> Dietary risk factors (diet high in red meat, low in fruits, high in sodium and low in milk, etc), alcohol consumption and tobacco use are the main risk factors underlying early-onset cancers.
Are women under 50 who are now getting breast cancer really getting it because women are eating more red meat now than 1990? I don't buy it.
Breast cancer is generally thought to be caused by excessively high estrogen levels. There are other environmental and dietary factors that contribute to increasing estrogen levels..eating a burger is not one of them.
> Breast cancer is generally thought to be caused by excessively high estrogen levels.
If by "excessively high", you mean the normal range for pre-menopausal adult women, then yes. Otherwise, citation needed. Afaik, breast cancer is thought to be caused primarily by having breast tissue, and secondarily by the response of breast tissue to normal levels of estrogen. (People with higher estrogen levels than average tend to have more breast tissue, but that's more because they tend to have breasts than because of any impact estrogen has on the rest of the body – unlike people with lower estrogen levels than average, who tend to be men.)
And yes, estrogen blockers / SERMs are a good treatment for some breast cancers, but they don't eliminate breast cancer risk. Even cis men who have relatively low estrogen levels and hardly any breast tissue can get breast cancer.
This article buries the lede, but boy is that lede fascinating.
> Estrogen receptors are known to bind to certain regions of the genome when a cell is stimulated by estrogen. The researchers found that these estrogen-binding sites were frequently next to the zones where the early DNA breaks took place.
Estrogens are important for other things, so (what's effectively) menopause would be a rather impractical preventative measure for most people – but knowledge is still power. I'll have to read the paper sometime.
> Data from the late 2000s showed that the top 10 percent of American drinkers (approximately 24 million people) consumed an average of 74 alcoholic drinks a week, which means those with the most severe form of AUD purchase over half the alcohol bought in the country.
Like most of nutrition "science" the whole thing is a bad joke. There has never been a single high-quality study which showed a significant causative relationship between red meat consumption and worse health outcomes. All of the studies that I've seen have been observational, relied largely on unreliable patient-reported data, had small effect sizes, and failed to control for key confounding variables such as the healthy subject effect.
And what even is "red meat"? Are we talking about corned beef? Bacon? Venison? Grass-fed Argentinian beef? It's such a broad category as to be scientifically meaningless.
I think it's correlation -- people who eat a lot of red meat tend to eat a lot in general -- so it's just a proxy for obesity. That's the usual problem with studies of high protein diets, anyway.
Red meat studies, based on my googling skills a few years back, do not control for the cut of meat or method of preparation, so they are close to useless
Are women under 50 who are now getting breast cancer really getting it because women are eating more red meat now than 1990? I don't buy it.
Breast cancer is generally thought to be caused by excessively high estrogen levels. There are other environmental and dietary factors that contribute to increasing estrogen levels..eating a burger is not one of them.