Be Aware If You Have Breasts

A couple months ago, I posted a piece about the health benefits of wine — including the information that red wine had been found to have both cancer-enhancing and cancer-preventive effects on breast tumors in women. My hope — quixotic, perhaps — was that it was a wash: the antioxidants in wine would cancel out any damage done by the alcohol.

Well, a cautionary story published this week in the Scotsman and by the Associated Press says that’s just not true. According to a study conducted by the European Institute of Oncology, wine drinkers are just as likely as drinkers of beer and other spirits to be diagnosed with breast cancer. Of more than 70,000 women surveyed during health examinations over a period of 7 years , those who reported drinking wine developed the disease at roughly the same rate as those who said they drank beer or hard liquor. But “light” drinkers (defined as less than one glass per day) and non-drinkers in the study suffered from breast cancer at a much lower rate.

I think this is worth knowing. But note a couple things: first, the study appears to have relied on self-reporting — a notoriously inaccurate way to collect data. (It sounds a lot better to say to one’s doctor, “I have a couple glasses of wine with dinner” than “I knock back three or four rum and Cokes every night.”) Also, I can find no evidence that the wine drinkers in the study were exclusive about what they consumed; did a few of them, maybe, follow those couple of glasses with the rum? Finally, there are other factors to consider, such as the fact that drinkers tend to eat rich food and this was Italy, after all, where smoking is still de rigeur.

But enough rationalizing. It appears to be sadly, horribly true that alcohol promotes estrogen production and estrogen feeds breast tumors. Which is a problem for women prone to cancer — or, for that matter, anyone with a set of breasts. So ladies, if you’re going to drink wine, be careful. Follow a low-fat diet, exercise, try not to eat hormone-laden meat, avoid taking the birth control pill, and DON’T SMOKE. And if you have risk factors beyond your control — such as a genetic predisposition — you might want to limit yourself to one glass a day.

If you must do this, however, please, make it a good one.