Nevertheless, our finding that vegetable intake was weakly related to lower molar ratios is consistent with the observation that vegetable-rich diets appear to protect against colorectal, breast and prostate cancer (World Cancer Research Fund, 1997), although associations of vegetable intake with IGF-I or IGFBP-3 have not been found in other studies (Kaklamani et al, 1999; Holmes et al, 2002). The gene discussed is IGF1; the disease is prostate carcinoma.