I recently landed on a Cancer and Diet website which lists most of the functional foods and related study on cancer . The interesting fact here is most of the conclusions from those studies present no evidence for the fact that eating vegetables and fruits will reduce the risk of cancer. This is the perfect example of using one type of information in a wrong way. This is against my views and position and here is why:

First of all it is important to distinguish epidemiologic study from laboratory study. An epidemiologic study is typically based on a questionnaire where people respond whatever they want. Of course a large group will help to minimize the outlier case and the wishful thinking, but still there is no precision.

An important fact about epidemiologic study is there are  a lot of variables you can’t control such as people smoke, do exercise, if they had infection, their exposure to cancer producing causes at their work, etc. Using only epidemiologic study, what the website Cancer and Diet did is like looking only one side of the subject.
However, an epidemiologic study is a  great tool to compare 2 different populations. As an Example in 2007 the National Cancer Institute made an epidemiologic study on Oriental women and the risk of breast cancer. In that study they compared Japanese women and Japanese women immigrants in USA and concluded that the risk of incidence of breast cancer for Japanese women immigrants in Hawaii USA increased by about 87% compared to 22% for Japanese woman living in Osaka. But this is not enough because this is just a starting point to go deeper into the study and narrow down which aspect of their life style has a real impact.

My approach is to read for you the list of articles which is based on scientific laboratory study on cell and molecules. In a controlled environment you can find out if the composition of soy can impact the cancer or not; supported by an epidemiologic study which compares 2 different populations where you can suspect that one of the population may eat more soy than the other (Japanese woman living in Osaka vs. Hawaii).

In sum, epidemiologic study is good to get a general idea of a cancer risk and laboratory study narrows down specific aspect of an element. The mix of them helps to make the appropriate conclusion. But at this point my biggest frustration as a researcher is that the studies are not done that way. That is one of the reason why I created the blog.