Parents, you may never get your kids to listen to this, but please try.
A study in the journal Pediatrics (Story in USA Today), found that frequent alcohol consumption by teenage girls may increase the chances that they will develop non-cancerous breast disease in their 20s and possibly breast cancer later in life. Girls who drank the most alcohol during their teen years — daily or nearly every day — were five times more likely to develop benign breast disease as young adults than were their peers who never drank or drank less than once a week. Here’s the kick. Study co-author Catherine Berkey, a biostatistician at Harvard Medical School in Boston, said that benign breast disease is known to boost the risk for breast cancer.