Photo: Riedel.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and now you can support the cause in style with Riedel's limited-edition pink glasses.

Crescendo ($70, pictured) is a set of four glasses, each in a different delicate shade of pink. Since they're stemless, the glasses are great for non-alcoholic drinks as well as white wines, and they're dishwasher-safe.

Pink Vinum Rosé ($59) is a set of two pink-stemmed glasses specifically designed for rosé wine. They're also dishwasher-safe, and the color of the wine isn't distorted, since the pink tint is limited to the stem.

Riedel is donating 15 percent of their pink sales to Living Beyond Breast Cancer, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering all women affected by breast cancer to live as long as possible with the best quality of life -- now that's something we can all raise our glasses to. Order online or find them at Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

For Slashfood readers who don't want to drink pink, the Pink Ribbon Shop is offering "Around My Mother's Table: Stories and Recipes Celebrating Lives Lost to Breast Cancer" ($16.95), the Breast Cancer Awareness Pink Ribbon Cookie Cutter, and more.

The news couldn't be more timely with Cinco de Mayo right around the corner.

According to the Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a native Mexican diet full of soups, legumes, tomato-based sauces, meat and Mexican cheeses seems to help prevent breast cancer. Whether the foods and dished are topped with a chili or two wasn't stated, but Hispanic women believe it's the chili in Mexican food that may prevent breast cancer.

So with Cinco de Mayo coming up and resources featuring Mexican recipes, now might be a great time to add Alondigas Soup, bean-based dishes, and moles (might it be the chocolate?) to your recipe repertoire.

But don't let this be an excuse to gorge on greasy, deep-fried tortilla chips!

Alright Slashfoodies, we have a challenge for you. As posted on our sister site The Cancer Blog, one of our favorite food bloggers, Béa at La Tartine Gourmande, the creator of many exquisite dishes we have featured here before, has prepared this perfectly-pink dish of Quinoa Beet Verrine (as shown above) to help raise awareness for Breast Cancer. We'd like to continue what she has started and see what our readers can come up with. There are no rules, other than it should be an original creation and contain the color pink. As I said before, it can be dinner or dessert, anything from pink cream cheese on a bagel to an entire fuchsia dinner is fine - use your imagination. Drink submissions are fine, too.

Please send us the link to your blog/website once you have posted the picture, and we will spotlight the entries in a future post. Is there a prize? Yes - knowing that you are helping to raise awareness for Breast Cancer, is that not enough? Tell you what, we will let you judge, and then we will do a spotlight/interview with the creator of our favorite submission.

(Thanks again, Béa!)

Every time we turn around it seems that there is some expert or some study telling us that another food is "bad" for us. And given a little more time, there will be another person saying that the food is, in fact, "good." Red meat -- a category that includes beef, pork and lamb -- has been subject to this time and again and it is getting difficult to keep track of all the things that it can -- and cannot -- do. Fortunately, an Independent columnist neatly summarized the benefits and risks of eating red meat.

Benefits

• High in zinc, which is important for a healthy immune system.
• Contains more iron than most foods, and it is more easily used by the body than iron from other sources
• Also a good source of other vitamins and minerals, including phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, selenium and b vitamins.
• Excellent source of complete proteins
• A high-protein diet based on lean red meat has been shown to help weight loss

Risks

• An increased risk of bowel cancer was found for people who ate more than two servings of red meat per week.
• The Mediterranean diet, which is low in red meat, has been shown to decrease the risk of Alzheimer's disease
• Excessive amounts of red meat can lead to a higher risk of osteoporosis due to an acid byproduct from digesting very large amounts of protein.
• Eating red meat every day can double the risk of Arthritis
• Red meat is high in saturated fat and cholesterol
• A recent study found that rating more than one serving of red meat per day can double the risk of breast cancer, especially in young women.

Some new research suggests that there may be a link between breast cancer and the amount of red meat women consume. Researchers said that having "one-and-a-half servings of red meat per day almost doubled the risk of hormone receptor-positive breast cancer compared to three or fewer per week." The conclusion was drawn from data from the Nurses' Health Study II, which was collected from 1989 to 2003, and where one portion of meat was defined as having a meat main dish (or major component of the name dish) at any meal, including in a sandwich, hamburger, hot dog or bacon.

There are a few reasons attributed to the increase in risk. First, some cancer-causing chemicals "such as heterocyclic amines" are created when red meat is cooked. Second, there may be a link with some of the growth hormones given to cattle. That being said, previous forays into this area have proven to be inconclusive, so even though there was a correlation it doesn't mean that anything is completely certain at this point.

Add another product to the list of things that have going pink in support of breast cancer awareness. This special edition set of Mundial knives is a ten piece set and includes seven knives, a carving fork, kitchen shears and the wood block holder to keep everything organized. One of the included knives is a granton edge santoku knife, one of the most popular models available, and this is the first Mundial set to include it.

Even though the set was created in honor of the company's partnership with the National Breast Cancer Foundation, the charmingly feminine pink color of the set should make it appealing to many for purely aesthetic reasons. In other words, whether you intend to support the cause or not, a girly set of kitchen knives is a nice change from the basic black of most manufacturers.

