Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com Author: Catharine Paddock, PhD A large study of over 400,000 people living in ten western European countries found only a modest link between high intake of fruit and vegetables and reduction in overall cancer risk: thus failing to confirm the widely held belief enshrined in the World Health Organization's recommendation that people should eat five servings of fruit and vegetables a day to prevent cancer and other diseases. Dr Paolo Boffetta, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and colleagues, wrote about their findings in a study published in the 6 April online issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. In 1990 the World Health Organization recommended people eat five helpings of fruit and vegetables a day to reduce their risk of cancer, cardiovascular and other diseases. But since then, many studies have either produced inconsistent results or failed to find a significant link between fruit and vegetable intake and cancer risk, wrote the authors. For their prospective study, Boffetta and colleagues analyzed data from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), which recruited 142,605 men and 335,873 women in Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom, between 1992 and 2000. The data were mostly self-reported by the participants and detailed their dietary and lifestyle habits. The participants were followed for a median of 8.7 years, during which time deaths and incidents of cancer diagnoses were noted. The researchers then analysed the data using [...]