Veggies cut cancer risk by half
Thursday 02 July 2009
Research suggests that eating a veggie diet can almost HALVE the risk of developing cancer.
Yep, scientists claim from the wide-ranging study that cutting out meat can reduce the risk of some types of the disease by nearly half.
Researchers who studied tens of thousands of Britons over more than a decade found that vegetarians were 12 per cent less likely to contract cancer than keen meat-eaters.
For some cancers like leukaemia, stomach and bladder, the difference was even more striking - with up to 45 per cent fewer non-meat eaters contracting the diseases than carnivores.
Dr Naomi Allen, an epidemiologist at Oxford University and co-author of the study, said: "This is strong evidence that vegetarians have lower rates of cancer than meat eaters."
With a third of the population developing cancer in their lifetime, changing diets could result in more than two million people avoiding the disease altogether.
Professor Tim Key, a Cancer Research UK epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, said: “Over a lifetime about one in three people will be diagnosed with cancer. So if 33 people in every hundred get cancer this would come down to about 29 with everyone following a vegetarian diet, which is 12 per cent lower.”
Mr Key - whose findings are published in the British Journal of Cancer - added however, that it was impossible to draw strong conclusions from this one single study.
“At the moment these findings are not strong enough to ask for particularly large changes in the diets of people following an average balanced diet.”
By Tasha Usefnia