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Various aspects of the Mediterranean diet are considered to have a favourable effect on several common epithelial cancers.
These were analyzed using data from a series of case-control studies conducted in Northern Italy on over 20,000 cases of several major cancer sites and a comparable number of controls.
For most digestive tract cancers, the risk decreased with increasing vegetable and fruit consumption, with relative risks (RR) between 0.3 and 0.7 for the highest versus the lowest tertile, and the population attributable risks for low intake of vegetables and fruit ranged between 15 and 40%. Fish tended to be another favourable diet indicator. In contrast, subjects reporting frequent red meat intake showed RRs above unity for several neoplasms. Whole grain food intake was related to reduced risk of several types of cancer, particularly of the upper digestive tract. This may be due to a favourable role of fibre, but the issue is still open to discussion. In contrast, refined grain intake and, consequently, glycaemic load and index were associated to increased risk of different types of cancer, particularly digestive tract and hormone-related ones.
Further, olive oil, which is a typical aspect of the Mediterranean diet, has been inversely related to cancers of the colorectum and breast, and mainly of the upper digestive and respiratory tract neoplasms. When a Mediterranean diet score, originally developed by Antonia Trichopoulou et al. on Greek data, was applied to our dataset, subjects in the highest score level for adherence to Mediterranean diet had 30 to 50% reduced risks of most common neoplasms, particularly of the digestive tract, but also of the liver, pancreas and endometrium.
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