Dr. Joe Schwarcz, McGill University

Drinking milk may raise your risk of breast cancer, says Montreal science writer Dr. Joe Schwarcz, pointing to a recent study from California’s Loma Linda University. While the evidence thus far on the breast cancer link has been conflicting, Loma Linda’s study  “does ring some alarm bells,” Schwarcz says, in a column published today in the Montreal Gazette.

Schwarcz is Director of the Office for Science & Society at McGill University.

Why might this study be more accurate than other studies that look at the progression of disease in a large group of people?  He explains: The Loma Linda study followed more than 50,000 women, all Seventh Day Adventists, who “eat a mostly plant-based diet, shun junk food and drink no alcohol. Obesity is virtually unknown. Since both alcohol consumption and obesity are associated with breast cancer, it is possible that elimination of these allows the milk connection to be revealed, ”  Schwarcz says.  

Read Schwarcz’s full column here. 

Read more on the mechanisms behind milk’s possible connection with certain kinds of cancer here.  As I reported in that piece, back in 2006, Dr. Walter Willett, for years chair of the Department of Nutrition, Harvard’s School of Public Health, told a McGill symposium that  “the evidence that milk consumption is related to prostate cancer risk is actually very strong, specifically for aggressive and fatal prostate cancers.”  German dermatologist Dr. Bodo Melnick and the late Canadian dermatologist Dr. William Danby have also researched and written about milk’s harmful effects for a long while.

Milk drives the uncontrolled cell growth that underlies cancer, says Melnick. Read the interview with him here.