Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Eating more fiber might lower your chances of getting cancers in your stomach or intestines, according to a big review of past studies.
Correlational
Eating more fiber might help people live longer by lowering their chances of dying from cancer.
Eating more fiber in your diet might help lower your chances of getting cancer overall, according to a big review of past studies.
Researchers followed nearly 10,000 Finnish adults for 24 years and found that eating foods with nitrates or nitrites didn't increase their chances of getting stomach or intestinal cancers.
Eating a lot of smoked and salted fish might raise your chances of getting colon cancer later in life, based on a long-term study of Finnish adults.
Eating more of a chemical called NDMA might raise your chances of getting colon cancer, according to a long-term study of Finnish people.
When someone is overweight and exposed to a lot of NDMA (a chemical found in some foods and water), their chance of getting cancer goes up more and more as the exposure increases.
Quantitative
Eating more foods with a certain chemical called NDMA might raise your chances of getting colon or rectal cancer by 12% if you're an adult.
Eating more foods with certain chemicals called nitrites and nitrates might slightly raise your chance of getting cancer later in life, according to a big study that followed people for 12 years.
Eating more red and processed meat doesn't seem to help prevent cancer, according to studies that looked at how much people eat.
Eating more processed meat, like bacon or sausages, might raise your chances of getting different types of cancer. For every extra 50 grams you eat each day, the risk could go up by a lot—anywhere from 8% to 72%.
Eating more red meat every day might raise your chances of getting different types of cancer by a lot, according to big studies that looked at how much meat people eat.
Eating processed meats like bacon or sausages might raise your chances of dying from cancer or getting certain types of cancer, according to big studies that combine lots of research.
Eating red meat might raise your chances of dying from cancer or getting certain types of cancer, according to big reviews of past research.
Eating even small amounts of red and processed meats regularly might increase your chances of getting long-term illnesses like heart disease or cancer, according to big reviews of past studies.
If you swap out foods like burgers and bacon for things like beans, chicken, or fish, it might help lower your chances of getting sick because these foods work better in your body.
Causal
Eating processed meats like bacon or sausage is more likely to cause long-term health problems than eating plain red meats like steak, according to health studies.
Eating a lot of processed meats like bacon or sausages is strongly linked to a higher chance of getting serious diseases like cancer, diabetes, and heart problems, and even dying earlier.
Humans and apes have high uric acid levels that might act like vitamin C to protect cells, helping them live longer and grow bigger, but this idea isn't proven.
Mechanistic
Monkeys and humans can't make vitamin C anymore, which might help fight cancer by changing how cells use sugar, but this is just a guess about evolution.
As people get older, their bodies might produce less of certain hormones, and this could make them more likely to get cancer over their lifetime, but scientists haven't proven this yet.
Scientists have a theory that animals keep their chance of getting cancer around 4% by balancing things like how big they are, how long they live, and how their bodies fight cancer, but it's just a guess from computer models so far.
Descriptive
Humans might have a special built-in way to fight cancer that uses certain hormones and proteins, which could have developed to protect us from cancer-causing chemicals in the environment, but this idea hasn't been proven yet.
In simple terms: Stomach cancer linked to eating too much salt is expected to become less common in these Asian countries over the next 15 years, but because more people are getting older and populations are growing, the total number of deaths might still go up in China and Mongolia.