Health & Medicine

A Vegetarian Diet May Lower Your Risk Of Colorectal Cancer

Kathleen Lees
First Posted: Mar 09, 2015 06:44 PM EDT

A veggie diet can reduce your risk of colorectal cancer, according to recent findings published in the Journal of the American Medical Association of Internal Medicine.

For the study, researchers looked at 77,000 participants and found that women and non-blacks were slightly less likely to develop this form of cancer than those on a non-vegetarian diet.

Similar findings were also found for those who did not completely go vegetarian but reduced their red meat intake. However, the main group of participants included vegans, vegetarians (meaning they did not eat meat but ate eggs and dairy), pesco-vegetarians and semi-vegetarians who did not eat fish more than once a week.

More research is certainly needed to prove if the findings prove true. However, it has shown consumption of red meat has been linked to an increased risk of some types of cancer.

Researchers noted, however, that the study data does not prove causation, meaning that adopting a mainly vegetarian diet will not necessarily result in a directly lowered risk of colorectal cancer.

See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone

More on SCIENCEwr