Being a vegetarian can cut your risk of cancer by a half, claim scientists

[ElenorRigby]

"More than 61,000 people aged between 20 and 89, roughly half of whom were vegetarian, were followed for more than 12 years in the British arm of the research which is supported by Cancer Research UK."
"vegetarians were 12 per cent less likely to contract cancer than their meat eating counterparts"
"For some cancers like leukaemia, stomach and bladder cancers the difference was even more striking with up to 45 per cent fewer non-meat eaters contracting the diseases than carnivores."
Wow very conclusive study, maybe there should be a campaign to switch children to a meat free diet!

Oh great, well someone I am very close to has recently been dx'd and she's been a vegetarian since she was 5. Another close friend has recovered from cancer recently and ate nothing but wholefoods for years and years.

Blows it out the window for me in a personal sense. Though I totally support vegetarianism and am going back to it myself, for other reasons.

Jumente, so sorry about your friends but individual cases don't change the population stats. Study says vegetarians have a lower risk than meat-eaters, not that they are immune.

Happy, most foods contain some protein. Dairy, eggs, nuts, seeds and pulses, wheat, oats and rice are good sources of protein. I don't eat tofu or soya or meat substitutes very often if at all. I don't want to eat meat, why would I try to recreate it artificially when there's plenty of nice food in the world?

You're right...I just imagined her seeing this thread and it making her feel ten times worse, that's all.

for anyone who is interested in veggie diets or cooking

oh dear.

Don't think anyone should ever feel responsible for getting ill.

No, I don't think she would feel responsible nor should she. Just that it makes it more extremely bad luck iyswim, and unfair, and ironic.
You weren't to know.

I got ill a while back. No-one knows why. Just one of those shitty things that happens and all that.

'By edam on Wed 01-Jul-09 10:27:33

(Except it probably doesn't make up for smoking, alas.) '

here too.

i think the research is interesting.

we are a family of 5.myself and my youngest dc(aged 3) are veggie-and no we dont fill up on quorn etc,we have a healthy balanced diet according to our gp(or ds does,im lazy).dh,dd(aged 9) and ds1(aged 8) are meat eaters-they eat less healthily and are more fussy.id like dd and ds1 to be veggie to but although they know exactly what their meat is and how it goes from animal to plate-they still want to eat it.

Yes it can be very random

lol, spokette, i feel the veggie diet = no meat
but i can see that is a point of debate.

i c see it as either an on/off type thing.
ie i eat meat therefore i'm not a veggie

vs i eat meatand vegn therefore i am partly veggie..

but it's of no consequence to the debate.

protein sources that are non meat,
nuts, lentils, all sorts of beans, chickpeas etc. can all be eaten.
and you don't have to have pretend meat- you can bypass that issue completely.

yes oops, vegetarianism is definitely binary. Despite my Gran's repeated attempts to hide prawns or very thin ham on my plate as they are 'practically vegetarian'.

But there is vegetarian and vegetarian.

We only have meat 2X a week and have a fairly trash free diet. We eat way more fruit& veg than the vegetarians I know.

My in-laws eat a lot of manufactured crap,highly processed filled with god knows what and not much fruit and veg. In fact the veggie food I cook has been accused of being too veggie in the past. Others I know are the same masses of cheese and pastry products.

I know we eat way more healthily as do many other vegetarians but to say all do is fantasy. They must have made the diet in the study trash free surely in which case I hope they made the meat eaters the same.

my nan and my mil used to do that.ham in a quiche-'its only a little bit' or tuna in something-'but fish is ok isnt it?'.also making gravy with the meat-eurgh!

Studies where they ask lots of people if they did this or that and if they got ill are a good first step to point to an area that needs looking into.

They can't be the end though as it's never as simple as that. For one thing you need to look at the actual mechanism as you might be rejecting meat when it's actually HOT food that's the problem (I bet on average meat eaters have fewer cold meals than vegetarians) or food that requires more chewing, takes longer to digest, or any one of dozens of possible factors.

Also the point made earlier about vegetarians being more likely to be generally health conscious.

That bit about adjusting the figures to allow for other differences has to be viewed with caution too as that will be based on figures arrived at by other studies like this. The experimental error factors multiplying as you use one to adjust another.

I suspect Spokette was simply making a point about being 70% vegetarian not really claiming to be one. I know that in other threads some ardent supporters of vegetarianism have posted as though meat eaters never eat veg whereas of course most of what we eat is veg.

One said to me once that I was missing out on all those lovely vegetables as though she pitied me not being allowed to have them

Yes but you also get threads by people wailing about having a visitor due who is veggie and what on earth can you feed them. As if the poster rotates between bacon, beef and chicken at every meal and never ever has anything remotely dairy or plant-based!

Do people still have meat with every meal?
Maybe they do.

most meat eaters I know (and yes I am talking poncey London types) only eat red meat about once a week.

edam, thanks for the word binary- i just knew there was a word but just couldn't think of it!

and, totally, some veggies eat healthy and some don't-

i'm sure the numbers make account for this-
i'm not sure if eating a healthy diet with meat is "better" than a bad veggie diet in this study- it doesn't have that as a conclusion.

It's an interesting question, though. Don't think I'm a shining example of a healthy veggie diet.

Riven, sure, I just thought it was interesting - didn't start the thread or anything.

i don't think they adjusted any fgures to account for anything
It was a reflective survey vs a sceintific experiment.

I think the large volume of people evened out some of the stats tbh.

About 11& of all of the respondents smoked- so this would be discounted as a primary factor for the things they were looking at.

Tho', for example, maybe smoking and eating chicken is worse then smoking and eating ham... but the survey would never show that as it hadn't asked that question.

I heard one of the profs on the radio and he said it was a start point to look into why a veggie diet/factors assoc with veggie people may cut the risk of cancer significantly...

we are all asking further questions to which there is no answer at the moment, the survey has jsut brought up a whole load of (interesting) questions for debate and further research IMO.

There's a growing body of evidence pointing to the benefits of a mainly plant based diet.

Although the majority of cancers are lifestyle/environment related (including smoking and poisoning by asbestos), there are a still a substantial number which are not. It's 1/3 to just under a half, depending on what you read.

I was veggie for ten years, then an occasional fish eater for the next five, then a regular fish eater. I still got cancer as mine is genetic.

Perversely a vegetarian diet does not seem in any case to protect against my cancer, colo-rectal.

It's not straightforward.

Hmm,

Only read the original post, but -

there are lies, dammned lies and statistics.

A vegetarian cancer sufferer.

MM

the study didn't say that you wouldn't get cancer if you were veggie- just that fewer people got some cancers if they didn't eat meat..

i linked it earlier on.

And i'm sorry you have cancer,MM, is it being treated?