In Consultation with Professor Michelle Harvie

Professor Michelle Harvie is an award-winning research dietitian working at the Prevent Breast Cancer Research Unit.

She’s been a leader in her field for 24 years and has had her findings published in many major scientific journals. Indeed, in research funded by Prevent Breast Cancer, Michelle was one of the first to demonstrate that weight loss can reduce risk of breast cancer.

We caught up with her to find out what she gets up to day to day and how it’s helping in our mission to break the cycle of breast cancer.

What type of research do you carry out at Prevent Breast Cancer Research Unit?

Right now, I’m investigating how we can reduce risk in high-risk women in a number of ways.

We have shown a dietitian call centre helps women across three centres to follow a healthy diet and become more active, and therefore lose weight, which we know can significantly reduce a woman’s chances of developing the disease. We need to do more work across a range of centres to show this service can be rolled out to the NHS.

One thing we always see is that younger women, especially young mothers, don’t manage to follow the diet so well and have the least weight loss and therefore risk reductions. I am supervising a PhD student who is developing a family based intervention which aims to help women and their families follow the diet and physical activity recommendations.

Once weight is gained it’s really hard to lose. The key is to prevent weight increasing in the first place . We know the 2 day (5:2) diet can help women to lose weight. We are now testing if a 6:1 diet (1 low calorie  day / week) can help young women follow a healthy diet and be active and not gain weight

We are also interested in how some people can be helped by more intensive weight loss interventions, including low calorie diet total diet replacement programmes and weight loss drugs including Wegovy, and Mounjaro.

What interests you so much?

The more you learn about breast cancer the more you realise we don’t know. Significant amounts of breast cancer, especially harder to treat breast cancers are linked to body weight, diet and health behaviours including drinking alcohol, being sedentary and smoking, so it’s an extremely important area of research.

What’s your favourite part of the job?

Increasing our knowledge and how we can help reduce risk and rates of breast cancer. Its great helping people on a personal level when they are part of our studies. Also sharing research finding with the wider scientific community and public.

What are your career highlights?

Developing The 2-Day Diet with Professor Tony Howell was a major highlight. It was a huge breakthrough both for us and the countless successful dieters who have adopted it and now live healthier, lower-risk lifestyles. Also being awarded an honorary professorship at the University of Manchester in August 2024

If you weren’t in this profession, what would you be doing?

Something outdoors and related to nature. Nature is so important to our health and well-being.

What would be your main message to women – and men – to help them reduce their risk of getting breast cancer?

Watch out for ‘weight creep’ as you get older. Weight gain significantly increases our risk of breast cancer – and 12 other cancers, as well as other common diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and dementia.

We also need to provide healthy home food environments which promote healthy habits in our children and adolescents. We can start accumulating breast cancer risk in childhood and adolescence. This needs to be a normal part of home life to promote general health and well -being and fitness. We definitely don’t want to worry children about risk of disease.