You can protect yourself from cancer by eating organic, a new study suggests. Those who frequently eat organic foods lowered their overall risk of developing cancer.
A higher frequency of eating organic food is associated with a reduced risk for cancer, according to results from a large population-based observational study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week.
Led by Julia Baudry, an epidemiologist at Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale in France, a team of researchers looked at the diets of 68,946 French adults. More than three-quarters of the volunteers were women, in their mid-40s on average. These volunteers were categorized into four groups depending on how often they reported eating 16 organic products, including fruits and vegetables, meat and fish, ready-to-eat meals, vegetable oils and condiments, dietary supplements and other products.
“Our results indicate that higher organic food consumption is associated with a reduction in the risk of overall cancer,” Dr Baudry says.
“We observed reduced risks for specific cancer sites – postmenopausal breast cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and all lymphomas – among individuals with a higher frequency of organic food consumption.
‘Although our findings need to be confirmed, promoting organic food consumption in the general population could be a promising preventive strategy against cancer.”
The study finds that pesticide-free organic food lowers your blood cancer risk by 86 per cent, and slashes breast and skin cancer risk by more than a third.
“If the findings are confirmed, promoting organic food consumption in the general population could be a promising preventive strategy against cancer,” Baudry and her colleagues concluded.
However, the diet had no significant effect on bowel cancer – which is soaring in numbers globally – or prostate cancer.
While the study does have several limitations, its takeaway, according to Chavarro, is that we should all probably be paying more attention to how much organic food we eat and “we should probably be studying this more”.
