Does eating less fat reduce your risk of cancer? It depends who you ask. A recent study of nearly 50,000 women published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute showed that the overall risk of invasive cancer, and the specific risk of endometrial cancer, were not reduced in women who reduced their fat intake. The journal's website highlighted the paper with these words: “Low-fat diet mostly ineffective in lowering cancer risk for women” (http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org 9 October 2007).
However, one result in the paper bucked the trend, and it was this that attracted the mainstream media. Although the hazard ratio for ovarian cancer was not significantly reduced in the dieting individuals and there was no observable benefit in the first 4 years of fat reduction, in the second 4 years the incidence of ovarian cancer dropped to 0.38 per 1,000, compared with 0.64 per 1,000 in the control group. Moreover, “the evidence ... is strongest among women whose usual diet was relatively high in fat (e.g. more than 35 percent of calories) who made a comparatively large fat reduction if assigned to the low-fat diet group,” said lead author Ross Prentice (http://www.washingtonpost.com 9 October 2007).
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