The study was led by researchers at the Nuffield Department of Population Health's Cancer Epidemiology Unit and funded by World Cancer Research Fund which supports global scientific research on cancer prevention and survival through diet, weight and physical activity. It is published today in the British Journal of Cancer.
Appropriately planned vegetarian diets are considered to be healthy but there has been uncertainty about how these diets influence the risk of specific cancers, largely because individual studies do not include enough vegetarians. To address these questions, the researchers pooled data from more than 1.8 million people from three continents through the Cancer Risk in Vegetarians Consortium.
They compared the risk of 17 different cancers across five diet groups: meat eaters, poultry eaters (do not eat red or processed meat), pescatarians (fish eaters), vegetarians (eat dairy and/or eggs), and vegans.
Compared with meat eaters, vegetarians had:
- 21% lower risk of pancreatic cancer
- 9% lower risk of breast cancer
- 12% lower risk of prostate cancer
- 28% lower risk of kidney cancer
- 31% lower risk of multiple myeloma.
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Population Health website.