On 15th and 16th July 2019, over 50 researchers from 17 academic institutions along with representatives from the World Cancer Research Fund and Cancer Research UK held a workshop in Bristol to discuss current challenges in nutritional cancer epidemiology and how Mendelian randomization can be used to address them. Presentations, discussions, and key conclusions on these topics reached by attendees have now been published in the form of a position paper in Cancer Causes and Control: Applying Mendelian randomization to appraise causality in relationships between nutrition and cancer 

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of how Mendelian randomization can contribute to understanding of nutritional determinants of cancer, challenges and sources of bias in these studies along with recent methodological developments to mitigate these challenges, perspectives on how this method can be used to identify nutritional factors contributing to cancer in non-European ancestral contexts, and considerations when translating findings from Mendelian randomization studies to clinical interventions. This workshop was funded by the World Cancer Research Fund and Cancer Research UK.