NEW YORK — Your diet may have more impact on your cancer risk than you might think, a new study has found.
An estimated 80,110 new cancer cases among adults 20 and older in the United States in 2015 were attributable simply to eating a poor diet, according to the study, published in the JNCI Cancer Spectrumon Wednesday.
“This is equivalent to about 5.2% of all invasive cancer cases newly diagnosed among US adults in 2015,” said Dr. Fang Fang Zhang, a nutrition and cancer epidemiologist at Tufts University in Boston, who was first author of the study.
“This proportion is comparable to the proportion of cancer burden attributable to alcohol,” she said.
The researchers evaluated seven dietary factors: a low intake of vegetables, fruits, whole grains and dairy products and a high intake of processed meats, red meats and sugary beverages, such as soda.
“Low whole-grain consumption was associated with the largest cancer burden in the US, followed by low dairy intake, high processed-meat intake, low vegetable and fruit intake, high red-meat intake and high intake of sugar-sweetened beverages,” Zhang […]
As a species, humans are so slow to evolve unless we’re pushed. That’s the silver lining in this understanding about the SAD. Our tradition and our culture, teach us to eat all these substances that are killing us. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in What I Believe: “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.”
Like Stephan, my wife and I try to eat mostly our own organic vegetables all year round and our doctors consider us very healthy by comparison to others who they treat, who do not eat so healthy a diet.