quote: For their study, Michels and colleagues used an ongoing survey of female registered nurses. They studied 582 women with breast cancer and 1,569 women free of breast cancer in 1993.
Writing in the International Journal of Cancer, the researchers said they looked at the women's diets and at questionnaires filled out by the mothers of the participants.
One risk factor for breast cancer stood out: women whose mothers who said their daughters ate French fries had a higher risk of breast cancer. This increased 27 percent for each weekly serving reportedly eaten.
Edit: Made URL shorter
Edit: (I didn't have a good opinion to add, but I guess I'll come up with one just for practice) Parents should be trying not to encourage fast food on their kids so early in their lives anyway.
posted
I read this this morning and it seemed really weird to me. Partially because you're relying on memory for associations, and partly because association != causality. As I've been thinking about it today, I would suspect that any connection or causality would have to do with transfats/hydrogenated oils (being a common way of reducing saturated fats and used in fry oil), since there is a possible link between transfats and some types of cancer. There doesn't seem to be a connection between breast cancer and acrylamide (carcinagan associated with high temperature cooking).
This, along with the nationwide epidemic of obesity (and obesity in children), is another reason to eat well and teach your children to appreciate a balanced and healthy diet.
Posts: 5879 | Registered: Apr 2001
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1) Try to use smaller URLs. This can be done by setting a link in the Full Reply form, or by using www.tinyurl.com
2) Its always nice to have the starter of the thread state their own opinion on the story they are linking to. It generally leads to better discussions.
But as for the story and the quote, I can't seem to parse that last sentance.
quote:women whose mothers who said their daughters ate French fries had a higher risk of breast cancer.
It just won't parse! Posts: 5656 | Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
Yeah it comes across a little weird. Since they were relying on information from mothers about the childhood eating habits of their daughters (and were then correlating that information with the incidence of breast cancer in the daughters), they had to phrase it that way.
Posts: 5879 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
If they added some sort of grouping operator to the written English language, we could avoid these problems. Can't use parentheses like we do in math, though, because the meaning that already exists is too different.
If we used <>, it would look like this:
quote:(women (whose mothers (who said (their daughters ate French fries))) had a higher risk of breast cancer.
posted
The biggest problem with that sentence is that there's too much subordination. There are three nested subordinate clauses in that sentences, and it takes a lot of work to untangle that.
I remember reading that linguists once thought that we were incapable of processing sentences like that, but then someone collected several samples from speech that disproved that. This one's still a brain-twister, though.
Also, the last closing parenthesis should go after "cancer."
Oh, and there's another problem in that "daughters" does not necessarily refer to "women." My verdict: this is a sentence that should be broken up into two or three complete sentences. There's no need to cram it into one.
Posts: 586 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
Well, I'm proud of my kids schools - they've removed all candy from the vending machines and all coke machines have been replaced with ones that dispense bottled water. I'm even prouder of my son's kindergarten teacher who has a water fountain in the room and tells parents not to send drinks, all the kids just get water whenever they need it.
When my kids eat take lunches or snacks to school from home it's usually a piece of fruit and water. I don't do the cookies and candy and crackers - and while we don't think of crackers as sweets usually take a look at the labels. Many of them have a lot of sugar and plenty of calories.
Now none of my children are overweight. This is not a conscious choice to try and "keep them thin" it's a conscious choice to help instill good habits in them early, so when they're thirsty they don't reach for a coke or kool aid but for a glass of water. And it works, even when we eat out and I let the kids order lemonade or sprite (I try to stay away from caffeine) my middle daughter Emily always orders water. She will not drink carbonated drinks, she said they feel funny in her mouth and cold water makes her feel better than any other type of drink. Then she will say in a very mature sounding voice "Plus, I'm an athlete. I have to take care of my body if I want to be good."
On the study itself, I agree with everything ludosti said.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
The factoid would be more useful if it included the overlap between women who ate more french fries as children and women who are more overweight. I can't help but think that girls who were habituated to eat salty&greasy foods would become the women who would most likely be overweight. And an increase in the degree of being overweight is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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