A red meat cancer study was conducted by Harvard University students, and the results are shocking.

According to the study, women who usually tend to eat a lot of steaks, hamburgers, and other meals that involved red meat, may have a slightly increased risk of getting breast cancer. Since then, doctors have never been shy of warning everyone about their diets.

Doctors have warned that a diet filled with red meat is strongly linked to different types of cancer, mostly of the colon and of the pancreas. Although it may still be linked to the occurrence of breast cancer, there is not much evidence of it.

The study analyzed data they derived from over 88,000 female subjects from ages 26 to 45 who had started with the study back in 1991. Their intake of meals, that had red meat, varied from none, or less than once in a month, to more than six servings in a day.

The initial results of the study were published in 2006, and it identified a preliminary link between the ingestion of red meat and breast cancer after a span of 12 years.

With the use of a statistical model, the scientists who conducted the red meat cancer study have estimated that in the female population who ate a lot of red meat on a regular basis, there were an additional 6.8 cases of breast cancer for every 1,000 women over 20 years of follow-up. Although this was part of the conducted study, they still cannot rule out the possibility that there were other factors present that could have helped precipitate the onset of cancer.

Scientists have stated that red meat proteins facilitate the cell division of cancer cells and quicken tumor growth.

In more developed nations today, studies have indicated that the female population approximately has a 12.5% chance of getting breast cancer.