Based on the information that each of these women provided, the researchers found no evidence that a daughter's cancer risk increases if she was breast-fed by a mother who would later go on to develop breast cancer. That study did not address whether breast-feeding affected the nursing mother's cancer risk. The benefits were even higher for women who nursed infants during their teenage years. The latest study's findings also do not rule out the possibility that chemical carcinogens might be passed to the next generation through breast milk. During lactation, a woman's body uses this fat to enrich the energy content of breast milk.
Any pollutants stored in the fat also pass to the baby with the fat in that milk.
Because a woman's cumulative lifetime exposure to estrogen is one of the best established risk factors for breast cancer, there is a growing suspicion that exposure to estrogen mimics may also pose a cancer risk. To date, the jury remains out on the carcinogenic potential of those pollutants. However, there's no doubt that babies are being exposed. Nursing protects moms from breast cancer. Titus-Ernstoff, L., et al.