Nutrition and Lifestyle : Opportunities for Cancer Prevention

The search for the links between diet, nutritional and metabolic factors and cancer etiology is an area of research which, over the past two decades, has attracted increasing attention from both scientific and public health points of view.

In the 1980s the European Union created the Europe Against Cancer Program which identified nutrition as one of the highest priority areas for cancer formulated, which also included nutritional advice, and it was decided to promote major new epidemiological studies on nutrition and cancer.

This resulted in the support that the Europe Against Cancer Program provided for the realization of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) which involves about half a million volunteers in 10 European countries. About ten years later, the Directorate General for Public Health and Consumer Protection of the EU supported the European Conference on Nutrition and Cancer which took place in June 2001, and the publication of this book which offers the opportunity to examine the relationship between nutrition and cancer with a multidisciplinary and multifactorial approach encompassing nutritional research, endcrinology, carcinogenesis, molecular biology and genetics.