Nikolay Markov
For both men and women, cutting processed meat is one of AICR’s Recommendations for Cancer Prevention that most strongly links to lower colorectal cancer risk, suggests a new study that focused on gender. But no matter the gender, the more healthy AICR Recommendations people followed, the lower the colorectal cancer risk when compared to none.
The study, published in Cancer Causes & Control last week, joins a list of other studies conducted independent of AICR that show following healthy recommendations lowers cancer risk.
Here, researchers analyzed data from 67,000 participants of the VITamins And Lifestyle Study. At the start of the study, the participants were 50 to 76 years old and cancer-free. They had answered questions about what they typically ate, their weight and other lifestyle habits.
The study scored whether each participant met AICR’s Recommendations related to body weight, physical activity, energy density, plant foods, red and processed meat, and alcohol.
After almost 8 years, 546 of the participants had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer.
Compared with meeting no recommendations, meeting 1–3 lowered risk by slightly more than a third and 4–6 recommendations lowered risk by about half. This was after taking into account BMI and other recognized risk factors.
The recommendations most strongly associated with lower colorectal risk for women were related to body fatness and red and processed meat, while for men these were alcohol intake and red and processed meat. 
