ABSTRACT
For many years, researchers have sought to explain the rising incidence of malignancies in Western countries, including breast, colorectal, prostate, and other epithelial cancers. In a seminal article in 1981, Doll and Peto [1] evaluated the causes of cancer in the United States. The two leading causes were tobacco use and diet and lifestyle. They speculated that diet played a role in between one-third and two-thirds of all cancers. Early epidemiologic studies, based largely on international ecologic and case-control studies, suggested associations between cancer risk and per capita dietary fat, ber, other dietary components, and micronutrients, as well as dietary fruit and vegetable intake [2-7]. Over the last decade, many of these factors have been shown to be only weakly associated with cancer risk based on longer term prospective cohort studies as well as randomized control trials [8-11].
