Millions of skin cancers are diagnosed every year, the most common cancer in the United States.

I've covered the single most important thing we can do, protect against exposure to UV radiation,

and just did a video on a supplement that might help.

What about dietary protection?

The first study to elucidate the effect of diet on UV-induced tumors found that high-fat

diets accelerated tumor formation in mice within six months of UV.

50 percent of the high-fat-fed mice had tumors compared to only 16 in the control-fed group.

Encouragingly, switching the mice to a low-fat diet after the exposure was able to negate

the tumor exacerbating high-fat effects.

In people, a dietary pattern characterized by meat and fat consumption was associated with

up to a near quadrupling of squamous cell carcinoma risk with the second most common type of skin

cancer, whereas a vegetable and fruit pattern was associated with a halving of risk,

apparently driven largely by the intake of greens.

All we needed now was to randomize people with low-fat diets, and see if cancer could be prevented

in people too.

And thanks to National Cancer Institute funding and a Veteran Affairs research team, the striking

results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

76 patients with a history of skin cancer, and therefore at high risk of developing more,

were randomized to continue to eat their regular diets or switched to a quote-unquote

low-fat diet of 20 percent of calories from fat.

I put low-fat in quotes because that's actually a high-fat diet compared to what's normal

for our species. For millions of years, our ancestors

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