NCRI 2015

Non-judgemental advice on lifestyle changes in the face of cancer

Prof Eileen Kaner - Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK

We presented a symposium based on lifestyles and cancer prevention and drew in Professor Paolo Boffetta from the USA and Professor Martin Wiseman from the UK. Essentially there has been a lot of interest in smoking and cancer to date, and that’s very important, but what we wanted to do was to bring in some of the other lifestyle behaviours and think a little bit about diet, physical activity and obesity and also alcohol and the impact that these behaviours can have on people’s chances of developing cancer.

Can you give us some examples of diet related issues?

What we were able to do across the areas of diet, physical activity and alcohol was to draw upon now a very, very large evidence base which clearly demonstrates the link between these behaviour patterns and the chances of developing cancer. We also considered some of the things that we can do to try to improve people’s chances of not developing cancer in the first place but also improving their journey after having cancer if they are essentially in recovery because there’s quite a lot that we can do to improve people’s sense of wellbeing but also their healthy life expectancy.

So on the alcohol side a lot of us drink, 85% of the UK population at least. What we know is that there are a lot of trials to show that very brief advice which is simple and non-judgemental advice, helping people understand about how much they’re drinking and what impact that can have on their health and providing people with simple ways of thinking about cutting down their drinking, we know that that can change people’s chances of developing cancer and that’s going to have a beneficial impact on their health.

Are you also looking at diet and exercise where cancer has already been diagnosed?

One of the really good stories is that for people who have been successfully treated with cancer making changes to their lifestyles around diet, physical activity and alcohol can change their physical sense of wellbeing and their recovery journey from having had cancer and also give them much more optimism about the many healthy years to come when they’re actually putting the cancer behind them and actually trying to get on with enjoying their lives.

Are you making guidelines for these diet and lifestyle changes?

Certainly the story about smoking and cancer is absolutely clear and everybody has a good sense of that. What we also know now is the foods that you eat and the level of activity that you’re engaging in your daily life and how much you drink in your social life, they can all affect your chances of developing cancer. So if we can try and adopt a healthy diet that’s high in plant foods and maybe lower in processed meat, be physically active and try to cut back the amount that we drink we know that we can make a real difference to the number of people who will be diagnosed with cancer from this point. And also help improve the lives of people who are recovering from cancer.

Is there anything else from your talk that you’d like to mention?

I think the rather splendid thing was how many people came to the session. We’ve had a lot of focus on trying to understand what causes cancer and the shift now needs to be on what are the things that we can do about it. The session was very much trying to move us on to the next agenda which is how do we prevent cancer and how do we help to encourage people to actually live healthy and well lives, free of cancer.