China News Service, Beijing, February 24 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Is how much meat you eat related to cancer risk?

What's the matter?

Eating meat five times a week or less is associated with a lower overall cancer risk, according to a health research paper published online in BMC Medicine, an open-access professional academic journal under Springer Nature.

  Corresponding author Cody Watling of the University of Oxford, UK, and colleagues investigated the link between diet and cancer risk by analysing data from 472,377 UK adults recruited by the UK Biobank between 2006 and 2010. Relationship.

  Their study found that compared with those who ate meat five or more times a week, overall cancer risk was 2% lower among those who ate meat five or fewer times a week, and among those who ate fish but not meat decreased by 10% and by 14% in vegans and vegans.

  After comparing the incidence of specific cancers with the dietary habits of the participants, the study found that those who ate meat five or fewer times a week had a 9 percent lower risk of colorectal cancer than those who ate meat five or more times a week. .

  They also found that, compared with men who ate meat more than five times a week, the risk of prostate cancer was 20 percent lower in men who ate only fish and no meat, and a 31 percent lower risk in men who ate only meat.

Postmenopausal women who followed a vegan diet had an 18 percent lower risk of dying from breast cancer than those who ate meat more than five times a week, but the findings suggest that's due to the BMI, also known as body mass index, of the vegan women ) tended to be lower than in meat-eating women.

  The authors caution that due to the observational nature of the study, no causal conclusions can be drawn between diet and cancer risk.

In addition, dietary data from the UK Biobank were collected at a single time point rather than over a continuous time period, and therefore may not be representative of participants' lifetime dietary patterns.

They suggest that future research could investigate the association between a meat-less or meat-free diet and the risk of specific cancers in larger populations with longer follow-up periods.

  Participants in the study sample, aged 40-70, reported how often they ate meat and fish, and the researchers used health records to calculate their average 11-year incidence of new cancers.

In the study, the authors also considered diabetes status as well as sociodemographic, socioeconomic and lifestyle factors.

  Of these, 247,571 (52%) participants ate meat more than five times a week, 205,382 (44%) ate meat five or fewer times a week, and 10,696 (2%) ate only fish and no meat , and 8,685 (2%) participants were either vegan or vegan.

Of the participants, 54,961 (12%) developed cancer during the study period.

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