Photo: Travis Rathbone
This month, you'll find the humble mushroom all dressed up in pink containers at your local supermarket, in recognition of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The reason? Recent research shows that a diet that includes plenty of mushrooms
Photo: Travis Rathbone
This month, you'll find the humble mushroom all dressed up in pink containers at your local supermarket, in recognition of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The reason? Recent research shows that a diet that includes plenty of mushrooms can help slow down the development of certain cancers, such as breast cancer. Mushrooms are one of the very few non-meat sources of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which has been shown to block aromatase, a protein necessary for producing estrogen in women. Since about 70 percent of breast cancers are hormone-dependent, the ability to block aromatase is a powerful tool in controlling or even stopping cancer. CLA is also found in dairy products, beef, and lamb.
So how many mushrooms do you need to eat to reap the benefits? Dr. Shiuan Chen, director of tumor cell biology at City of Hope, a biomedical research hospital in Los Angeles, is currently conducting human clinical trials designed to answer that very question. Early results indicate that you may need to eat about half a pound a day to get the most effective levels of CLA, but researchers won't know for sure until the trials are complete at the end of this year. In the meantime, you can't go wrong by adding more mushrooms to your diet. Go to bonappetit.com/go/mushrooms for a collection of some of our favorite mushroom recipes of the past few years.