Meaty Diet Linked to Pancreatic Cancer But Green Tea May Protect Against Prostate Cancer
4/22/2005 Anaheim, CA Charlene Laino WebMD Health (my.webmd.com) New studies presented at a major cancer meeting reinforce the old adage that you are what you eat (and drink). One study shows that green tea may stave off prostate cancer. Another study suggests that eating a lot of hot dogs, sausage, and other processed meats may raise the risk of pancreatic cancerrisk of pancreatic cancer. Loading up on red meat also seems to increase the chance of developing pancreatic cancer, one of the most deadly of tumors, says study researcher Ute Nothlings, DrPH, MSE. "The findings suggest that eating less processed meat and less red meat might help prevent pancreatic cancer," she tells WebMD. Nothlings is a researcher at the Cancer Research Center at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. Red meat has also been linked to an increase in colon cancer.linked to an increase in colon cancer. Diving Into the Meat of the Matter For the study, the researchers examined the relationship between diet and pancreatic cancer among nearly 200,000 men and women. When they first entered the study in the mid-1990s, all the participants filled out a detailed questionnaire that asked what foods they had eaten in the past year, how frequently they had eaten them, and how much they had eaten. By an average of seven years later, 482 of the men and women had developed pancreatic cancer. Those who ate more than 1.5 ounces of processed meat a day were about two-thirds more likely to have pancreatic [...]