• Question: is specific food can make you get cancer

    Asked by cupcake94 to Amar, Ana, Andrea, Leah, Matt on 10 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by isaacnewton123, court1700.
    • Photo: Andrea Hanvey

      Andrea Hanvey answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      its well documented that diets high in salty food are linked to stomach cancer. There is a high rate of stomach cancer in Japan due to salting and pickling process of a lot of their foods.

      its also been documented that eating a iet high in red meat and processed meats increases your risk of colon cancer.

      drinking excessive amounts of alcohol can put people at risk of about severn different types of cancer including mouth and liver

    • Photo: Amar Joshi

      Amar Joshi answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      Eating large amounts of processed red meat can make you more likely to get colon cancer. And drinking excessive amounts of alcohol can cause mouth, tongue and throat cancer. But is important to remember that these cancer can have other causes too – or happen just by coincidence.

    • Photo: Leah Fitzsimmons

      Leah Fitzsimmons answered on 10 Mar 2014:

      Foods can’t cause cancer by themselves, and it is sometimes difficult to tell exactly why certain foods increase a person’s risk of getting cancer.

      One type of cancer I work on is very common in Asian countries where people eat a lot of preserved and salty fish but researchers are still trying to figure out exactly how these two things are linked. Some people think that it is because there are small quantities of chemicals in the fish that can build up and increase the chances of mutations happening in the genes of the people that eat it. This is hard to test directly as it would be illegal to ask people to eat lots of preserved fish and then let doctors take away their cells to look for damage – so we have to find other ways to check this in the lab.

      Other scientists think that the people who end up getting the cancer already have mutations in an important gene and that eating the preserved fish somehow interacts with an already faulty gene. Again, this is difficult to prove because we don’t yet know all of the genes that are important in this cancer so we can’t easily look in people’s DNA to find the gene that is causing the problem.

    • Photo: Anastasia Wass

      Anastasia Wass answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      As Leah said eating unhealthily won’t directly cause cancer but certain foods can increase your risk!

    • Photo: Matthew Lam

      Matthew Lam answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      What the others have said it all true!

      It’s not a food but drinking too much alcohol can increase your chance of getting liver cancer.

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