Cancer and Diet

Graham A. Colditz & Catherine Tomeo Ryan & Hank Dart

In recent years, there has been an explosion of prospective studies on diet and chronic disease, and this has greatly furthered our understanding of cancer etiology. Much of the hypothesized relation between diet and cancer comes from studies of the variation in cancer rates between countries and the change in both diet and cancer rates when populations migrate from one country to another. Building on international correlation studies and retrospective case-control studies, prospective cohort studies offer the potential to evaluate diet-disease relationships free from recall bias and to correct for measurement error. Current evidence from these prospective studies suggests that, on a global scale, diet and obesity cause approximately the same proportion of cancers each year as tobacco use does. That is, nearly one third of all cancers (or 3 million to 4 million cases worldwide) are caused by diet and obesity—and could thus be prevented by improvements in nutrition ...

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