Women who reported diets higher in antioxidant nutrients were less likely to have cervical cancer in a new study, but the finding does not show that those foods prevented the disease.
Researchers analyzed U.S. health and nutrition data from 1,044 women, including 174 with cervical cancer and 870 without it. Women with the highest dietary antioxidant scores had a lower prevalence of cervical cancer than women with the lowest scores.
The study, published in the International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics, used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey collected between 2003 and 2018.
The important catch is that researchers looked at women’s diets and cancer histories at the same point in time. That means they cannot tell whether diet came before the cancer or played any role in preventing it.
Women who eat differently may also differ in other important ways, including smoking, health care access, screening habits, income and overall health behaviors. Some women may also have changed the way they ate after a cancer diagnosis. Researchers can adjust for some of those differences, but they cannot eliminate them entirely in this kind of study.
The researchers estimated antioxidant intake using dietary recall interviews and combined several nutrients into an overall dietary antioxidant score.
That does not mean they tested blueberries, leafy greens or any other specific “antioxidant food.” The study also cannot show that any one nutrient was responsible for the association.
It does not provide evidence that antioxidant supplements prevent cervical cancer either.
The authors themselves were cautious about the results.
“These findings suggest that dietary antioxidant intake may play a potential role in the prevention of cervical cancer. However, further prospective studies are needed to confirm this association and clarify the underlying mechanisms,” they wrote.
The study found that women in the highest antioxidant-intake group had a 55.8% lower prevalence of cervical cancer than those in the lowest group. Each increase in the antioxidant score was also linked to a lower prevalence of cervical cancer.
Those numbers sound striking, but “lower prevalence” is not the same as “lower risk of developing cancer.”
To answer that question more confidently, researchers would need studies that measure diet before cancer develops and then follow women over time.
Cervical cancer also has a well-established primary cause: persistent infection with certain high-risk types of human papillomavirus, or HPV. That context is important because diet is not currently considered a substitute for established cervical cancer prevention.
HPV vaccination, routine cervical cancer screening and appropriate follow-up care remain the proven tools for reducing risk and catching precancerous changes before they progress.
The wording of the news release itself also deserves caution. In one sentence describing the results, it refers to an 11.4% lower prevalence of colorectal cancer even though the study examined cervical cancer. That appears to be an error in the release rather than the research question itself.
For now, the findings add an interesting piece to research on diet and cervical cancer, but they do not establish a new way to prevent the disease. A nutrient-rich diet can support overall health, while HPV vaccination, cervical cancer screening and appropriate medical follow-up remain the established prevention tools.
The study received public funding through China’s National Key Clinical Specialty Construction Project.