Breast Awareness, Part 2

I was — perhaps rightfully — taken to task by a reader (see comment on the entry below) for downplaying the risks of wine by posing questions about whether the most recent study to find a link between breast cancer and alcohol consumption also controlled for things such as smoking, high-fat diets, misreporting, etc. Mr. Johnson’s comment was well articulated and I took it to heart.

I also became curious about what the nation’s medical news experts are saying. So I looked at articles by a few of the big ones, including a blog by Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s CNN health team. (If you click on the link, scroll down to the October 1 entry.) And it turns out even the widely-revered Dr. Gupta and his associates were criticized for their handling of the Kaiser Permanente study which found red wine is as prone to enhance breast tumors as beer or hard liquor.

Several readers — including a few medical professionals — wrote to CNN hawking a paper from 2005 that was authored by a team of Melbourne-based researchers and claimed high levels of folate (a B vitamin necessary for the production of red blood cells and the synthesis of DNA) may mitigate the effects of alcohol when it comes to breast cancer. It’s worth noting, however, that at least one of the people responding to Gupta was a doctor (of what kind, I cannot say) with the American Roots Winery in Napa Valley.

For the record, I’m not recommending that women swallow handfuls of B-complex capsules before slugging down liters of wine. . . .I’m only putting out all the information I can find so careful readers and cautious drinkers can make informed choices of their own.