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  • Food controversies
  • The EPIC study
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  • Look at the labels
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Diet and cancer- the EPIC study

The links between health and diet are very complex and human population studies must look at large numbers of people to provide the most meaningful results.

Many previous studies on diet and cancer have been flawed for the following reasons:

• They were too small. Even thousands of people may not be enough to detect links between cancer and diet.
• They focused on one population with limited variation in diet. For example, if you only study a group of people who eat very little fibre, your study would miss out the beneficial effects of eating large amounts of fibre.
• They did not measure dietary intakes accurately. In many cases, scientists determined their subjects’ diets by asking them to remember what they ate months or years in the past.

The EPIC study

Cancer Research UK is co-funding the UK arm of a massive study called EPIC, the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer. EPIC researchers have carefully designed the study to overcome the limitations of previous investigations.

EPIC is a long-term study of more than 500,000 people in ten European countries. This includes around 90,000 British men and women, including about 30,000 vegetarians, recruited by Cancer Research UK groups in Oxford and Cambridge.

EPIC aims to produce detailed, reliable information about diet and cancer. Unlike many other studies, it has the following important design features:

• It’s huge. At over 500,000 participants, EPIC is the largest study of diet and health ever undertaken.
• It looks forward. Only healthy people were recruited and their health was then followed for many years. This type of study is called a prospective study. Many other studies ask patients who already have cancer to recall their lifestyles before their diagnosis - a much less accurate approach.
• It’s accurate. Each participant completed detailed diet and lifestyle questionnaires and most also provided blood and urine samples so the researchers could analyse their nutrient levels.
• It’s long-term. EPIC participants will be followed for at least 10 years. Participants fill out repeat surveys every three years or so.
• It has a wide geographical coverage. People from the 10 EPIC countries have very varied diets. This will allow the researchers to make more reliable assessments of the effects of different aspects of our diet.