Apple a day 'can help minimise breast cancer growth'
Eating apples and other fruit and vegetables on a daily basis can help to prevent the growth of breast cancer, research has revealed.
Dr Rui Hai Liu, associate professor of food and science at Cornell University and member of Cornell's Institute for Comparative and Environmental Toxicology, conducted tests on rats to determine the results.
He found apple extracts given to rats helped to inhibit the size of mammary tumours in the animals, which may interest potential breast cancer insurance customers.
"We not only observed that the treated animals had fewer tumours, but the tumours were smaller, less malignant and grew more slowly compared with the tumours in the untreated rats," Dr Liu says.
The study also found a type of highly-malignant tumour called adenocarcinoma, which is the main cause of death in breast cancer patients, was evident in four out of every five rats.
Only 23 per cent of the animals given high doses of apple extracts developed the aggressive tumour, the report concludes.
Professor Wie Zheng, professor of medicine and director of the Vanderbilt Epidemiology Center, recently identified a genetic 'hotspot' which may make Asian women more susceptible to breast cancer. 
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