Despite the advances in cancer research over the past 40 years, including World Cancer Research Fund’s evidence on cancer prevention, and dramatic advances in cancer treatment, one question remains to be answered: why does one person get cancer when another, who lives a similar lifestyle, does not?

Experts estimate that up to 40% of cancer cases are preventable, if people didn’t smoke, avoided the sun, avoided alcohol, ate a healthy diet, maintained a healthy body weight and stayed physically active. But that doesn’t mean we can reduce our own risk of cancer by 40% if we follow this advice. It’s not easy to estimate an individual’s cancer risk because so many biological and genetic factors are also at play.

And that’s where large databases about our health can make a big difference. One of these is the UK Biobank, which contains details about the health – and increasingly, as the participants get older, the ill-health, of 500,000 people in the UK. The longevity of this data – not just at one point in a person’s life but repeatedly measured over a long period of time – helps us understand what influences cancer risk throughout someone’s life.

Heel bone density to house size

Since 2006, the UK Biobank has been collecting environmental, lifestyle and genetic information about the participants. For scientists, the size, range of information – from heel bone density to blood pressure to the size of their house – and duration of information collected is a gold mine.

It has been described as “the world’s most important health database” yet it’s not the only resource of this type. Another large database established as part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study has grown into a massive project involving 10 countries, with 521,000 participants and data collected over more than 30 years.

Of the 30,000 registered researchers from 100 countries who have used data from the UK Biobank, some are funded by the World Cancer Research Fund network, and are using the data to investigate a range of cancer risk factors:

• Sleep, sleep patterns, and risk of prostate and endometrial cancer
• Fat tissue and advanced prostate cancer risk
• Social inequality and cancer risk
• Physical activity, sedentary behaviours, and cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes
• Plant-based diets
• Ultra-processed food
• Following our Cancer Prevention Recommendations
• Obesity and insulin
• Vegetarian diets
• Links between diabetes and cancer
• How many cancers are linked to obesity and physical activity?

Some of the things our scientists have found out using UK Biobank data include:

• Physical activity across the day – with a peak early in the morning and late in the evening – linked to lower risk of colorectal cancer
• Ultra-processed food increases cancer risk
• Following our Cancer Prevention Recommendations reduces the risk of all cancers

The UK Biobank allows researchers around the world to look at biological and medical data and “supports a diverse range of research intended to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of illness, and the promotion of health throughout society”.

And it’s not easy to get hold of such large amounts of data. It’s hard to get half a million people to consent to sharing their personal data in this way, and even harder to get them to keep filling in surveys and undergoing procedures over many years. This type of research can only be done with people’s support and willingness to consent, and without it, finding ways to prevent and treat diseases such as cancer will be so much harder.

The wealth of data the UK Biobank contains could have drastic implications for cancer research, perhaps even finally helping realise World Cancer Research Fund’s ambition of living in a world where no one dies of a preventable cancer.

What do our grant holders say about UK Biobank?

Eating a wide variety of food may reduce the risk of gastrointestinal cancers, according to research funded by the World Cancer Research Fund network* and published in the European Journal of Cancer.

Little is known about how eating a wide variety of food species, also known as food biodiversity, may benefit our health or affect our cancer risk. Food species refer to a distinct type of plant or animal, such as wheat, chicken, or salmon. For example, salmon, mackerel, and tuna are all separate food species, even though they share some biological traits and belong to the same food group. Similarly, rocket, lettuce and spinach count as separate food species, even though they are all leafy green vegetables. However, chicken and a chicken’s egg belong to the same food species even though they are different types of food.

This study is the first to examine how the number of different food types consumed, measured as Dietary Species Richness (the number of species an individual consumes per year) affects the risk of the following gastrointestinal cancers:

• Oesophagus
• Throat
• Stomach
• Bowel
• Colon
• Rectum
• Gallbladder
• Pancreas
• Liver

The study followed 450,111 cancer-free adults in 9 European countries from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition cohort for 14 years. The researchers, from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, found that individuals with the most diverse diets, by including more food species in their diet, had a 23% lower risk of developing gastrointestinal cancers compared with those with the least variety. The risk decreased by 6% for every 10 extra species per year added to their diet. People can do this by including more variety in the types of fruit and vegetables they eat, for example, choosing to eat local and seasonal fruit and vegetables of different colours.

Food biodiversity includes eating different types of food that provide the necessary nutrients for maintaining health. Investigating food biodiversity is important because it has the potential to benefit public health and sustainable food systems.

Dr Helen Croker, our Assistant Director of Research and Policy, said: “Diets have become more limited in the types of foods eaten and they are often high in fat, sugar and salt. However, for cancer prevention, it’s important to eat a healthy, balanced and varied diet with plenty of wholegrains, pulses, vegetables and fruit.”

Achieving a balanced combination of exercise and controlling our waistline is far more effective in reducing our risk of cancer than doing just one or the other, according to a study funded by World Cancer Research Fund.

In the world’s first study looking at the effectiveness of combining these measures, we found that only doing one is not enough to lower our risk of cancer. The study, which looked at more than 300,000 people, found that:

• People not meeting World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines on waist circumference are at 11% greater risk, even if they are physically active.
• People not meeting WHO guidelines for physical exercise are at 4% greater risk, even if “abdominally lean” (ie they have a smaller waist).
• Achieving neither means a 15% greater risk.

The study – WHO guidelines on waist circumference and physical activity and their joint association with cancer risk (Lead researcher: Prof Michael Leitzmann, University of Regensburg) – was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.