Cheese raises breast cancer risk!! (Not really)

This alarming headline clogged my facebook feed this week. Cheese raise your breast cancer risk, but yogurt may be protective. This is based off a study by Susan McCann, PhD and her team and published in Current Developments in Nutrition and a good recap of the study can be found here.

The breast cancer survivor in me's original reaction "What! No, I love cheese. How am I going to give up cheese? Is life worth living without cheese" Yes, it got real dramatic, real quick.

Then the science driven nutrition professional dove in. In this study Dr. McCann and her team took a group of women who had breast cancer and a group of woman who had not had breast cancer and gave them a Food Frequency Questionnaire. A food frequency questionnaire is exactly what it is sounds like, a document where people are asked how often they consumed an item in the past month.

A question might look something like this:
 "In the past month, how often have you consumed 4 oz (1/2 cup) of yogurt?
☑ Never ☑ 1-2 times per month ☑1-2 times per week ☑ Daily

The questions are likely more specific, but you can get the idea.

The main results touted for the study are that woman who consumed a "high" amount of yogurt had a 39% lower risk of developing breast cancer and those who had "higher" intake of cheddar and cream cheese had a 53% high risk of developing breast cancer.

Well, this highlights the issue with nutrition studies. People eat all kinds of food and it's very hard to tease out exactly what is affecting people's diet. If people were only eating yogurt or cheese than it would be easier to say where the correlation lies.

People who eat yogurt, also tend to be people who eat more fruit and vegetables. It is known that high fruit and vegetable consumption lowers an overall risk for cancer. While the researches did correct their results for confounders such as BMI, overall fruit and vegetable intake wasn't included.

Bottom line, no new news. Continue to eat a balanced diet and low fat dairy products is still part of that diet. Consume high fat dairy products (like cheddar cheese and cream cheese) less frequently (not daily) and there is further research needs to be done on the role of dairy and breast cancer.