Letter to the Editor

In Response: We thank Dr. Grant for his interesting suggestion and appreciate the discussion about potential risk factors for cancer. Within the EPIC-Study, we certainly plan to carry out additional analyses into risk factors for ovarian cancer covering nutrients, food groups, and biomarkers to highlight associations that might be of interest. The aim of our recent study, however, was to test the hypothesis that the consumption of animal foods is associated with risk of ovarian cancer controlling for relevant covariates (1). This research question has been developed based on a review of the literature (2). Our review did not provide evidence for the assumption that dietary glycemic index or glycemic load could potentially confound the association with animal foods. We did not intend to identify the most predictive dietary factors, which would call for a completely different strategy of running diet-disease models. Therefore, we do not think that the reported null association between consumption of animal food and ovarian cancer risk was based on an incomplete study. Nevertheless, we agree that as new evidence emerges (3), future analyses will have to take this into account.