Ellington

Young women, beware of the emerging evidence that eating red meat can increase your risk of breast cancer. Per a New York Times editorial today:

The bad news about red meat emerged from a very large and authoritative study of premenopausal nurses by researchers at Harvard medical institutions, published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The researchers followed more than 90,000 women ages 26 to 46 for a dozen years to determine if there was a relationship between the amount of red meat they ate and the development of breast cancer.

For breast cancer as a whole, there was not. But for breast cancers whose growth is stimulated by the level of hormones circulating in the body, there was. Women who ate more than one and a half servings of beef, lamb or pork per day had almost double the risk of developing such cancers when compared with women who ate three or fewer servings per week. While previous studies have been inconclusive, this was the first to focus on younger women and to analyze their risk by type of tumor.