There is no single food or ingredient that will have a large impact on whether you do or don’t get cancer. Rather, the regular patterns of what we eat combine to make us more or less susceptible to cancer.

For example, eating lots of fruit, vegetables, beans, pulses and wholegrains lowers your risk of cancer, but eating too much red or processed meat increases your risk of bowel cancer.

Eating too much food that’s high in fat or sugar tends to lead to excessive calorie intake and weight gain, which itself is a cause of several types of cancer.

In addition, alcohol (from any type of alcoholic drink) increases the risk of several cancers.

Anyone can get cancer, but a small number – about 5–10% – are strongly inherited, meaning they are passed from parents to child.

One example is a certain type of breast cancer that occurs due to mutations, or errors, in two genes: BRCA1 (BReast CAncer gene one) and BRCA2 (BReast CAncer gene two).

However, inheriting a mutated gene does not mean you will definitely get that cancer; rather that you have a higher risk.

Following our Cancer Prevention Recommendations is therefore even more important.

Cancer can be treated in different ways including surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, targeted therapy and hormone therapy. Most people will have a combination of these, and people with the same cancer may receive different treatment based on:

• where in the body the cancer originated (the primary cancer).
• the size of the tumour and whether the cancer has spread (stage of cancer).
• how fast the cancer is growing (the grade of cancer).
• symptoms you may have from the cancer.
• general health.

At World Cancer Research Fund we’re researching if and how exercise can be used after a diagnosis of cancer. Some evidence suggests that exercise before treatment (prehabilitation) can make you fitter and healthier, and therefore better able to cope with the side-effects of treatment. Exercise during treatment may speed up recovery.

Cancer drugs, such as chemotherapy, kill cancer cells in different ways, such as by attacking the DNA, which stops the cell replicating and so it eventually dies.

But chemotherapy can make people feel very poorly because the drug cannot tell the difference between cancer cells and healthy cells.

This can lead to side-effects such as nausea and hair loss.

Survival rates and prognosis depend on the cancer, the stage and the health of the person. However, pancreatic cancer has the lowest survival rate in the UK, mainly because it’s usually not discovered until it’s quite advanced.

It’s also important to remember that cancer frequency is not the same as cancer mortality. Skin cancer is the fifth most common cancer in the UK, but has the highest survival rate. However, any cancer diagnosis can be shocking.