Since 1936, Cancer Council Victoria has supported research into cancer causes.
Each year we invest in projects investigating treatment, screening, and primary prevention. We have built our internal research capacity, including founding Australia’s first cancer registry in 1940, and establishing our cancer epidemiology and behavioural sciences centres in 1986, which made original discoveries and facilitate global collaborations.
Our involvement in research informs our advocacy and campaigning. One key area has derived from discovery of links between obesity and cancer. We now know obesity increases the risk of thirteen cancers, and being overweight is partly due to low nutrition, high sugar foods consumed from childhood. These links have taken decades to establish, and through our internal scholarship and our collaborations, Cancer Council Victoria has been involved in this research since the 1970s.
Documents recently uncovered in our archives show that in 1978, eminent Australian epidemiologist A. J. (Tony) McMichael—then a fresh PhD graduate working at the CSIRO—proposed that Cancer Council Victoria invest in research into the links between cancer and nutrition, including the benefits of the Mediterranean diet and reducing alcohol.
McMichael's papers helped shape the thinking of our director of the Victorian Cancer Registry and first head of cancer epidemiology Graham Giles. With collaborators and from Melbourne and Monash universities, Giles proposed a cohort study following 40,000 Melburnians across their lives to examine the relationship between diet and cancer. The Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study launched in 1990 with funding from Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth) and we still run it today.
We launched the Australian Breakthrough Cancer Study in 2013, which follows a 50,000 Australians to discover the causes of cancer, including the contribution of unhealthy foods.
This investment in research and the resulting discoveries about nutrition, obesity, and cancer has supported important advocacy and behaviour change campaigns aimed at creating a healthier population.
These include helping to create the Food for Health Alliance in 2006, which campaigns to protect children from unhealthy food marketing and to ensure more nutritious food for babies and toddlers. We support campaigns like Food Fight—which aims to remove unhealthy food marketing from where kids are likely to see it—and we continue to fund state-of-the-art research, such as using artificial intelligence to explore what children see on digital platforms: https://lnkd.in/gyqTQ5Us
Cancer Council Victoria is committed to using research and advocacy, and behaviour change campaigns to create a food environment where it is easy and affordable to eat delicious, nutritious food, and reduce the risk of cancer and other non-communicable diseases.
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