Who am I?

I am a 36 year old 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 MEDLINE database (pubmed) and created this site to answer these questions for myself and to help others answering these questions. Since the launch of this site, the methodology has improved a lot and therefore, older reviews were deleted/republished.

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 goal.

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.

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 (January 2010).