Ladies, if you are one of those women who loves her glass of wine per day with dinner, a new study clearly indicates that you are raising your risk for various kinds of cancer by indulging.

Unfortunately, all of the health benefits with wine relative to the cardiovascular system, do not apply, when it comes to the risk for developing cancer. A new British study which followed 1.28 million women between the ages of 50-64, to determine if there is a link between their alcohol consumption and development of cancer. The study showed that even one glass ofany type of alcohol per day - including wine- increases a woman’s risk of developing breast, liver, and rectum cancer.

From A Washington Post Article about the study, here is the scary part of the calculations:

“About 5 percent of all cancers diagnosed in women each year in the United States are the result of low to moderate alcohol consumption. Most are breast cancers, with drinking accounting for 11 percent of cases — about 20,000 extra cases each year — the researchers estimated.”

5 percent doesn’t seem like a lot, but I guess if you look at it on an individual basis, if a woman has a family history of cancer already, and adds alcohol on top of that risk, it could be a substantial threat to her health.

I personally, thought I was safe when I read the ages of the women followed (50-64), but you know those tricky statisticians find a way to crunch the numbers to rain on my thirty-something parade: 

“In any group of 1,000 U.S. women up to age 75 who consumed an average of one drink a day, the researchers calculated, there would be 15 extra cancers; two drinks per day would result in 30 extra cancers, and so forth.”

There is a ray of hope, however, which is one of the studies shortcomings:

“The researchers could not, for example, distinguish between women who drank only one or two drinks every day and those who drank seven drinks all at once. Some researchers worried the findings would unnecessarily frighten women and deprive them of the possible health benefits of an occasional drink.”

I’m holding on to hope the hope that all the women that got cancer were the binge drinkers of the bunch. 

It seems though, that since alcohol raises estrogen levels, potentially playing a role in breast cancers, that the risk might be dependent on a third component that has yet to be studied - that being the natural estrogen levels and/or ratio of estrogen to progesterone levels, of the women on a daily basis, prior to throwing alcohol into the mix. Now, this is purely my own *f.a.t. speculation, so don’t go quoting me on that. If they do that study, I’ll be sure to let you know!

Read more about the study at ScienceDaily.com