Not too much meat, especially processed, thank you.

[Bill Sikes]

An interesting short article in this morning's "Daily Telegraph".



"Red meat 'doubles' breast cancer risk

Women who eat red meat more than once a day double the risk of getting the most common form of breast cancer, doctors said yesterday.

Women who ate the most meat, especially in processed forms such as hamburgers and sausages, were at the greatest risk of hormonesensitive breast cancers.

[...]



Dr Eunyoung Cho, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who led the study, said there were a number of reasons why red meat triggered this type of breast cancer.

They included the treatment of American beef cattle with hormones to speed up growth, carcinogens created when meat was cooked at high temperatures and the presence of a certain form of iron in meat.

More than 90,600 premenopausal American nurses aged 26 to 46 filled in questionnaires about their diets between 1991 and 1999, according to Archives of Internal Medicine, which published the research.

Twelve years after the start of the study researchers identified 1,021 cases of breast cancer in the group. Women who ate more than one and one-half servings of red meat per day — defined as being the main part of a dish — were 97 per cent more likely to have a HR+ breast cancer than those who ate three or fewer servings per week.

The increased risk for those who said they had between three and five servings per week was 42 per cent.

Those who had meat in processed form such as sausages, salami or mortadella more than three times a week were 2.3 times more likely to get HR+ cancers than those who ate them less than once a month.

Women who ate hamburgers between one and three times per week were 71 per cent more likely than those who did so less than once per month.

There was little difference in the risk from HR+ breast cancer between those who ate unprocessed beef, pork or lamb between one and three times per week and those who did so less than once per month."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... meat14.xml

[tedhutchinson]

Bill Sikes;458668 wrote: An interesting short article in this morning's "Daily Telegraph".http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... meat14.xml


Medpage Today review of the same research paper UK readers need to be reminded that The NURSES HEALTH Study was done in AMERICAN states on nurses eating AMERICAN BEEF probably in AMERICAN FAST food joints.

I doubt very much if it applies to British women eating british lamb/beef in their own homes.

British farmers do not use the hormone growth additives that are used in the USA so it is unlikely that any hormomal component in British meat would have the same exogenous hormone residues as US beef.

Similarly the feedlot system used to produce cheap US beef isn't used in the UK. Beef animals fed on corn are likely to have more carcinogenic heterocyclic amines than grass fed animals. The same applies to bread baked with non organic corn. If you keep growing corn on the same ground it isn't as good as organically produced corn and produces a higher ratio of carcinogenic heterocyclic amines when cooked at high temperature. While I haven't time to find the evidence to back up this claim at the moment it's more than likely. I'd also pose the question if American nurses are eating their burgers in fast food establishments they are probably also eating fast food trans fats and these also double the breast cancer risk. So maybe the risk comes from the extra trans fats in the fries. Though it's also possible that US beef has more trans than UK grass fed beef.

Anyone particularly worried about reducing the risk of breast cancer should attend to other risk factors first. Note that the participants who ate more red meat were also more likely to be current smokers, to have three or more children, and to have a higher body mass index and caloric intake but less likely to have a history of benign breast disease.

the things I've made bold are risk factors that you can do something about. By giving up smoking NOW losing weight, eating/drinking less. I would also add that increasing your VITAMIN D status either by taking an effective amount of Cholecalciferol Vitamin d3 or getting a regular modest direct exposure to sunshine throughout the year. Regular exercise also lowers the BC risk.

[Bill Sikes]

tedhutchinson;458898 wrote: Medpage Today review of the same research paper UK readers need to be reminded that The NURSES HEALTH Study was done in AMERICAN states on nurses eating AMERICAN BEEF probably in AMERICAN FAST chains.

I doubt very much if it applies to British women eating british lamb/beef in their own homes.


Sorry, I should perhaps have emphasised that.



tedhutchinson;458898 wrote: British farmers do not use the same hormone growth additives that are used in the USA so it is unlikely that any hormomal component in British meat would have the same impact on exogenous hormone residues as US beef.


It is in fact prohibited to do so (throughout the "EU"). Do you know what the

situation is in the rest of the world (Canada==USA), e.g. South America?

The issues with "recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbGH)" seem "current", too!