Fiber Kicks Cancer's Butt in New Studies | Educational Video | Biolayne

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]If you want to kick cancer's ass, you want fiber. Two new studies looking at dietary fiber and cancer that have some interesting results. Now, the first one is a scoping review of studies on breast cancer. Now, scoping review is not an individual study itself, but it's looking at a bunch of different studies on a topic. And they were attempting to identify what dietary components are associated with better or worse breast cancer survival or breast cancer reoccurrence. Now, most dietary components, it was a big gobbledygook.

[00:00:31]Like there was some studies for, some studies against, there wasn't really any consistent signal. But the one thing that had a clear consistent signal for surviving breast cancer and limiting reoccurrence was dietary fiber intake and consuming fruits and vegetables. So, this reduced the risk of cancer occurrence and increased your odds of survival. And again, this is not surprising based on what we know about fruits and vegetables and fiber intake because it reduces the risk of developing certain cancers, which makes sense that we reduce the risk of reoccurrence of certain cancers, and it increases survival probability, which we've also seen with the risk of cancer mortality. And I want to point out, they did attempt to control for various confounding variables by statistically controlling for things like BMI because obesity is a risk factor for breast cancer. They controlled for lifestyle, smoking, hypertension, these sorts of confounding variables. And they found literally across every different control they used, the dietary fiber still reduced the risk of death from breast cancer and reduced the risk of reoccurrence. Another study also looked at dietary fiber intake and the risk of cancer cachexia. So, this was a study where they went in and looked at people who were currently undergoing cancer treatment. And they found that people who consume more dietary fiber had a lower risk of cancer cachexia. And they said that they thought that maybe this was modulated by reduced inflammation.

[00:01:55]That some of these inflammatory markers were increasing the risk of cancer cachexia. And for those who aren't familiar, cancer cachexia is wasting from cancer or cancer treatment where cancer cells are relatively greedy and they tend to suck up more nutrients than non-cancer cells. And so, muscle wasting in particular is a real concern during cancer treatment. Now, I will say I think consuming fiber is a good thing for all the reasons we've talked about with reducing the risk of cancer, reoccurrence of cancer, and improving uh cancer mortality. But, I think this study may be a bit of reverse causality, which is people undergoing cancer treatment are typically having a hard time eating. And I think what's happening here is that people who feel better, who are healthier overall, are able to eat more food and therefore consume more dietary fiber. A lot of people, obviously from cancer treatment, get nauseous. They have trouble eating.

[00:02:51]And I don't want to make people think that like, "Hey, you need to eat fruits, vegetables." These sorts of If you're undergoing cancer treatment and you just can't tolerate those, the most important thing, in my opinion, if you are undergoing cancer treatment and you're trying to prevent wasting, you want to get enough protein and enough calories.

[00:03:09]And however you do that is the most important thing. If you can get enough dietary fiber in, then absolutely that's a benefit as well. But, focus on protein and calories. And I think this study, even though I'm a big fan of fiber, I think it's probably an effect of reverse causality that healthier people who tend to survive and are resistant to death under these sorts of treatment conditions and resistant to wasting, they tend to have better appetite because they're healthier and they just consume more of everything overall. So, if you want to live longer, you want to be more resistant to cancer, less likely to have cancer reoccurrence, and avoid dying from cancer, eat your fiber.