By David Liu, PHD

Monday Jan 14, 2013 (foodconsumer.org) -- A review published in PLoS One suggests that drinking coffee does not significantly reduce risk of developing breast cancer.

X. J. Li from Department of Oncology, Xuzhou Medical College in Xuzhou, People's Republic of China and colleagues reviewed 16 cohort and 10 case-control studies on coffee and risk of breast cancer and found coffee drinking is not associated with significantly reduced risk of breast cancer.

Exactly, high coffee consumption was associated with 4%, low to moderate consumption was associated with 1% reduced risk of breast cancer while drinking additional 2 cups per day of coffee was associated with 2% reduced risk. 

However, drinking coffee was inversely associated with risk of ER negative breast cancer, but not other types of diseases.

The researchers concluded "Our findings suggest that increased coffee intake is not associated with a significantly reduced risk of breast cancer, but we observe an inverse association in ER-negative subgroup analysis."

The downside of this meta-analysis is that it included all studies and some of them may be highly influenced by the industry or highly biased or population dependent.

In any case, coffee has a zero nutrition value and one should drink it for its taste, but not for disease prevention although some studies claim that drinking coffee is linked to reduced risk of liver cancer.

An authoritative organization says that the two major risk factors for breast cancer is medical radiation and hormone therapy although other risk factors such as drinking alcohol may also play a role in the carcinogenesis.

Breast cancer is diagnosed in 230,000 women each year in the United States and the disease and its complications kill about 37,000 annually in the country, according to the National Cancer Institute.

In many cases, breast cancer is preventable.