Story highlights More than 68,000 French adults took part in the study

Those who ate the most organic food were 25% less likely to develop cancer

(CNN) You can protect yourself from cancer by eating organic, a new study suggests. Those who frequently eat organic foods lowered their overall risk of developing cancer, a study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine finds. Specifically, those who primarily eat organic foods were more likely to ward off non-Hodgkin lymphoma and postmenopausal breast cancer compared to those who rarely or never ate organic foods.

Led by Julia Baudry, an epidemiologist at Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale in France, a team of researchers looked at the diets of 68,946 French adults. More than three-quarters of the volunteers were women, in their mid-40s on average. These volunteers were categorized into four groups depending on how often they reported eating 16 organic products, including fruits and vegetables, meat and fish, ready-to-eat meals, vegetable oils and condiments, dietary supplements and other products.

Follow-up time varied for each participant but lasted slightly more than four and a half years on average, and during that time, the study volunteers developed a total of 1,340 cancers. The most prevalent was breast cancer (459) followed by prostate cancer (180), skin cancer (135), colorectal cancer (99), and non-Hodgkin lymphomas (47).

The authors calculated cancer risk

Comparing the participants' organic food scores with cancer cases, the researchers calculated a negative relationship between high scores (eating the most organic food) and overall cancer risk. Those who ate the most organic food were 25% less likely to develop cancer. Specifically, they were 73% less likely to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma and 21% less likely to develop post-menopausal breast cancer.