Significant increase: Food eaten by millions of Britons raises cancer risk more than 10%
Cancer symptoms: Top 14 early signs to look out for
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Pioneering treatments for cancer are on the horizon but prevention will always trump cure. Not all hope is lost on this front. Numerous studies over the years have pointed to the ways you can modify your risk of cancer by improving your diet. This owes in part to research indicating certain foods can increase your risk of developing the deadly disease.
One of the more worrisome studies is published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
The 2018 study assessed the prospective associations between consumption of ultra-processed food and risk of cancer.
For the study, researchers analysed data on 104, 980 participants aged at least 18 years (median age 42.8 years) from the French NutriNet-Santé cohort (2009-17).
The NutriNet-Santé study was set up to investigate nutrition and health relationships.
Dietary intakes were collected using repeated 24-hour dietary records, designed to register participants’ usual consumption for 3,300 different food items.
Associations between ultra-processed food intake and risk of overall, breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer assessed.
What did the researchers find out?
Ultra-processed food intake was associated with higher overall cancer risk and breast cancer risk.
“These results remained statistically significant after adjustment for several markers of the nutritional quality of the diet (lipid, sodium, and carbohydrate intakes and/or a Western pattern derived by principal component analysis),” the researchers wrote.
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They concluded: “In this large prospective study, a 10 percent increase in the proportion of ultra-processed foods in the diet was associated with a significant increase of greater than 10 percent in risks of overall and breast cancer.
“Further studies are needed to better understand the relative effect of the various dimensions of processing (nutritional composition, food additives, contact materials, and neoformed contaminants) in these associations.”
What counts as ultra-processed?
Processed foods are essentially made by adding salt, oil, sugar, or other substances.
Examples include canned fish or canned vegetables, fruits in syrup, and freshly made breads. Most processed foods have two or three ingredients.
Some foods are highly processed or ultra-processed.
Harvard Health explains: “They most likely have many added ingredients such as sugar, salt, fat, and artificial colours or preservatives.
“Ultra-processed foods are made mostly from substances extracted from foods, such as fats, starches, added sugars, and hydrogenated fats.”
They may also contain additives like artificial colours and flavours or stabilisers, says the health body.
Examples of these foods are frozen meals, soft drinks, hot dogs and cold cuts, fast food, packaged cookies, cakes, and salty snacks.
Cancer – main symptoms to spot
It’s important to be aware of any new or worrying symptoms.
According to the NHS, you should speak to a GP if you’ve noticed these changes and it’s lasted for three weeks or more:
- Tummy discomfort
- Blood in your poo
- Diarrhoea or constipation for no obvious reason
- A feeling of not having fully emptied your bowels after going to the toilet
- Pain in your stomach or back passage (anus).
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