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Women who ate the most red meat increased
their risk for breast cancer by nearly 25 per cent, a 20-year study of
nearly 89,000 women suggests.
On the flip side, however, replacing a
daily serving of red meat with a combination of fish, legumes, nuts and
poultry appeared to lower the risk of breast cancer by 14 percent, the
researchers said.
“Cutting down processed meat, limiting
intake of red meat, and substituting a combination of poultry, fish,
legumes and nuts as protein sources for red meat during early life seems
beneficial for the prevention of breast cancer,” said lead researcher
Maryam Farvid, who’s with the Harvard School of Public Health’s
Department of Nutrition.
Compared with women who had one serving
of red meat a week, those who ate 1.5 servings a day appeared to have a
22 per cent higher risk of breast cancer.
And each additional daily serving of red meat seemed to increase the risk of breast cancer another 13 per cent, Farvid said.
Eating more poultry, however, lowered the
risk, the researchers noted. Substituting one serving a day of poultry
for one serving a day of red meat reduced the risk of breast cancer by
17 per cent overall and by 24 per cent among postmenopausal women, the
researchers found.
“Decreasing consumption of red meat and
replacing it with other healthy dietary sources of protein, such as
chicken, turkey, fish, beans, lentils, peas and nuts, may have important
public health implications,” she said.
“Reduction of red meat intake in the diet
not only decreases the risk of breast cancer but also decreases the
risk of other chronic diseases, such as coronary heart disease, stroke,
diabetes and other kind of cancers, as well,” Farvid said.
Because this is a so-called observational
study, it doesn’t prove that more red meat increases breast cancer
risk. And the biological reasons behind the apparent red meat-breast
cancer connection isn’t clear, she said.
Red meat has been thought to increase the
risk of breast cancer in different ways, Farvid said. Cancer-causing
“byproducts created during high temperature cooking of red meat” may be
to blame, she said.
Another possibility: hormones used to
increase growth of beef cattle. Also, she noted, “food preservatives
such as nitrate and nitrite in processed meat can also be associated
with elevated risk of breast cancer.”
Source: online report
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