Fruit and Cancer: 17th December 2025

Morning it's Wednesday the 17th of December 2025 and I'm Dr Ellen Storm from U-Turn Health. This morning I would like to talk about the U-Turn Health fact sheet entitled fruit and cancer. This is the first fact sheet that I have put together for U-Turn Health but hopefully the first of many. I put this fact sheet together because I was working with someone who was suffering with breast cancer and I think it's not uncommon for people to feel fear around the idea of eating fruit if they are on a cancer journey but even if you're not on a cancer journey there's just an awful lot out there telling us that we should be avoiding sugar. Sugar feeds cancer, sugar is bad for cancer and if we eat a lot of sugar we're going to get cancer and all of these ideas are floating around in the world and stopping us from feeling comfortable and happy about eating lots and lots of fruit. So I think it sits behind a lot of people's suspicion when I start talking about a fruit-based raw vegan diet. I'm organising the Welsh Fruit Festival where we will be eating a lot of fruit, not only fruit but basically in a fruit-based raw vegan diet you're getting most of your calories from fruit, that's the idea. So it's really your main calorie source and I felt that in order to confidently recommend that I needed to address the issue of fruit and cancer and what is the relationship between fruit and cancer because you know it's kind of not okay to say well it's great for everyone to eat loads and loads of fruit except for those people who have cancer or even people who might be at risk of getting cancer. So what's the truth? What do we know from the scientific literature as it stands at the present point in time? So I had a look around and the first thing I came across was the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, also known as the EPIC study, which recruited over 500,000 participants across 10 European countries in the 1990s and they followed those people up over 30 years. So this is what's known as a large prospective cohort study and they looked to find out first of all when they recruited those people what they were eating and then they followed them up over a long period of time to find out who developed cancer, what kinds of cancer they developed and what their ultimate survival from that cancer was like. So the study resulted in over 3,000 scientific publications, it really was massive and in 2014 scientists summarised the findings to date stating that cancers of the upper gastrointestinal tract, so that's your esophagus and your stomach, colorectal cancer and also lung cancer in smokers particularly and that's maybe surprising because lung cancer is obviously not directly part of our digestive system. All of these cancers were inversely associated with fruit intake, so that means that the development of the cancer, the incidence of the cancer, the more fruit you eat the less likely you are to get it, so that basically means more fruit equals less cancer for those cancers specifically. So for some kinds of cancers they didn't find a relationship between fruit intake and cancer, they didn't find a negative relationship meaning more fruit equals more cancer, they didn't find that for any cancers but there were some cancers where they just didn't find a relationship and that might be because there isn't a relationship or it might be because even though the epic study was huge it actually wasn't big enough to detect a relationship and the other possibility here is that people just weren't eating enough fruit, so there might be a relationship if you eat 10, 15 or 20 portions of fruit a day but if people were only eating not five portions of fruit a day then which I suspect is likely given that almost nobody in the western world at least eats more than five portions of fruit a day unless you're a fruit-based or vegan. So basically we can't tell, we can't tell, we don't have any data on that, the study isn't able to detect relationships that might exist at higher levels of fruit consumption because nobody was eating that amount of fruit. So those are the possibilities, so whether an effect is found depends on the size of the study, so how many participants there were and also how much fruit participants were eating. So the other thing the study can't tell us, it can't differentiate between different kinds of fruit, it can't tell us whether black grapes are better at preventing cancer than bananas for example. We might surmise that there might be these kinds of relationships based on what we know about the chemical composition of different kinds of fruit but in terms of real solid scientific evidence that's just something that we don't know the answer to yet. So the other thing we need to remember about this study is that association is not the same as causation. Lots of people will talk about this, you may have heard people talk about this, so we can observe that people who eat more fruit get less cancer. That probably makes us feel more confident that fruit isn't causing cancer because then we would see a relationship in the opposite direction but it might be that those people who are eating fruit are also doing other things. They might be richer because fruit's expensive and being richer makes you have a lower risk for lots of reasons across the board. They