The Common Food Preservatives That Are Linked To Cancer

Dr. Anaïs Hasenböhler is back!

Well, Dr. Anaïs Hasenböhler et al., of course, for rare is the scientist who does something by herself (even in ye olden days when often only one scientist was credited for things, it was almost always a team effort in reality).

If the name rings a bell, we wrote about her work recently:

The Preservatives That Increase Diabetes Risk

…and this time, it’s about cancer.

First, a reminder about blanket statements…

We said it last time, and we’ll briefly repeat it here: it is a generally held popular belief that “food additives are bad”.

This is, however, not always true:

• Sometimes, food additives are health-neutral, like: Monosodium Glutamate: Sinless Flavor-Enhancer Or Terrible Health Risk?
• Sometimes, food additives are positively healthy, like: The Food Additive You Do Want ← this is about guar gum, a resistant starch that functions much like dietary fiber

…and of course, things being fortified with vitamins and minerals is usually a good thing too.

But today, that’s not what’s happening.

Would you like cancer with that?

Dr. Hasenböhler and her team followed 105,260 initially cancer-free participants (average age 42 years, and the participants were 79% women) for over a decade*, and examined links between 17 common food preservatives and cancer risk.

*In the longest run, anyway. Average follow-up time was 7.6 years, because as is usual with these sorts of studies, not everyone survives for the duration.

The good news: preservatives as a group weren’t associated with cancer, and indeed, 11 of the 17 individual additives showed no link at all.

So, what of the other six?

Higher intakes of potassium sorbate, potassium metabisulfite, sodium nitrite, potassium nitrate, acetic acid, and total sulfites were associated with higher risks of overall cancer or, in some cases, specific cancers.

Which specific cancers, you ask?

• Breast cancer: potassium sorbate, potassium nitrate, total acetates, and acetic acid were each associated with increased risk.
• Prostate cancer: sodium nitrite was associated with increased risk.

As to how/why this happens, the researchers note that these preservatives influence immune function and inflammation, which could contribute to cancer development, although the mechanism isn’t proven. And in fact, since it’s an observational study, causality itself isn’t proven, albeit with good methodology and a sample size of 105,260 (within which sample of people, there were then 4,226 incidences of cancer, and these were mostly distributed on a basis of one cancer per person, not just one really unlucky person with 4,226 cancers), it does look very damning.

You can read the paper in full, here: Intake of food additive preservatives and incidence of cancer: results from the NutriNet-Santé prospective cohort

All this of course means that it’s one more reason to prioritize minimally-processed food where reasonably possible!

On which note, see: How Processed Is The Food You Buy, Really?

Want to learn more?

If you’d like to give yourself the best dietary chances against cancer, then consider:

Fasting Cancer – by Dr. Valter Longo ← notwithstanding the title, this is not, actually, about fasting. Rather, it’s about a fast-mimicking dietary approach that specifically starves cancer cells while keeping your own cells well-nourished.

Take care!