For a while there, it looked like drinkers had Science on their side: there were reports saying that wine blocks sunburns and older women should drink every day. But now, Science has seemingly turned its back on alcohol and the ladies who love it: a new study shows that women who consume as little as three drinks a week have an elevated risk of breast cancer.
The study followed more than 100,000 women over 30 years, and is one of the first to assess what happens when women drink a relatively small amount of alcohol over a long period of time. Consuming five to 10 grams of alcohol a day (approximately six glasses of wine a week) raises a woman's risk of breast cancer by 15 percent.
Don't freak out, though—as the Times points out: "While such an increase may sound alarming, experts caution that it translates into only a very small risk for the average woman. A typical 50-year-old woman, for example, has a five-year breast cancer risk of about 3 percent, so a 15-percent increase would increase that risk only to 3.45 percent."
“We’re not recommending that women stop drinking altogether,” said Dr. Wendy Y. Chen, an author of the study. “For an individual woman to make the best decision it would depend on what her own breast cancer risk factors are, as well as her cardiovascular risk factors." Plus, there are still other studies floating around there telling people to drink every day...for your health, of course!
