We should not be overly surprised if we come to know some diseases that comes along and any disadvantages of obesity, which is breaking new grounds almost everyday; but we will need to react when we learn that obesity can do something for our benefit. It is a well-known fact that obesity is a potential risk factor for breast cancer after menopause, but many do not know that it also appears to help protect women from developing the disease earlier in life. Well, this could sound a little bit difficult to believe that obesity could have any advantage, but according to the study conducted on breast cancer and obesity, it has been found that obese young women are less prone to breast cancer.

A recent study has shown that overweight has been linked to menstrual cycle irregularities and other medical conditions that limit ovulation, which means lower circulating levels of the breast-cancer-promoting hormones estradiol and progesterone. It can clearly be seen that obesity helps to protect against breast cancer prior to menopause, by reducing circulating levels of these sex hormones. But it is not so after the menopause, and obesity has all its dangers after that stage!

The study undertaken for this fact was conducted on a large-scale and for a long-period of time: researchers from the Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital studied more than 113,000 pre-menopausal female nurses participating in an ongoing health study. These participating nurses were followed from 1989 to 2003, during which around 1,398 cases of invasive breast cancer were diagnosed. However, women who were obese at the time of diagnosis, showed 19% lower breast cancer risk than normal-weight women, which is of course considerable to back the study.

It is clear that we could be able to go to the root of this cause once more research is done on this subject, but it is obvious that the results from this study clearly show that there is something better in obesity.