Kate Emery: Sorry to contrarians, but turns out cancer experts are right

Bad news for anyone approaching the festive season with a burger in one hand and a pint in the other, safe in the knowledge that official health advice is so contradictory, confusing and ever-changing that it’s impossible to know what to believe anymore. After all, the “experts” once thought leeches and lobotomies were a cure-all so you’ll be taking your advice from the guy on TikTok who tells you what you want to hear, thanks very much: he’s got an eight-pack and access to a ring-light so he seems legit. Turns out, the experts know what they’re talking about and that official advice might save your life. That is according to a study published in BMC Medicine that attempted to show whether people who followed the official health advice for how to avoid cancer were actually less likely to get cancer, or if their ever-so-slightly joyless existence was all in vain. Some of us, I suspect, would secretly wish it to be the latter. Those people may be disappointed to learn that following the official lifestyle-based recommendations made by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research can significantly cut your risks for developing cancer. This is, as I say, terrible news to those of us who want to believe, as we queue for a morning doughnut and quadruple espresso, that truth is a social construct and official advice represents only the faddish trends of the moment. On the flipside, it’s pretty good news for anyone who wants to minimise their chances of, well, dying of cancer. The study worked like this: researchers looked at recommendations made by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research against the risk of both all cancers combined and those for which there is a particular lifestyle risk, including ovarian, lung, breast and prostate. They then used data from nearly 95,000 people in the UK, giving them a score for how well they adhered to the expert advice. Those people were tracked over eight years, during which 7296 of them developed cancer. For every point participants received for following a piece of advice, such as not smoking or restricting their consumption of red meat, their overall risk of cancer dropped by seven per cent. For breast cancer and colorectal cancer the correlation was stronger: each point equated to a 10 per cent reduction in the risk of breast cancer. The conclusion was that sticking to the recommendations reduced the risk of all cancers and specifically of breast, colorectal, kidney, oesophageal, ovarian, liver and gallbladder cancers. As for the advice? Maintain a healthy weight, be physically active, eat a diet rich in vegetables, fruit and wholegrains and low in meat, highly-processed foods, sugary drinks and alcohol. But, then, you knew that already, right?