'Organic food does not cut women's cancer risk'

Celebrity fans of organic food like Gwyneth Paltrow will be up in arms after experts found no link between pesticide-free produce and a lower cancer risk for women.

Eating pesticide-free organic food does nothing to reduce a woman's risk of developing cancer, according to a study, as reported by The Telegraph, Monday.

Researchers instead found that there was a small increased risk of breast cancer seen in consumers who opted for organic produce.

They asked 600,000 women aged 50 or over whether they ate organic food and monitored their health for nine years.

In total, around 50,000 of the women developed one of 16 of the most common cancers during the study period.

A comparison between 180,000 women who never ate organic food and 45,000 who "usually" or "always" chose organic found no difference in overall cancer risk.

In fact, they saw a small increased risk of breast cancer in organic consumers. But this result could be due to other factors or pure chance, the scientists said.

A reduction in the risk of the blood cancer non-Hodgkin lymphoma was also linked to eating organic, but again scientists said this may not be a genuine association.

Prof. Tim Key, a Cancer Research U.K.-funded scientist at Oxford University, said: "In this large study of middle-aged women in the U.K. we found no evidence that a woman's overall cancer risk was decreased if she generally ate organic food.

"More research is needed to follow-up our findings of a possible reduction in risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma."

There have been widely-reported concerns that pesticides commonly used in food production might increase cancer risk, but so far the evidence has been inconclusive.

Conventionally-grown fruit and vegetables contain very small pesticide residues.

The new findings were published in the British Journal of Cancer, which is owned by Cancer Research U.K.

Dr. Claire Knight, the charity's health information manager, said: "This study adds to the evidence that eating organically grown food doesn't lower your overall cancer risk.