UK Biobank Study Links Vegetarian Diets to 14% Lower Cancer Risk

Vegetarian diets are linked to a 14% lower risk of cancer compared with eating meat regularly, according to a study of more than 470,000 people in the UK. Vegetarian men also had a 31% lower risk of prostate cancer.

Cody Watling and colleagues at Oxford Population Health followed 472,377 cancer-free UK Biobank participants for an average of 11.4 years, during which 54,961 cancers were diagnosed. The study, funded by World Cancer Research Fund and Cancer Research UK, is published in BMC Medicine.

Compared with people eating meat more than five times a week, cancer risk was 2% lower in low meat-eaters and 10% lower in fish-eaters. Low meat-eaters had 9% lower bowel cancer risk, and vegetarian women had 18% lower risk of postmenopausal breast cancer, possibly explained by their lower body weight. The study is observational and vegans were too few to study separately.

Previous evidence has suggested that vegetarians and pescatarians may have a lower risk of developing cancer. However, the evidence for a lower risk of developing specific types of cancer has been inconclusive.

That is lead researcher Cody Watling in the World Cancer Research Fund release. He added: "Being overweight after menopause is known to increase the risk of breast cancer and so the reduced risk of post-menopausal breast cancer in vegetarian women, due to lower BMI, was unsurprising - but we were surprised by the substantially lower risk of prostate cancer in vegetarians."

It follows the French study linking a plant-rich diet to 15% lower cancer risk and the Oxford study that linked meat to heart disease, diabetes and pneumonia.

Another big study, another good reason to fill up on plants.