After getting all that Pink tea from the Republic of Tea, it's probably a good idea to have something to drink it out of and, since we're already looking at a lot of pink-themed things for breast cancer awareness month, why not a pink ribbon cup, as well? While buying one tea cup at a time isn't the most practical way to outfit a kitchen, it's nice to be able to get one to support a cause. The Pink Ribbon Tea Cup is another product where a portion of the proceeds go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and its connection to the charity extends beyond the color outside cup to the little pink ribbon within.

We think that a cup like this would make a great gift set when paired up with some favorite teas. The teas mentioned above would be a good choice, but other purveyors, including Adagio, will give you a wider range of tea options to choose from, although coffee is always an option, too.

If you want to honor breast cancer awareness month, or if you just happen to like pink, there are a lot of options for pink foods that don't require you to get a new set of cookware or buy cookies. Besides, baking your own cookies is much more fun, isn't it?

A good place to start is by looking back at our archives, because last year some food bloggers got together to make up their own pink recipes. Once you've had your fill of those, you can take a look at the famous pink recipes from KitchenAid's Cook For the Cure collection, as well as looking (perhaps somewhat lustily) at all their lovely pink appliances, as well. iVillage has a complete pink party menu that will get you from appetizers and cocktails through dessert. Speaking of cocktails, there are well over 100 cocktail recipes that turn out pink-hued drinks, or at least use pink in the name. Finally, RecipeZaar, a great online recipe source full of user-submitted recipes and reviews, has 156 pink recipes, including one for Pink Fluff, a sweet concoction that can be either salad or dessert.

Whew! That was quite a list, but you should be able to find plenty of pink foods even without using these resources. How about a medium steak for dinner, followed up by a creamy strawberry milkshake?

[Thanks for some of the tips, Ken!]

We love it when we can support a good cause with some of our favorite things, especially when those things happen to be delicious cookies like these. Eleni's New York, one of our favorite specialty cookie companies, has a whole line of cookies to raise breast cancer awareness. Everything is either pink or adorned with pink ribbons, as are these Reach for a Cure handbag cookies. No matter which set of cookies you choose from the collection, 50% of the proceeds will go directly to The Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

The cookie tins make fantastic gifts, too, especially if you know anyone who has had breast cancer. They range in price and the number of cookies that they include, but the cookies pictured here come in a box of 18 and sell for $58.50.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and to raise awareness and help to raise funds for charities that support cancer research, many companies offer special promotions and products. The Republic of Tea is one such company, with a number of products where a portion of the proceeds goes directly to charity. In fact, as of yesterday, the Republic of Tea has contributed over a half million dollars to the Susan G Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, which is pretty impressive since it comes just from tea.

Their Sip for the Cure line includes Pink Grapefruit Green Tea, which was their original offering in the collection, Pink Rose Green Tea, Lady Apple Green Tea and Pink Lemonade Green Tea, as well as marmalade, a mug and a teapot.

A recent study suggests that drinking coffee prevents breast cancer breast cancer in a specific group of women: those who have the BRCA1 mutation. The genetic mutation puts women at a higher risk of developing breast cancer.

The Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance and National Cancer Institute sponsored a study in which researchers compared answers to a survey about coffee consumption against the medical records of 1,690 women who have the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genetic mutations. Compared to women who did not drink coffee at all, those who had 1 to 3 cups of coffee per day reduced the risk of breast cancer by 10%. That doesn't seem all that impressive, but take a look at the serious java junkies: women who drank 4 to 5 cups of coffee reduced their risk by 25% and women who drank 6+ cups of coffee per day reduced their risk by a whopping 69%.

I think there are some days I drink six cups of coffee by...lunch.

[via: The Cancer Blog]

Women have been hearing for a while now that compounds called called isoflavones may block estrogens, promote the destruction of faulty cells, fight inflammation, and overall, reduce the risk of breast cancer. With this association, women were running out to the drug store to buy soy supplements.

However, researchers at Johns Hopkins have said that they don't know what soy supplements do, and that they now believe that the reduction in risk of breast cancer comes not from the soy itself, but from the health habits that go along with eating soy, like eating tofu and drinking soy milk.

Claims about soy's influence on breast cancer have been based on studies of Asian women, who have a lower incidence of the disease. However, Asian women's entire diet is different from Western women. They are also more physically active and drink less alcohol. These are all associated with reduced risk of breast cancer.

Introduced at the Fancy Foods Show last month in San Francisco, Chick Chocolates introduced a new chocolate to their line of individually packaged chocolates for women: Strong Chick. Featuring a graphic of a woman who looks as though she just crossed the finish line of a race, the candies are creamy white chocolate and raspberry on the inside, wrapped in a coating of smooth and rich dark chocolate. The pink hue of the raspberry is particularly appropriate, because 100% of the profits from the sale of this bar are being donated to support Athena Partners and the fight against breast cancer. The chocolates are available online from Seattle Chocolates.