Professor Willett explains that for overall cancer reduction by diet, the most important thing is keeping calories in balance with our physical activity, which means staying as lean and active as we can throughout our life.

Walter Willett is the Fredrick John Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. HIs research focuses on how dietary factors may contribute to and cause health-related conditions. He has written a book entitled Eat, Drink and Be Happy, which summarizes some of the results from his research. “For overall cancer reduction by diet, the most important thing is keeping calories in balance with our physical activity, which means staying as lean and active as we can throughout our life. There's quite a bit of evidence that high consumption of red meat is related to several cancers, probably colon cancer and probably prostate cancer as well. So, replacing some of the red meat with poultry, some legumes, beans, and fish, and nuts is a good thing to do. We know that's very helpful from the standpoint of cardiovascular disease and probably useful from a standpoint of cancer prevention as well. Eating a lot of fruits and vegetables has been widely advocated as a means of reducing cancer risk and there possibly is some benefit from that. But it's I think pretty clear that it's not nearly as powerfully cancer preventive as we had hoped a few years ago. And it may turn out that it's much more specific than cancer overall. For example, we have seen that men who consume more tomato products high in a substance called lycopene have a lower risk of prostate cancer, but when we look at fruits and vegetables overall, we don't see much relationship with prostate cancer risks. So, this may have to come down to specific components of fruits and vegetables and specific cancers.”

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