Vegetarian diet protects from cancer

Vegetarians have lower cancer risk

A vegetarian diet seems intrinsically healthy, maybe because a vegetarian tends to eat a lot of
fresh fruits and vegetables and accompanying fiber. But few large, or long-term, studies have
been carried out on the health impact of the vegetarian diet. In a new report, researchers at
the Cancer Research UK Epidemiology Unit at Oxford University gather data from the
original Oxford Vegetarian Study and a more recent one called EPIC-Oxford.

The research involved more than 61,000 people divided up into pure vegetarians and vegans
(20,601 people), fish-eating vegetarians (8,562 people) and meat-eaters (32,403 people)
followed for around 12 years. Overall, vegetarians are 12% less likely to get cancer than
meat-eaters. The incidences of 20 different cancers was recorded and some interesting
differences between vegetarians and meat-eaters noted.

Cancer of the stomach, bladder and ovary were less common among vegetarians than among
meat-eaters. Also cancers of the blood, including leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and
multiple myeloma were, taken together, 45% less common among vegetarians. There was also
a decreased risk of prostate cancer among fish-eating vegetarians compared to the meat-
eaters.

How do these findings on the vegetarian diet compare to those of other studies? The Adventist
Health Study in California showed that vegetarians have a lower risk of colon and prostate
cancer than non-vegetarians. And the UK Women's Cohort Study showed a lower risk of
breast cancer in vegetarians. As with all these studies, there are challenges in assessing
people's diet - are they really vegetarian and which vegetarian foods are the most healthy?
The researchers declare themselves most surprised by the link between the vegetarian diet and
a lowered risk of blood cancers. This deserves a fuller investigation. There is clearly much
more to be learned about how the vegetarian diet affects both overall cancer risk and the risk
of individual types of cancer.