ISLAMABAD, (APP): People who eat a lot of saturated fat the "bad" kind of fat that's abundant in foods like butter and beef are more likely to develop lung cancer than individuals on low-fat diets, a recent study suggested.
Compared to adults who didn't get a lot of fat in their diets, people who ate the most total fat and saturated fat were 14 percent more likely to get lung malignancies, the study found. For current and former smokers, the added risk of a high fat diet was 15 percent.
While the best way to lower the risk of lung cancer is to not smoke, "a healthy diet may also help reduce lung cancer risk,"said study co-author Danxia Yu of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, Health news reported.
"Specifically, our findings suggest that increasing polyunsaturated fat intake while reducing saturated fat intake, especially among smokers and recent quitters, may (help prevent) not only cardiovascular disease but also lung cancer," she said.
Both diets emphasize cooking with vegetable oils with unsaturated fats, eating nuts, fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy products, whole grains, fish and poultry, and limiting red meat and added sugars and salt.
"Those guidelines are the same for avoiding heart disease, stroke and diabetes, and I would say they are also exactly the same for helping with cancer prevention in general and lung cancer in particular," said Dr. Nathan Berger, a researcher at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center who wasn't involved in the study.
"This doesn't mean you need to throw away all the steak and butter in your freezer, but cutting back to once a week would be good for you," Berger said.
Combined, the smaller studies had more than 1.4 million participants, including 18,822 with cases of lung cancer identified during an average follow-up of more than nine years.
Researchers sorted participants into five categories, from lowest to highest consumption of total and saturated fats. They also sorted participants into five groups ranging from the lowest to highest amounts of dietary unsaturated fats.