The Mediterranean Style Diet: It Might Cut The Incidence Of Womb Cancer By Half

♦ A diet rich in vegetables, nuts, fruit, olive oil or oils with lots of monounsaturated fats, cereals and pulses, little meat and other carbohydrates like potato, plenty of fish but little red meat, low dairy and alcohol intake.

♦ Incidence of womb cancer said to be cut by a half if the Mediterranean diet is followed.

 The Mediterranean diet has long been held up as one of the healthiest in the world and evidence for its nutritional healthiness continues to be gathered. The latest research from Italy and reported in the British Journal Of Cancer suggests that women on this particular diet might cut their risk of womb or uterine cancer by over a half (57%) later on in life.  New cases of womb cancer number 8,500 a year in the UK alone and its incidence has been increasing year on year.

The lead author Dr Cristina Bosetti from the IRCCS-Istuto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri stated:-

“Our research shows the impact a healthy balanced diet could have on a woman’s risk of developing womb cancer. This adds more weight to our understanding of how our every day choices, like what we eat and how active we are, affect our risk of cancer.”

The study was based on diets recorded by more than 5,000 Italian women which assessed how well they had stuck to the Mediterranean diet and the subsequent development of womb cancer in later life. There are provisos to the study on careful inspection because it depended on the subjects remembering what their diet had been which usually implies a high potential for bias. Nonetheless, such findings bare scrutiny.

The diet is based on consuming high levels of vegetables, nuts, fruit, olive oil or oils with lots of monounsaturated fats,  cereals and pulses, little meat and other carbohydrates like potato, plenty of fish but little red meat, low dairy and alcohol intake.

The research team separated the diet in to nine different components and assessed how well the women followed each component of the diet. Those women in the group who drastically lowered their risk of developing womb cancer had eaten from at least seven of the nine beneficial food groups. As less of the diet’s food groups were followed, the risk of womb cancer development rose. So any who followed just six of the diet’s components, lowered their risk by 46% and if only five components taken, then the risk was reduced to just over a third (34%). Any women on a diet based on five or fewer components of the diet did not show any greater significant difference in the risk compared with the average. It’s probably reasonable to assume that as the permutations rise in terms of components chosen, there is a mathematical probability of expecting this type of result. No one component is responsible, more a case of the diet being healthy.

The study was funded by the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss League Against Cancer.

The Head of Health Information at Cancer Research UK, Dr. Julie Sharp is stipulating:-

“While we know that getting older and being overweight both increase a woman’s risk of womb cancer, the idea that a Mediterranean diet could help reduce the risk needs more research. This is partly because the study was based on people remembering what they had eaten in the past.

“Cancer risk is affected by our age and our genes but a healthy lifestyle can also play a part in reducing the risk of some cancers.”

“Not smoking, keeping a healthy weight, being active, eating healthily and cutting down on alcohol helps to stack the odds in your favour.”

Filomeno, M. et al. (2015) Mediterranean diet and risk of endometrial cancer: a pooled analysis of three italian case-control studies. Brit. J. Cancer 112, pp. 1816–1821. doi:10.1038/bjc.2015.153