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Sustainable nutrition is associated with a statistically significant reduction in cancer risk and a corresponding decrease in cancer mortality. This was the finding of an extensive systematic review of the scientific literature evaluating data from 2.2 million people. The researchers involved came from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
Sustainable nutrition is increasingly recommended as a strategy for reducing noncommunicable diseases and promoting health worldwide. Current unhealthy dietary patterns are considered to contribute to the global cancer burden, while certain types of production further exacerbate environmental problems. “Investigating the impact of sustainable diets on cancer is therefore of critical importance,” wrote Marina Kasper from the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Regensburg and her co-authors, including Tilman Kühn (MedUni Vienna), in EClinicalMedicine/The Lancet Discovery Science (doi: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2025.103215).
Mortality rate drops by twelve percent
The study summarized a total of 19 estimates of the effect of sustainable diets on cancer from 17 studies conducted worldwide between 1983 and 2022 and analyzed the studies as a whole. “Adherence to sustainable diets showed a significant reduction in cancer incidence (minus seven percent) and cancer mortality (minus twelve percent),” the scientists found.
In any case, the dual benefits of sustainable nutrition in terms of health and the environment should be emphasized. However, better standardized approaches should also be developed to enhance the possibilities for investigating such topics. This is because the individual studies used had shown very different results in some cases.
The proportion of plant-based foods is too low
Calculations by a committee of the medical journal “The Lancet” in 2024 showed that the incidence of diet-related cancers increased by eight percent worldwide between 2016 and 2021. Twenty percent of cancer mortality in Western industrialized countries is associated with diet, primarily a low proportion of plant-based foods.
- source: APA/picture: Image by Sabrina Ripke from Pixabay
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