"Gimme a Double Soybean Curd Burger with Pickles, and a Towel to Cry In, Please"

As the delightful wag James Taranto over at OpinionJournal.com would say, "What would we find without studies?"

"Breast Cancer Risk Linked To Red Meat, Study Finds"

Younger women who regularly eat red meat appear to face an increased risk for a common form of breast cancer, according to a large, well-known Harvard study of women's health.

Now I ask you, haven't the steakhouses of America been punished enough? First they restrict smoking in the joints, now we get this report from Mount Olympus (excuse me, from the Channing Laboratory, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Departments of Nutrition and Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention) stating that premenopausal nurses ages 26-46 who eat more than three servings of red meat per week have an increased incidence of hormone-receptor positive breast cancer.

Is it the beef? Is it synthetic estrogen which is injected into cattle to fatten them up? Is it the heterocyclic amines released during grillling a nice thick juicy brontosaurus steak? Is it just a lot of balderdash? What does the lead author of this study have to say about it?

Although more research is needed to confirm the association and explore the possible reasons for it, researchers said the findings provide another motivation to limit consumption of red meat, which is already known to increase the risk of colon cancer. "There are already other reasons to minimize red meat intake," said Eunyoung Cho, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who led the study. "This just may give women another good reason."

I realize that one study doesn't prove the world is flat, but there seems to be an ever growing body of evidence that today's beef is not healthy for some of us. In the Harvard study the relative risk of getting breast cancer was almost doubled when women reported eating more than 1.5 servings of red meat per day.

Say what you wish, and eat whatever you please, but as for me, I'm jumping off the chuckwagon - and I happen to possess an XY genotype and (except for a couple of grog-induced episodes during the undergraduate days) an XY phenotype. This greatly reduces my risk of getting breast cancer, yet I am still limiting my consumption of red meat.

The nice thing about such asceticism is that even if future research shows that, contrary to current opinion, red meat actually contains nothing of risk to the human body, I personally will not regret my decision - not with the good news coming out of these vitally important dark chocolate research studies. Hoc erat in votis!