A twelve-year study of over 90,000 women has found that daily consumption of red meat may significantly increase a woman’s risk of certain breast cancers, even before menopause. Women who ate more than one and a half 100-gram servings of red meat per day had nearly twice the risk of developing hormone-sensitive breast cancer as those who ate three or fewer servings per week. The researchers, from Harvard Medical School, speculate that the cause may be chemicals added during meat processing or growth hormones given to cattle.
Other doctors counter that because the risk of pre-menopausal breast cancer is low to begin with, compared with that post-menopause, even the highest rates of meat consumption mean a relatively small increase in cancer risk.
A separate study, by scientists at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute in California, has shown that, at least for mice, a mother’s diet can change the behavior of a specific gene for at least two subsequent generations. Although the study may explain some reported effects of grandparents’ diets on grandchildren, the researchers caution that one shouldn’t extrapolate the findings from mice to humans at this point.