Moroccan Study Suggests Dairy Products May Lower Colorectal Cancer Risk

This is a study conducted between 2009 and 2017, in five different Moroccan hospital centers, including Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakech, Oujda and Fez. It was carried out on a population of 2,906 people, including 1,453 cancer cases and 1,453 control cases, reports the HuffPost website.

By evaluating the regularity of dairy consumption over a given period, the researchers tried to identify the link between the consumption of industrial dairy products such as milk, cheese and yogurt, or traditional Moroccan products such as raib, jben, lben or saykok and the risk of colon and rectal cancer, also called colorectal.

According to the confidences of Khaoula El Kinany, researcher at the laboratory of epidemiology, clinical research and community health at the Faculty of Medicine of the University Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah in Fez to HuffPost, "we can say that the lactic bacteria already present in these products, the calcium intake and the fermentation methods are protective factors". In other words, "people who consume a lot of modern or traditional dairy products have a lower risk of CRC (colorectal cancer, ed.)." However, she clarifies, "these results should be further confirmed by longitudinal data." And so it will take more time and long-term monitoring to definitively confirm all of this.

Having risen to the rank of the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths (1.85 million new cases and 880,792 deaths in 2018), colorectal cancer is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer in the world. In Morocco, it represents the fourth case of cancer diagnosed in women and the third in men, with an incidence rate of 10.6% in men and 8.8% in women (between 2008 and 2012).