Vegetarians have a 45 percent lower risk of being diagnosed with cancers of the blood, including multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to research published in the British Journal of Cancer last Wednesday.

More specifically, the study found that there was a difference of 75 percent relative risk between vegetarians and meat eaters for developing multiple myeloma.

For this research, scientists at the University of Oxford compared vegetarians’ and meat eaters’ risks of developing cancer. This was done by analyzing data about more than 61,000 British men and women over the course of 12 years.

By the time of follow-up, 3,350 of the research participants were diagnosed with cancer. The scientists broke down their findings into risk differences between vegetarians and meat eaters for 20 different kinds of cancer.

For blood, stomach, and bladder cancers, they found significantly lower risk among vegetarians compared to meat eaters. They called their blood cancer data their “most striking finding,” with both the greatest percent difference in risk and a large pool of people to base their conclusions on—257 of the study participants had blood cancers.

Both Professor Tim Key, first author of the study and member of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford, and Sara Hiom, Cancer Research U.K. director of health information, stress the need for more research to replicate the study’s results and to discover why meat consumption might affect the development of cancer, particularly blood cancers.

Meanwhile, Hiom advises that people “eat a healthy, balanced diet high in fiber, fruit, and vegetables and low in saturated fat, salt, and red and processed meat.”

Key and his colleagues’ data came from two previous studies in the U.K., the Oxford Vegetarian Study and the EPIC-Oxford cohort. The results were found to be independent of many other possible cancer-causing factors including age, smoking, alcohol use, obesity, and exercise habits.

For more information, please see the press release from Cancer Research UK . The full text of the research paper is also available for free from the British Journal of Cancer.