If you do one thing this week . . . put fish on the menu

COULD EATING fish help reduce the risk of colorectal cancer? A new meta-analysis that looked at data from more than 40 studies suggests so.

The paper, published recently in the American Journal of Medicine, trawled through 41 studies published in English between 1990 and 2011.

And while the authors point out that the results of the analysis must be interpreted with caution, overall the findings pointed to fish consumption having preventive effects on colorectal cancer.

“Our analysis found that fish consumption decreased the risk of colorectal cancer by 12 per cent,” write the authors from the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi’an in China.

They also went to the trouble of looking for differences between colon and rectal cancer in the studies. And they found them: “We noted that the protective effect of fish consumption is more prominent in rectal cancer than that in colon cancer.”