In a study funded partially by the U.S. National Cancer Institute and Pfizer Oncology, it was found that Colon cancer patients who eat a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, poultry and fish can significantly lower the risk of their colon cancer returning. Doctors for some time now have strongly implicated poor diet and certain lifestyle factors as being associated to an increased risk of developing colon cancer however until now it’s been unclear as to what effect nutrition has on established colon cancer patients.

“We know a lot about how certain dietary things affect the risk of developing colon cancer in the first place but we didn’t know, before this study, how diet affected persons who already have cancer,” explained study author Dr. Jeffrey A. Meyerhardt, an assistant professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

“This is not a substitute for standard therapy, but it’s not unreasonable for oncologists to use this data to start talking about diet,” Meyerhardt said. “There are benefits in other regards, such as benefits for heart disease, and it does give us some initial information that may affect people’s outcome.”

“Maybe the message is it’s never too late to change your diet,” added Dr. Andrejs Avots-Avotins, an associate professor of internal medicine at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and a gastroenterologist with Scott & White Hospital in Temple, Texas. “A healthy diet is going to be so helpful in so many different ways that even if you do end up with a cancer that may or may not have been related to your diet, this may be of benefit in prolonging your survival.”

The study identified two major dietary patterns:

• Western, with high intakes of meat, fat, refined grains and dessert and

• Prudent, consisting of lots of fruits and vegetables, poultry and fish.

The study showed that patients who ate primarily a Western diet pattern had a significantly higher occurrence, both in terms of recurrence and death, than those of the prudent diet pattern. And compared with patients ranked in the lowest 20 percent of a Western dietary pattern, those in the highest 20 percent had almost three-and-a-half times the risk of recurrence or death. Those in the highest 20 percent of a Western diet were also 2.9 times more likely to see their cancer recur than those in the lower 20 percent.

“There’s a biological basis for this. The Western type of diet affects insulin levels and insulin-like growth factors that help promote cancer’s growth and metastases,” Meyerhardt explained. “The magnitude of the effect was surprising, however.”
Read the study’s findings from the Journal of the American Medical Association

More information:
Visit the U.S. National Cancer Institute for more on colon and rectal cancer.

Related Articles:
Preventing Cancer with Proper Nutrition

ABOUT US

PRIVACY

ARCHIVES

LINK TO US

DISCLAIMER

Tagged as: colon cancer