UK under pressure to promote natural healthcare
group of British politicians, who are calling for the Government to
focus on diet to reduce cancer incidence in the UK.
Food is a major and underused anticancer weapon, according to a group of British politicians, who are calling for the Government to focus on diet to reduce cancer incidence in the UK.
"With dietary interventions, we have the potential to prevent around a third of all cancers," said Dr Ian Gibson MP, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cancer. "In the long term, we could also save some of the £2.4-3.5 billion (€3.4bn) annual cost to the NHS [National Health Service] of cancer," he added.
The group of MPs claims that 70 per cent of cancer treatment money is spent during the terminal stages, while less than 10 per cent of total cancer research funding is focused on prevention. This is at odds with the overwhelming epidemiological evidence that many cancers are preventable.
"The biological mechanisms of cancer prevention through diet can be discovered and exploited in the same way as new curative drugs," said Professor Ian Johnson of the Norwich-based Institute of Food Research (IFR), a publicly funded research group, which has collaborated on the 'Diet and Cancer' report, to be launched at today's annual Britain Against Cancer conference.
"Scientific advances should be as vigorously applied to prevention strategies as they are to drug development," Johnson added.
This needs to be accompanied by an investment in public awareness of the links between food and cancer prevention, as research has shown that such associations are often poorly understood. For example, an IFR study of beliefs among low-income women found that foods were not generally linked to cancer prevention. Connections made between food and cancer revolved around beliefs that food processing might cause cancer.
However, "the strongest association between diet and cancer in the western world is the protective effect of a high intake of fruit and vegetables", noted Professor Johnson.
"In the next Cancer Plan, let's try to get it right for the sake of the economy, the long term future of the NHS, and the health of the next generation," said Dr Ian Gibson MP.
While awareness of healthy diet urgently needs to be tackled, UK consumers are increasingly buying herbal products, supplements and alternative medicine. The UK's vitamin and supplement market is one of the largest in Europe, with sales of £350 million (€510m) last year, and although new European legislation could considerably reduce the number of products on health store shelves, consumer pressure could see natural remedies gradually introduced to national healthcare.
Earlier this week a government advisor called for herbal and other alternative medicines to become available on the National Health Service. Harry Cayton, charged with introducing 'choice' into the NHS, said that herbs like St John's Wort and echinacea should be prescribed if patients insist that they are beneficial, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
And the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the Government body that decides which drugs should be used by the NHS, also issued recommendations this week on the use of supplements, to include ginger in antenatal care.
