Dairy, soy, and risk of breast cancer: those confounded milks

Abstract

Background: Associations between soy, dairy intakes and breast cancer risk are inconsistent. No studies exist with large numbers of dairy consumers and soy consumers to assess mutual confounding.

Methods: The study cohort contains 52 795 North American women, initially free of cancer, followed for 7.9 years (29.7% were Black). Dietary intakes were estimated from food frequency questionnaires and, for 1011 calibration study subjects, from six structured 24-h dietary recalls. Incident invasive breast cancers were detected mainly by matching with cancer registries. Analyses used multivariable proportional hazards regression.

Results: The participants (mean age of 57.1 years) experienced 1057 new breast cancer cases during follow-up. No clear associations were found between soy products and breast cancer, independently of dairy. However, higher intakes of dairy calories and dairy milk were associated with hazard ratios (HRs) of 1.22 [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.05-1.40] and 1.50 (95% CI 1.22-1.84), respectively, comparing 90th to 10th percentiles of intakes. Full fat and reduced fat milks produced similar results. No important associations were noted with cheese and yogurt. Substituting median intakes of dairy milk users by those of soy milk consumers was associated with HR of 0.68 (95% CI: 0.55-0.85). Similar-sized associations were found among pre- and post-menopausal cases, with CIs also excluding the null in estrogen receptor (ER+, ER-), and progesterone receptor (PR+) cancers. Less biased calibrated measurement-error adjusted regressions demonstrated yet stronger, but less precise, HRs and CIs that still excluded the null.

Conclusions: Higher intakes of dairy milk were associated with greater risk of breast cancer, when adjusted for soy intake. Current guidelines for dairy milk consumption could be viewed with some caution.

Keywords: Soy isoflavones; Western population; breast cancer; meat analogues; soy intake; soy milk; tofu.

Figure 1

Plot of: (i) maximum likelihood regression and 95% confidence band uncalibrated log(dairy-milk kcal/day + 1) against the hazard ratio (HR) of incident breast cancer^a(darker grey); (ii) 95% confidence band (lighter grey) for the corresponding calibrated regression; (iii) vertical interrupted lines show positions of spline knots at the 5th, 35th, 65th and 95th percentiles of the non-zero values. Interrupted line is unrestricted cubic spline (uncalibrated) result. P-value that tests significance of the non-linear spline terms is 0.73, indicating that the log-transformation describes the data well. Cups are 8 ounce size.