A large US study has suggested that for girls and young women, consumption of a lot of fiber could pay off years later with decreased risk of suffering from breast cancer.

Researchers analyzed data on over 44,000 women participants in a long-term study. They discovered that the one who consumed the most fiber during high school and in the beginning of adulthood were nearly 20% less likely to develop breast cancer by middle age as compared to the ones who ate the least fiber while young.

The authors noted in the journal Pediatrics that there is a reason to trust that dietary fiber may affect developing breasts in ways that could have an effect on long-term cancer risk, however, so far, nobody has ever followed-up over that long time span.

Lead author Maryam Farvid of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston said, “Most of the studies that evaluated association between dietary fiber consumption in midlife or later, have not noted any significant association. Therefore, it seems high-fiber diet in early life would be important in terms of breast cancer prevention”.

Farvid said that high fiber foods includes many other nutrients, which could have played a role, but most common breast cancer risk factors and the overall quality of diet of women were considered. Yet the link with fiber is there.

For the study, researchers used data from the Nurses’ Health Study II, including over 90,000 premenopausal women who filled up a dietary questionnaire in 1991, when they belonged to the age group 27 to 44 years. Post years later, 44,263 of the participants also filled up a questionnaire regarding their diets when they used to be in high school.

By 2011, there were 1,118 cases of invasive breast cancer in women with high school dietary data.