Beef Bad for Boobs

By Andrew Jenkins in Food on Nov 15, 2006 5:03PM

That’s it! We’ve had it with beef. First it went after our friend the heart. Then it was rumored that beef was picking on the kidneys. We put up with it because a nice steak can be pretty tasty every once in a while, but now a study shows that beef has it out for one of our favorite pieces of anatomy: the breast. This is where we draw the line.

The study, published in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine, uses the typical research rhetoric. Apparently, women who ate more than 1.5 servings of red meat per day were nearly two times more likely to develop hormone-related breast cancer, compared to women who ate fewer than three portions of red meat per week. First off, who eats 1.5 servings of red meat per day? Are we talking about a female velociraptor here or what?

Secondly, we’d like to point out the obvious frustrations with the coverage of these studies. One day eggs are good for you, and the next they’re causing massive internal bleeding. Who can keep tabs on all this stuff? The connection between beef and breast cancer is important news, and it really hits home in a city like Chicago where you can’t throw a bottle of A.1. without hitting a steakhouse. But let’s be smart, people, and keep the porterhouse lunches down to one every other month.

Image via firsthealth.org.