Who am I?

I am a 37 year old Dutch man with a lifelong interest in the role of diet & supplements for prevention/progression of various (chronic) diseases.
This interest has led me to various beliefs about the specific role of diet. My special interest was triggered when I read that milk might prevent colon/colorectal cancer, but also increase risk of prostate cancer. So what to do now? Was milk either good or bad, neither, or good/bad under specific circumstances?
I started reading a lot of scientific articles, but found that most reviews did not answer some questions that came to my mind:

• What specific food items are responsible for the described effects from the food groups?
• How much of a food group/item do I have to consume to find a described effect? And does no effect exclude the possibility of an effect at an intermediate level of consumption?
• Can a described effect be found among different strata of possible effect modifiers (e.g. sex, BMI, smoking status)?

I learned myself how to use a search engine with access to the Pubmed database and created this site to answer these questions for myself and to help others answering these questions. In 2009, I began the education "Nutrition & Dietetics".

I started out with information about the relation with cancer, but - to put findings in a wider perspective - have begun adding information about other health outcomes. After all, food items may decrease risk of one disease, but at the same time increase risk of another disease.

My personal goals.

• To create a transparent and reproducible information source where healthy or sick people can find objective, evidence based information about diet and the direct relation with disease prevention, progression and survival.
• To be a starting point for scientists interested in examining the available literature on diet in relation to major chronic diseases.

What's positive and negative about this site?

Negative points:

• I am not able to execute a meta-analysis.
• I am not educated in the field of epidemiology.

Positive points:

• I try to answer questions, most advisory committees and systematic reviews do not answer. Such as: Which specific foods are responsible for the effects of certain food groups on certain health outcomes? How much of a given food do I have to consume to find a significant effect? Is there evidence for an effect at intermediate levels of consumption?
• I created pilot systematic reviews about certain food groups. Such as vegetables/fruits, eggs, or meat in relation to all-cause mortality or total cancer. No reviews about various topics on my site existed until now.
• I do not ever exclude any article from my systematic reviews. Instead, I often/always was able to identify more articles than scientists performing literature searches.
• I use a theoretical model to judge the evidence, which is probably a stronger predictor of the possibility that a true causal effect might exist, than just doing a meta-analysis. I use different grades of evidence, and take several variables into account. Such as consistency of results, cohort size, amount of cases within a cohort, and effect size.
• I use a consistent methodology to judge the evidence for all foods/nutrients the same way.

I do not ask of anyone to trust any of the information on my site. I only ask of you to put any one of my systematic reviews next to any officially published systematic review. Then compare the articles identified through the literature searches, and compare the variety of effects examined.

Declaration of conflict of interest and commercial sponsorship.

I created and maintain this site without any help from anyone else. In doing so, I do not receive direct or indirect fundings/favours from anyone. I do not accept money or favours to manipulate the evidence in any way.
Since I do not cooperate with anyone, bias can be found in the way I choose my topics. This is based on personal choices for topics of interest. The order in which I chose my topics is not predefined! In addition, I cannot clearly define when a topic will be published or updated since maintenance of the site is done in my spare time.

I am the owner of another internetsite: voedingengezondheid.com. This is a Dutch newssite relating various items (e.g. diet, physical activity, supplements) to various outcomes (mostly healt-related). Sometimes, findings from canceranddiet.nl are published on my Dutch newssite.
The same declaration of interest and commercial sponsorship also applies to this Dutch newssite. Topics on the newssite are based on personal interests triggered by discussions.

R. Hoenselaar,
The Netherlands (February 2011).