I got a text from my friend Josie today: “According to the paper if women do housework there’s less chance of breast cancer.” So I got hold of the paper and read something like this
Women who keep their homes clean and tidy are less likely to develop breast cancer than those who let the dust and dishes pile up, according to a new report.
Researchers found regular moderate exercise such as housework provides greater protection from the disease than more strenuous but less frequent sporting activity.
Being active in the home cut the likelihood of pre-menopausal women developing breast cancer by 29 per cent compared with being inactive, and reduced the risk for post-menopausal women by 19 per cent.
What I find particularly amusing is that even though the research absolutely didn’t touch on whether or not the women’s houses were clean (rich women who have cleaners can have very clean houses without spending an hour on housework, whereas mother’s of several children could do 17.6 hours a week easy and still live in chaos), the various newspaper reports worked very hard to imply that it was the dust itself that was causing the cancer risk.
I always go into these stories outraged by the sexism, but by the end of the article, I’m often just as outraged by the scientific ignorance. It’s as if every health reporter on the planet needs to be locked in a room until they’ve written “Correlation Does Not Prove Causation” 1,000 times. If you actually want to read the study itself to find out what it does prove (not much), it’s available here as a pdf file.
But actually this study discovered something that I do find interesting. This was a survey of 218,169 women in 9 European countries and the average pre-menopausal woman spent 17.6 hours a week on housework.
I believe that the vast amount of unpaid, unvalued reproductive labour that women do, is central to our oppression. The women in that study averaged 10% of their life on housework (which appeared to leave out the actual reproduction). The solutions to the second shift: men taking on their share of unpaid work, and a socialisation of some labour that is currently unpaid, haven’t changed, but they don’t look any easier to put into place either.
Well if it ever ends up being true, Im screwed.
17 hours a week for housework? I doubt it put in 17 hours a month. My house isnt filthy, but I dont feel the need to scrub down everything that often. Then again, I dont have a husband so not much actually needs to be done.
When I *did*, I gave up rather early on. I got sick of cleaning only to have him come in RIGHT BEHIND ME and mess shit up again. I finally took everything he left in the living room (clothes, shoes, dirty dishes) and put them on his side of the bed. And told him the next time, he’d have to go dumpster diving, because anything left in the living room that didnt belong there would be thrown away. We had separate bathrooms, and I didnt bother with his. I didnt mess it up.
Definitions used by researchers may not be strictly followed by the women in their self-reporting. I’d tend to lump in walking to the store with housework, not recreation. Given the tendency of many Europeans to shop and launder locally (within walking distance), nonadherence to the research definition would shift a major source of caloric expenditure/ aerobic exercise to a different category.
The conclusions they make are hampered by the lack of precise definitions clearly followed by the respondents, and by the low number of “manual” and “heavy manual” labor workers which encouraged the researchers to pool the two categories. I daresay a detailed record of actual tasks accomplished by specific methods would allow a more precise estimation of actual caloric expenditure in said housework, and in the various categories of labor. One would also like to see a description of the occupational exposures of the manual/heavy manual laborers.
Altogether, the sort of study that is inconclusive for a number of reasons, not least of which is the lack of standard definitions, in caloric terms and in lack of info re: occupational exposures.
I’d also like to do the primary correction by age and age at first birth. OCPs are a non-issue, at least in current formulations. HRT use really should be recorded as woman-years of use, not use at current time.
jesus, that is a new nadir of something or other.
yes, and particularly when you use heavily chemical-laden cleaning products, breathing the fumes all day, that is -great- for those cancer-fighting cells! builds strong bodies twelve different ways! YAY
I found fact that there was no link between activity in the job and a decrease in breast cancer quite interesting, but it makes sense to me.
Assuming that the sample wasn’t completely biased towards non-immigrant/middle class women there were probably some women who were doing cleaning as their job. I would find it really interesting if cleaning as a job didn’t offer the same protection as cleaning at home, but as a union organiser it wouldn’t surprise me. I would imagine that a high level of activity at work probably also coincides with as many negative factors (such as exposure to commercial cleaners) as positive impact from the exposure.
Science reporting in MSM articles tend to really suck. I’m not surprised.
The secondary source I read claimed that it was *specifically* housework that reduced the risk of breast cancer, and that the researchers were very surprised. They had sorted out a group of women who did 16-17 hours a week of housework, and compared their cancer statistics to a group of sedentary women of similar age, and to a group of women who said they took the recommended 30 minutes of exercise, at learst 3 times per week. They were very surprised to find that things like laundry and childcare could be healthier than jogging.
It does not seem to have occurred to them to parse it an terms of “17 hours/week of mild exercise could be healthier than 90 minutes/week of more intense exercise.” Of course, if they had said THAT, it would not have shocked anyone.
Sandy at JunkFoodScience has written about this one (http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/01/housework-latest-breast-cancer.html) and points out that “In total, moderate inactivity was associated with an 11% lower risk. Inactivity proved more protective than being the most active! (Being active was associated with a mere 8% lower risk).”
If the study’s true, shouldn’t there be a lot more men with breast cancer?