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 Compared to adults who didn’t get a lot of fat in their diets,
people who ate the most total fat and saturated fat were 14 percent
more likely to get lung malignancies, the study found. For current
and former smokers, the added risk of a high fat diet was 15
percent.
While the best way to lower the risk of lung cancer is to not smoke,
“a healthy diet may also help reduce lung cancer risk,” said study
co-author Danxia Yu of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in
Nashville, Tennessee.
“Specifically, our findings suggest that increasing polyunsaturated
fat intake while reducing saturated fat intake, especially among
smokers and recent quitters, may (help prevent) not only
cardiovascular disease but also lung cancer,” she said.
The American Heart Association recommends the Dietary Approaches To
Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet or a Mediterranean-style diet to help
prevent cardiovascular disease. Both diets emphasize cooking with
vegetable oils with unsaturated fats, eating nuts, fruits,
vegetables, low-fat dairy products, whole grains, fish and poultry,
and limiting red meat and added sugars and salt.
“Those guidelines are the same for avoiding heart disease, stroke
and diabetes, and I would say they are also exactly the same for
helping with cancer prevention in general and lung cancer in
particular,” said Dr. Nathan Berger, a researcher at Case Western
Reserve University and University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center
who wasn’t involved in the study.
“This doesn’t mean you need to throw away all the steak and butter
in your freezer, but cutting back to once a week would be good for
you,” Berger said in a phone interview.
For the current study, researchers examined data from 10 previously
published studies in the United States, Europe and Asia that looked
at how dietary fat intake influences the odds of lung malignancies.
Combined, the smaller studies had more than 1.4 million
participants, including 18,822 with cases of lung cancer identified
during an average follow-up of more than nine years.
Researchers sorted participants into five categories, from lowest to
highest consumption of total and saturated fats. They also sorted
participants into five groups ranging from the lowest to highest
amounts of dietary unsaturated fats.
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Overall, people who ate the most unsaturated fats were 8 percent
less likely to develop lung cancer than people who ate the least
amounts, researchers report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
Substituting five percent of calories from saturated fat with
unsaturated fat was associated with a 16 percent lower risk of small
cell lung cancer and 17 percent lower odds of another type of lung
malignancy known as squamous cell carcinoma.
One limitation of the study is that dietary information was only
obtained at one point, the authors note. This makes it impossible to
track how changes in eating habits might influence the odds of
cancer.
They also didn’t account for two other things that may contribute to
cancer – sugar and trans fats, Glen Lawrence, a biochemistry
researcher at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York, said by
email. Previous research has also found that unsaturated oils may
increase the risk of certain cancers, added Lawrence, who wasn’t
involved in the current study.
It’s also possible that other bad eating habits, not fat, contribute
to the increased risk of lung cancer, said Ursula Schwab of the
Institute of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition at the University
of Eastern Finland in Kuopio.
“We need antioxidants, vitamins and minerals as well as unsaturated
fatty acids,” Schwab, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by
email. “A typical Western diet has a low content of these essential
nutrients and a high content of saturated fat.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2wsZteB Journal of Clinical Oncology, online
July 25, 2017.
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