Red Meat and Breast Cancer

Red Meat and Breast Cancer
Eating red meat may raise a woman’s risk of a common type of breast cancer, and vitamin supplements will do little if anything to protect her heart.

Women who ate more than 1½ servings of red meat per day were almost twice as likely to develop hormone-related breast cancer as those who ate fewer than three portions per week, one study found.

The other — one of the longest and largest tests of whether supplements of various vitamins can prevent heart problems and strokes in high-risk women — found that the popular pills do no good, although there were hints that women with the highest risk might get some benefit from vitamin C.

Antioxidants like vitamins C and E attach to substances that can damage cells. Scientists have been testing them for preventing such diseases as Alzheimer’s and cancer.

More than 8,000 women were randomly assigned to take vitamin C, E or beta carotene alone or in various combinations for nearly a decade. An additional 5,442 women took folic acid and B vitamin supplements for more than seven years.

Overall, there was minimal evidence of any cardiovascular benefit of any of these antioxidants and people should not start or continue taking them for that purpose. Among the 3,000 women in the study who had no prior heart disease but three or more risk factors for it, those who received vitamin C alone or in combination had a 42 percent lower risk of stroke. Smokers taking C also had a 48 percent lower risk.
Red Meat and Breast Cancer