Dieting Dangerously?

Nov. 13, 2006 — -- To some breast cancer patients, and to anyone else who worries about their health, dinner can sometimes seem dangerous.

"What's safe to put on the table today?" wonders Beth C., currently under treatment for early stage breast cancer.

"It's 'Russian Roulette' between the pesticides on vegetables, the hormones in meat, the junk in farmed fish, the pollutants in the water and air," Beth says.

"Going to the grocery store these days puts me in a panic."

Today's findings from the Nurses Health Study seem to only add to that panic. This new research suggests that red meat intake in pre-menopausal women seems to increase the risk of developing hormone-receptor positive (or ER+) breast cancer.

But don't run away from your grill just yet -- what the study actually found is a bit less scary. In reality, out of this large sample of women, those with ER+ breast cancer are more likely to eat red meat on a regular basis.

The large-scale Nurses Health Study lets scientists think about how diet early in life can impact risk of disease later in life. The study isn't supposed to give any definitive answers, but it helps scientists pick up on trends in diet and disease that they might not otherwise notice.

Over 90,000 pre-menopausal nurses filled out several questionnaires about their diets and the foods they ate. Researchers followed the nurses for 12 years. Then they tracked who got breast cancer and who didn't. They found that the more red meat a pre-menopausal woman ate, the more likely it was that this woman also had ER+ breast cancer.

While scientists can suggest a connection between red meat and breast cancer, they can't exactly say that eating red meat ups your chances of ER+ breast cancer. The study wasn't specifically designed to settle this big red meaty question.

For example, the red meat eaters in this study differed from the non-red meat eaters in potentially important ways: red meat eaters were more likely to be current smokers, weigh more and consume more calories. Those differences make any conclusions a bit shaky.