Milk Reduces Bowel Cancer Risk

Otago Bulletin, issue 1, January 2011

Dunedin School of Medicine researchers’ finding that regular consumption of school milk significantly reduced the risk of bowel cancer in adulthood attracted national attention last week.

The national study by Associate Professor Brian Cox and Dr Mary Jane Sneyd of the Hugh Adam Cancer Epidemiology Unit was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

The researchers obtained information from people newly diagnosed with bowel cancer and people of a similar age without bowel cancer selected from the general electoral roll.

They found that the risk of bowel cancer was 30 per cent lower in people who drank school milk daily, and that the reduction in risk was greatest in those who drank 1200 or more half-pint bottles of milk while at school.

The researchers propose that the calcium provided by the free milk-in-schools programme from 1937 to 1967 may be responsible for the dramatic reduction in risk of bowel cancer that has occurred in New Zealanders born between 1938 and 1953.

Studies in adults have suggested that calcium consumption may reduce bowel cancer risk
but very few studies of consumption in childhood have been done.

Professor Cox said the results of the latest study, if confirmed, would provide a means of reducing New Zealand’s very high rates of bowel cancer.

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