October is breast cancer month, so it seems appropriate for a short article on breast cancer. Breast cancer affects one in eight women during their lives. Breast cancer kills more women in the United States than any cancer except lung cancer. No one knows why some women get breast cancer, but there a number of risk factors. Risks that you cannot change include:
• Age - the chance of getting breast cancer rises as a woman gets older
• Genes - there are two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, that greatly increase the risk. Women who have family members with breast or ovarian cancer may wish to be tested.
• Personal factors - beginning periods before age 12 or going through menopause after age 55
Other risks include being overweight, using hormone replacement therapy, taking birth control pills, not having children or having your first child after age 35 or having dense breasts.
Now an additional risk can be added. Apparently, having 3 alcoholic drinks a day increases your risk of cancer similar to one pack of cigarettes a day. It doesn’t matter whether the alcohol is beer, wine, or hard liquor.
Having two drinks a day, increases your risk by 10%; which isn’t anything to be sneezed about either. What this means is you increase your risk by whatever your present baseline currently is: alcohol would increase your chances beyond your baseline.
The item that piques one interest is that it didn’t matter whether the alcohol was alcohol, hard liquor, or wine. Supposedly, the reservatol in red wine has been linked to a decrease in prostate cancer; so how does this square with the above information.
The response is that different red wines have different levels of reservatol, which is a potent antioxidant. Cabernet Savignon’s level of reservatol is higher than any of the other wines. The type of red wine was not looked at in this study.
The moral: live a health lifestyle in all ways. Nutrition, exercise, and moderate alcohol consumption are the keys to longevity.
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