After my last blog post, “The Good in Caffeine”, I got a suggestion from a fellow classmate to discuss “The Bad” in caffeine. And I decided to do just that.
In my last blog post on caffeine, I discussed study that was conducted that found that caffeine can improve your memory. Now while this is very interesting and beneficial, there are many other parts to caffeine that are harmful, and almost not worth some of the benefits you get from it.
After finding multiple articles on caffeine being bad for you in terms of blood pressure and things of that nature, there was one study I found striking to me. According to this study, caffeine can increase the risk of breast cancer.
Breast cancer is cancer that forms in the cells of the breast, most commonly found in women. In 2015 alone, it is estimated that over 200,000 new cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed. There are no known causes for breast cancer, besides just a damage to a cell’s DNA.
Since breast cancer is most commonly found in women, this study followed a total of 38,432 women over a ten year span. All of the women followed were of age 45 or older when the study began and were asked to record how much caffeine they consumed on a regular basis. The results from this study were that over the span of the ten years, about 1,200 women ended up with breast cancer. The study stated that “drinking more than four cups of coffee a day increased the risk of the cancer by 68%”.
Not only this, but it increased the chance of growing tumors larger than two centimeters by 79%. This piece of information is extremely important in regards to breast cancer because breast cancer is a malignant tumor, and can continue to grow in size to about five centimeters in size. These tumors can grow out of control, very quickly, and spread to other parts of the body, especially those closest to the breast area. Knowing the size of the tumor is very important because it helps determine what stage of the cancer you are in. The higher the stage (the larger the tumor size), the more serious the cancer is.
What I want to make sure that I cover here is that these findings do not say that caffeine causes breast cancer. What these findings simply say is that there is a chance that caffeine consumption may affect the progression of breast cancer. There is however, a correlation between consuming a lot of caffeine and developing breast cancer. Like we always say in class, correlation does not equal causation!
What I would take away from this research and my last research done on caffeine increasing memory is that you can consume, but just be careful how much you do. Obviously, caffeine has its benefits and downfalls, but if you are smart about how much you consume, you should be okay!