The thrive diet

If 10 or more pounds have piled on your frame since around age 30, scientists suggest that you drop them now. New research sug­gests that women who trim weight from a 30-something frame may be cutting their risk of breast cancer later.

Based on the lifetime weight histories of 218 women with breast can­cer and 436 people with­out, researchers saw that 63 percent of breast-cancer patients had gained weight between age 30 and their current ages. But only 49 per­cent of cancer-free women were weight gainers after age 30, ac­cording to a report pre­sented at the American Society for Clinical On­cology meeting in May.

Further calculations showed that with every 10 pounds gained around age 30, risk of  breast cancer at any age increased by 23 percent. Figure what that does when you gain 20 or even 30 pounds and it’s enough to make you drop that brownie and run to aerobics. There’s been a longstanding link between being over­weight and a higher risk of  breast cancer, “but we saw that age 30 to 39 seems to be a very criti­cal phase,” says study leader Nagi Kumar, Ph.D., R.D., director, department of nutrition, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research In­stitute, Tampa, Florida.

What’s more, the stretch from ages 25 to 34 is everyone’s favorite time to gain weight, ac­cording to the Department of Health and Hu­man Services. “The gain at age 30 is predomi­nantly upper-body fat. Even in pregnancy, weight gain is primarily in the upper body,” says Dr. Kumar.

And that’s the hazard zone. Earlier studies found that women with upper-body fat had a different hormonal makeup than women who held their heft else­where. This left them with high levels of free estrogen, “which has the opportunity to act on the endometrium, ovaries, uterus and breast tissue,” she says. The good news is that “upper-body fat is what’s conducive to weight loss. And if women get back to their ideal weights, then they may prevent this can­cer,” says Dr. Kumar.