New research has indicated that people who have suffered colon cancer may be able to significantly lower the risk of their cancer returning by eating a diet high in fish, poultry, vegetables and fruit.

Assistant Professor Of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and lead study author Dr Jeffrey Meyerhardt, said, ‘We know a lot about how certain dietary things affect the risk of developing colon cancer in the first place but we didn’t know, before this study, how diet affected persons who already have cancer’.

One thousand and nine chemotherapy patients with stage three colon cancer (spread to the lymph nodes), who had already had surgery to remove the cancer, answered dietary questionnaires both during and after the period of their treatment.

Two main diets were identified by the researchers, namely Western, which comprised high meat, fat, refined grains and desserts intake, and Prudent, which comprised more fish, poultry, vegetables and fruit. Those patients who fell into the Western diet category were found to have a significantly higher risk of recurrence and death than Prudent dieters.

Patients in the highest 20 per cent of a Western dietary pattern had nearly three and a half times the risk of recurrence or death than those in the lowest 20 per cent. They were also 2.9 times more likely to suffer recurrence of their cancer.

‘This is not a substitute for standard therapy, but it’s not unreasonable for oncologists to use this data to start talking about diet. There are benefits in other regards, such as benefits for heart disease, and it does give us some initial information that may affect people’s outcome’ Meyerhardt said.