ABSTRACT
In 1982, the National Research Council’s Committee on Diet, Nutrition, and Cancer (NRC) concluded “that of all the dietary components it studied, the combined epidemiological and experimental evidence is most suggestive for a causal relationship between fat intake and the occurrence of cancer” (National Research Council, 1982). This conclusion was based primarily on the strong positive correlation between dietary fat and cancers of the breast, colon, prostate and a number of other sites observed in intercountry studies and on the results of numerous experiments on animals showing that those fed high-fat diets develop cancer more readily than those fed low-fat diets, especially in the breast and colon. The evidence from studies on experimental animals indicated that dietary fat had a promoting effect on tumorigenesis (Carroll, 1975).