might be just generally people who are more health conscious and that might mean that they're also less likely to smoke, they do more exercise, they take more care of themselves, they rest more, they sleep more, they go on health retreats, all sorts of things that you just can't really account for within your study. So studies do try to account for what we call confounding factors, things that might explain that association that aren't the actual thing that you're studying, other things that might explain that association. We know what smoking less and eating more fruit, they tend to go hand in hand, people who are more health conscious smoke less and eat more fruit. So we know that smoking might be a confounder for fruit consumption or the relationship between fruit consumption and cancer for example. So that's something that people can adjust for in their scientific studies, they can make adjustments but you can never completely adjust for all possible confounders, that is not possible. So what we really do need to remember, we can take away from this, is that what is important to know is that none of the types of cancer were more common in people who ate more fruit. At the very least fruit does not cause cancer and at the best it might help to prevent it. So that's really talking about prevention, we're talking about what the effect of eating fruit before you get cancer, trying to not get cancer in the first place. But what happens if you've got cancer already? Does eating fruit make your cancer worse or does it make it better? Does it make you more likely to die from your cancer or less likely to die from your cancer? Well that's also something we don't really know. What scientists have looked at is they've looked at the relationship between how much fruit you ate before you got your cancer and whether you're likely to die from your cancer. So in 2020 scientists reported the results of a systematic review and meta-analysis of 28 studies that examined the relationship between fruit intake, pre-diagnosis and cancer recurrence and survival in cancer patients. Five of those studies compared deaths in people with head and neck cancers and of these four studies showed fewer deaths in people who ate the highest amounts of fruit and one study, the smallest, showed slightly more. Five of the studies compared deaths in people with ovarian cancer and all five studies showed fewer deaths in people who ate the most amounts of fruit compared to those who ate the least. So one study showed an inverse association between fruit consumption and deaths from all causes in prostate cancer patients. So that means that the more fruit you ate, the less before you got diagnosed with your prostate cancer, the less likely you were to die from your prostate cancer. And interestingly this study, particularly, also reported an inverse association for raw vegetable intake but not for total or cooked vegetables. So that's really quite unusual. It's very unusual to find scientific studies that differentiate between cooked and raw fruits or vegetables. Most studies lump them all in together and just report how many portions of fruits and vegetables somebody might be eating. So generally speaking, most people eat fruit raw and they eat vegetables cooked. It's a broad generalisation. Of course you can stew your apples and you can eat salad vegetables raw but on balance it's probably more common. You know, most people just eat fruit as it is. We expect to eat fruit raw. We open a banana, we eat it or whatever but we think about vegetables as something that we cook. We cook broccoli, we cook leeks, whatever it is. So do we have an explanation for why you might be less likely to die from your cancer if you eat raw vegetables but not cooked vegetables? Well, to some extent, yes we do because when you apply heat to a vegetable you destroy the molecular structure of many of its contained phytonutrients. You might also actually, depending on what vegetable it is and how you're heating it and to what temperature, you might actually be generating carcinogenic compounds as well. The World Cancer Research Fund has identified two randomised controlled trials that look at the relationship between diet and breast cancer survival but neither of these randomised controlled trials specifically looked at fruit consumption and differentiated fruit consumption from the other aspects of diet that they were looking at. So the World Cancer Research Fund has summarised its dietary advice in relation to breast cancer as fairly standard dietary advice it does advise eating more fruit, more vegetables, also more whole grains, more legumes and limiting fast and processed foods and also limiting red meat, saturated fat and alcohol and this is quite reasonable, quite moderate advice. It probably isn't going to get you your very best results and it's based on imperfect science and I think that that is the thing that we need to remember is that actually the science in this field, although there seems to be a vast proliferation of papers and scientific studies, actually we know very little and it's quite hard to get scientific evidence around even just the basic major things. So I did quite a limited literature search when I was looking at this, there may be other papers out there and I'd be very interested to know if you know about any, if you