Sustainable diets significantly reduce cancer risk

Sustainable diet significantly reduces cancer risk Keystone-SDA

A sustainable diet is associated with a statistically significant reduction in cancer risk and cancer mortality rate. This was the result of a large systematic review with Swiss participation.

Sustainable diets are increasingly being recommended as a strategy to reduce non-communicable diseases and promote health worldwide. Current unhealthy dietary patterns are recognised as contributing to the global cancer burden, while certain types of production further exacerbate environmental problems.

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“Investigating the impact of sustainable diets on cancer is therefore of crucial importance,” wrote Marina Kasper from the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Regensburg and her co-authors, including Sabine Rohrmann from the University of Zurich. The researchers published their reviewExternal link of the scientific literature, which analysed data from 2.2 million people, in The Lancet journal eClinicalMedicine.

Mortality drops by 12%

In the study, a total of 19 estimates of the effect of sustainable nutrition and cancer from a total of 17 studies conducted worldwide between 1983 and 2022 were summarised and the studies were analysed again as a whole. “Adherence to sustainable diets showed a significant reduction in cancer incidence (-7%) and cancer mortality (-12%),” the researchers from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the UK concluded.

In any case, the dual benefits of sustainable nutrition in terms of health and the environment should also be emphasised. However, better standardised approaches should also be found to improve the possibilities for investigating such topics. The individual studies used had shown very different results in some cases.

Proportion of plant-based foods too low

Calculations by a committee of the medical journal The Lancet in 2024 showed that the incidence of diet-related cancers increased by 8% worldwide between 2016 and 2021. Around 20% of cancer mortality in western industrialised countries is associated with diet, particularly an insufficient proportion of plant-based foods.

Adapted from German by DeepL/ac

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