Women's perspectives on nutrition, health, and breast cancer

Objective: To explore women's beliefs about diet, health, and breast cancer. Design: Individual interviews exploring women's perceptions of their eating habits, health status, and diet, health, and breast cancer beliefs. Setting: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Participants: A culturally diverse convenience sample of women aged 40 to 60 years, including breast cancer survivors (n = 29) and women who had not had breast cancer (n = 32). Analysis: Verbatim interview transcripts were coded and themes developed by sorting and summarizing coded transcript segments. Results: Three perspectives on healthful eating were identified. A "traditional" perspective stressed regular meals of meat, potatoes, and vegetables and made no specific claims about the diet-breast cancer relationship. A "mainstream" perspective stressed increasing vegetables and fruits and decreasing fat intake to improve health, reduce cardiovascular disease risk, and, possibly, reduce breast cancer risk. An "alternative" perspective focused on the role of toxins, carcinogens, and protective factors in food in affecting cancer risk. Conclusions and Implications: Although overall perspectives on healthful eating were not related to participants' breast cancer status, they were related to how participants thought about the relationships between diet and breast cancer. Specific diet-cancer beliefs, degree of conviction about those beliefs, and reasons why foods are believed to be protective or harmful are indicative of overall nutrition perspectives.