Diet and cancer prevention

Recent articles and commentaries in the Journal cast doubt on the dietary prevention of cancer (1–4). Is this pessimism really justified?

Migration studies of populations moving from low-incidence to high-incidence locales (such as Japanese to Hawaii) suggested that dietary factors existed that altered colorectal cancer risk. The rapid increase in the incidence of colorectal cancer incidence throughout the first 13 years of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program1 (1973 through 1986; a National Center for Health Statistics program for monitoring cancer incidence and outcomes in the United States beginning in 1973) added urgency to define these dietary factors. …