mind as well use them. Where are you going to get discarded female tissue, though? Placentus, human placentus. So they got a bunch of women to donate their placentus after giving birth to further this critical line of research. And after years of searching they found 7 vegetables with significant anti-aromatase activity, and here they are. 7 different vegetables dropping aromatase activity about 20% except for this one. That's like a 60-65% inhibition. Which one was it? Was it the bell pepper, broccoli, carrots, celery, green onions, mushrooms, or spinach? Well, it wasn't green onions, not celery, not carrots, not peppers, nor broccoli, which would have been my guess, not spinach, but X marks the spot, mushroom.