Breast Cancer Risk Dramatically Increased By Glass Of Milk A Day: Study
For millennia, cow’s milk has been a dietary staple for many. Throughout modern advertising history, marketing efforts have pointed excitedly at the myriad benefits of drinking milk, deploying stars like Beyonce, Harrison Ford and even Kermit the Frog to convince us all that we aren’t getting enough of it.
But new evidence seems to suggest quite the opposite: daily consumption of dairy milk has been linked with a greater risk of breast cancer.
A new study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, has found “fairly strong evidence” that drinking even one cup of dairy milk a day is linked with a sharp increase in a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer — in some cases, by up to 80 per cent.
“Consuming as little as one-quarter to one-third of a cup of dairy milk per day was associated with an increased risk of breast cancer of 30 per cent,” Dr. Gary E. Fraser, the first author of the research paper, said in a news release.
“By drinking up to one cup per day, the associated risk went up to 50 per cent, and for those drinking two to three cups per day, the risk increased further to 70 percent to 80 per cent.”
Over the course of nearly eight years, the observational study tracked the dietary intake of some 53,000 North American women, all of whom were aged 30 or older and all of whom were initially cancer-free.
By the end of the study period, 1,057 breast cancer diagnoses had cropped up.
The study’s authors believe this might be a result of the sex hormone content of the milk, since about 75 per cent of the dairy herd is pregnant. Intake of dairy and other animal proteins has also been previously associated with higher blood levels of growth factor-1(IGF-1), which has been linked with certain cancers.
Researchers did not seem to find an association between soy milk and an increased risk of breast cancer.
“However, dairy foods, especially milk, were associated with increased risk, and the data predicted a marked reduction in...
