Study On Milk And Bowel Cancer

By Author: Prabhu Eswaran
Total Articles: 14
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Colorectal cancer is 9% of all cancers and kills about 500,000 people per year worldwide.

In a study, Susanna Larsson published in the prestigious journal American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, was over 45,000 men aged 45-79 years followed from 1997 to 2004. None of these had cancer of the baseline. The men who participated in this study had a high calcium intake in the diet (809 - 1665 mg of calcium per day). Only 2% took calcium supplements. The aim of this study was to see if the amount of calcium and dairy products that were taken had no influence on the risk of developing bowel cancer.

Big difference in risk:

They found a reduction in risk of 32% when compared to individuals with the highest and lowest intake of calcium. When you did the same analysis on the consumption of dairy products was found a reduction in risk of 54% when compared to people who took a lot of dairy products (more than seven servings of dairy products a day) with people with a low intake of such products (less than two servings of dairy products daily ).

Both calcium and dairy products protected:

It was found that ...
... is a protective effect of calcium both in itself and of dairy products on the development of cancer of the colon and rectum, but the effect was greatest for dairy products. Among dairy products protected milk best. The tendency was that the types of milk containing more than 0.1% fat seemed to be more protective than skim milk. They found a protective effect of the cream and sour cream, but not for yogurt and cheese. Milk superior ability to protect believed to be because milk is an important source of calcium than cheese and yogurt for most people. However it must also be other protective factors in dairy products other than calcium, and candidates here are so-called CLA and milk proteins.

1400 mg of calcium a day:

When studying risk reduction and the amount of calcium that the different subjects were taken, so it appears that there exists a kind of threshold level of around 1400 mg of calcium a day.

Weaknesses of the study:

A weakness is that you have not studied other calcium sources in the diet than dairy products and that you have not studied vitamin D status, only intake of vitamin D. Studies in animals have shown that the beneficial effect of calcium seems to have disappeared by vitamin D deficiency. Another weakness is the participation rate, only 49% of the men who were invited to participate in the study completed.

Strengths of the study:

There were a high number of participants in the study, which gives the results strength. This was a prospective study, that a study to follow individuals forward in time. This avoids the problem of people who have been ill change their diet as a result.

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