let me know what they are, if you're aware of any please do send me the details I will certainly incorporate that into future versions of the fact sheet and any future fact sheets that I make as well. So I think this is an ongoing and evolving project but I wasn't able to do a full-scale literature review like you might do if you were doing a systematic review for example, looking at this subject but from what I did find, I didn't find anything that told us about what happens if you eat a lot of fruit after your cancer diagnosis. So all they're really saying is if you eat a lot of fruit before your cancer diagnosis you're more likely to survive it which is an interesting message. If you're healthier before you get cancer but obviously you still get cancer then you're more likely to survive your cancer and obviously people get cancer they're not healthy but by definition I think if you get cancer you're not a healthy person but that health is a range, health is not one, it's not a black or white, it's not an either or, it's a range, it's shades of grey and people who get cancer you could still sort of say that some of them are healthier than others so I guess you could say well if you are healthier at the point at which you're diagnosed with your cancer your survival chances are better generally for whatever reason you happen to be healthier and stronger than somebody else who's been diagnosed with the same cancer. There's something slightly illogical to me about thinking well fruit is preventative of cancer before you get cancer but once you've got cancer it's very scary and you should avoid it because it's going to make your cancer worse. Well why would that be the case and I don't think it is and the World Cancer Research Fund is advising people to eat fruits and vegetables so it's the processed foods and the refined sugars that they are telling people to avoid so I think from that I feel quite confident that I can recommend people who don't have cancer to eat lots of fruit and it will help you to not get cancer in the future so it's preventative. I don't make any claims about fruit curing cancer, I don't make any claims about curing cancer. Once you've got cancer and you've got a cancer process going on in your body I don't know that we understand enough about the mechanisms from purely from a scientific point of view and we certainly don't have any studies that tell us that eating fruit is protective, that it will either slow down your cancer progression or cure your cancer completely. We just don't have that and I don't think those studies have been done. I'd like to be proved wrong and told about studies I don't know about that would be great if they do exist please let me know but I don't know about them and therefore I can't really say anything about that at the moment but I think it's it's reasonable to think that if fruit is protective against cancer it's at the very least not going to make your cancer worse and it might even make it better. If you have it I don't think you should be frightened of eating I think fruit and raw vegetables are absolutely the way to go and the best cancer fighting diet that you can put together is one that basically consists entirely of raw fruits and vegetables that is the fruit-based raw vegan diet that in my opinion is the most powerful because it contains the maximum amount of cancer-fighting phytonutrients that you can possibly pack into your body there is no other way to do it you know you just have to get all of your calories from raw fruits and vegetables and preferably I would suggest from brightly coloured ones as well because those are the ones that contain those potent plant compounds so the black grapes the carrots the beetroot the you know you know pomegranates whatever it is the rainbow whatever rather than just eating nothing but bananas they're cheap fillers and raw vegans like them a lot for that reason but I would try to try to wind back on the bananas and put in more of a diversity of brightly coloured raw fruits and vegetables if you are on a cancer journey whether you're trying to prevent yourself from getting a cancer that you think you are at risk of getting or whether you have had a diagnosis already but I have to caveat that advice by saying I think the scientific evidence only tells us that fruit is preventative of cancer before you get it and I don't think it tells us that it's although although I can reasonably confidently say that the World Cancer Research Fund does advise fruit and vegetable consumption I think I think we have to be cautious about making claims for any kind of diet being able to cure a cancer process like halter cancer process if you like after it's begun and I'm not saying that that can't ever happen or that you shouldn't try to achieve it because you absolutely definitely should like go all out for curing your cancer but it's just about kind of having that understanding of where we are in terms of the scientific literature and what claims we can make that we can call evidence-based so I don't think we can make any claims or really any kind of diet curing cancer based on the scientific evidence but if you were to ask me if I had cancer what I would eat it would be a 100% raw fruit-based raw vegan diet and that's my personal opinion. Lovely chatting have a great day see you again for the next one.