Confirm that organic foods reduce the incidence of cancer is difficult



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Tomorrow – NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – People who consume more organic food are less likely to develop cancer than those who have never eaten it, but have also struggled to establish a cause-and-effect relationship. effect between nutrition and health, according to a recent study.

It is impossible to conclusively prove that this or that food reduces the risk of a complex disease such as cancer.

Researchers should monitor the condition of a large number of people and wait for the registration of certain cancerous lesions in some of them, in the hope of monitoring certain behaviors at the same time. patients who may be held responsible for the injuries that followed.

Thousands of studies have been conducted on nutrition and its role in various diseases over the past decades. Even the most important of these studies is sometimes called into question, as in the case of the famous experiment, which showed in 2013 the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet in the fight against heart disease, but was removed from the medical journal this year. year due to methodological issues.

In the case of organic foods, a large-scale study on the effects of cancer was conducted under the title "Million Wemen Stadi", which included 600,000 Britons in 2014.

The study makes no difference between women who consume organic foods and those who do not take them for overall cancer risk, but note that eating these foods reduces the risk of a specific cancerous disease is non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

However, the recent French study, overseen by leading scientific institutions such as the University of Sorbonne, the National Institute of Agricultural Research and the National Institute of Health and the Medical research was more detailed, although it included fewer than 69,000 people, most of whom were women. The results of this study were published in the American magazine "Gamma".

The hypothesis is that organic food consumers consume less synthetic pesticides in fruits, vegetables and cereals and thus reduce their risk of suspicion of insecticides at the origin of cancer .

After using them, volunteers completed a questionnaire containing information on income levels, physical activity, body mass index and smoking, as well as on the amount of organic food that they had consumed during the previous 24 hours.

Participants were divided into four groups based on their consumption of organic foods. The number of cancer cases in each group was calculated over an average period of four and a half years.

Of a quarter of respondents who reported consuming the largest amounts of organic food, the risk of cancer was 25% lower than the quarter, those who said they had never eaten juicy food.

In absolute terms, the increase in risk is only 0.6%, which represents six additional patients per 100,000 population.

The study did not conclude that there is a significant statistical relationship between these two factors, except in cases of breast cancer in menopausal women and in the lymphoma domain, in particular non-breast cancer patients. -hodgkinines.

The authors of the study were keen to correct their results by taking into account that people who consume organic foods are generally richer and less obese and smoke less.
Other subtle factors associated with the environment or lifestyle, however, play a potential role in this direction.

This is a fundamental problem of such studies.

"People who consume organic foods openly are probably different from others," said Nigel Brockton, director of research at the American Institute for Cancer Research.

It does not recommend a specific diet, but a whole range of practices aimed at reducing the risk of cancer, including maintaining a normal weight and exercising, exercising, lightening, and restoring weight. Adopting a healthy diet and choosing not to eat too much red meat.

"The diet is complex," says Brockton, "We will never publish a recommendation based on a study, no matter how statistically important."

Other problems also concerned the non-measurement of the effects of pesticides among study participants, which prompted criticism from Harvard University experts in the same issue of the magazine Gamma.

Julia Bodry, one of the authors of the study, told AFP that the measures had been taken only on a small subset of participants.

The researchers' confidence in the information presented by the participants also poses another problem to John Johnides, professor of medicine at Stanford University, who is known to say that most published studies are wrong.

"Most people, including myself, are not able to specifically disclose the amount of organic food they eat," he told AFP.

"The probability that this study reaches a significant 3% is a 97% probability that it gives absurd and trivial results," he said.

However, "the field of research is progressing with every new study," according to Brockton.

As for red meat or cigarettes, several studies must be conducted in the same direction to draw conclusions about organic foods.

In the meantime, the AmericanCancer Society recommends eating fruits and vegetables, organic or not. (AFP)

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