Include calcium to reduce your risk of breast and colorectal cancers

Posted on :  May 28, 2021
Include calcium to reduce your risk of breast and colorectal cancers

by Ashleigh Feltham
Accredited Practising Dietitian and Accredited Nutritionist

Include calcium in your diet to help reduce your risk of breast and colorectal cancers. Colorectal and breast cancer is not on anyone’s ‘to-do list. The good news is there are ways you can reduce your risk. Diet is one powerful way you can decrease your risk of these two cancers. This blog looks specifically at the power of calcium in reducing your risk of these two cancers.

Caesar Salad

Assessment of available research on calcium and colorectal cancer concluded each 300 mg per day increase in your total calcium intake was associated with an approximately 8% decreased risk of colorectal cancer. Calcium is predicted to play a suppressive role in preventing tumour growth.

Calcium plays a killer role in reducing your risk of both pre-and post-breast cancer by helping to switch on the cells which kill and destroy potential breast cancer cells called Natural Killer Cells. Calcium may also help to switch on a gene that promotes the destruction of breast cancer cells.

Cancer cells secrete lactic acid to help hide in their environment. Calcium can also expose breast cancer cells to the T cells and Natural Killer cells and promote their destruction by reducing the lactic acid environment.

Sources of calcium are well known in the dairy group but have you considered dairy-free alternatives to give your body its needed calcium?

Seafood provides two sources of non-dairy sources of calcium in Safcol Wild Alaskan Pink Salmon 210g as well as three quality sardine choices:

½ cup or 100g  of pink salmon with bones and 60g of sardines is a non-dairy serve of calcium.

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Take home message

If you have moved away from dairy products and looking for other ways to meet your calcium needs or want to increase the variety of foods in your diet which provides you with calcium, Safcol Seafood is a great choice to add.

Not only is Safcol the Seafood Experts tuna lunchbox friendly, but it also tastes delicious, and boasts some amazing health benefits! Tuna contains Omega-3 fats that are an unsaturated form of fat called polyunsaturated. These types of fats cannot be made by the body, so we need to include them as part of our diet to stay healthy. For good health, you need omega-3 fats in our diet, particularly the type which comes from fish and seafood because it contains two acids known as docosahexaenoic acid or DHA and eicosapentaenoic acid or EPA. These two acids are linked to better health for your body particularly for your brain and heart.

References:

  1. Yang W, Liu L, Masugi Y, Qian ZR, Nishihara R, Keum N, et al. Calcium intake and risk of colorectal cancer according to expression status of calcium-sensing receptor (CASR). Gut. 2018;67(8):1475-83.
  2. Schwarz EC, Qu B, Hoth M. Calcium, cancer and killing: the role of calcium in killing cancer cells by cytotoxic T lymphocytes and natural killer cells. Biochim Biophys Acta. 2013 Jul;1833(7):1603-11. doi: 10.1016/j.bbamcr.2012.11.016. Epub 2012 Dec 3. PMID: 23220009.
  3. Choi, S. Y., Collins, C. C., Gout, P. W., & Wang, Y. (2013). Cancer-generated lactic acid: a regulatory, immunosuppressive metabolite?. The Journal of pathology, 230(4), 350–355. https://doi.org/10.1002/path.4218
  4. Giorgi, C., Bonora, M., Sorrentino, G., Missiroli, S., Poletti, F., Suski, J. M., Galindo Ramirez, F., Rizzuto, R., Di Virgilio, F., Zito, E., Pandolfi, P. P., Wieckowski, M. R., Mammano, F., Del Sal, G., & Pinton, P. (2015). p53 at the endoplasmic reticulum regulates apoptosis in a Ca2+-dependent manner. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 112(6), 1779–1784. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1410723112