- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People
who eat a meat-laden diet have more than triple the average risk of
esophageal
cancer and double the risk of stomach cancer, U.S. researchers reported
Thursday.
-
- The report adds to several studies that link eating meat,
especially "red" meat such as beef, with certain cancers. Colon
cancer has been the most strongly linked with a high-meat diet.
-
- The study of people living in Nebraska found that those
who ate the most meat had 3.6 times the risk of esophageal cancer and
double
the risk of stomach cancer when compared to people eating what the
researchers
considered a healthy diet.
-
- People who ate a lot of dairy products, who tended also
to eat a lot of meat, had double the risk of both cancers, the researchers
report in the January issue of the American Journal of Clinical
Nutrition.
-
- Mary Ward, Honglei Chen and colleagues at the National
Cancer Institute, Tufts University in Boston and elsewhere surveyed 124
people with stomach cancer, 124 people with esophageal cancer and 449
people
who did not have cancer.
-
- They asked detailed questions about their eating habits,
then characterized their diets as being "healthy," "high
meat," "high milk," high in salty snacks, heavy on desserts
and heavy on white bread.
-
- The so-called healthy diet had the highest amounts of
fruits, vegetables and whole grains and generally matched the government
recommendations that people eat at least five servings of fruit and
vegetables
a day, up to 10 servings of grains, breads and pasta and just two to three
small servings of meat.
-
- The healthy eating group -- 21 percent of those surveyed
-- also generally ate the fewest calories.
-
- "In contrast with this healthy dietary pattern,
the high-meat dietary pattern included much higher intakes of meats and
much lower intakes of fruits, bread and cereals," the researchers
wrote in their report.
-
- They said 33 percent of stomach cancer patients and 35
percent of esophageal cancer patients ate either the high-meat or high-milk
diets.
|
