What a person eats helps determine if he or she will get a recurrance of colon cancer, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

"It's not really increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables, but really trying to reduce the amount of red meat intake and fatty foods and sugary, 'desserty' foods, that seems to be protective for colon cancer recurrences and survival," said Dr. Jeffrey Meyerhardt of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The higher-fat diet is sometimes called the Western pattern diet. And Meyerhardt said his team was surprised about how much of an effect it has.

Stage 3 colon cancer patients -- those who also have cancer in the lymph nodes -- who ate that way were more likely to have cancer come back or to die from it. Those who ate the most heavily Western diet were 3.3 times more likely to die than the 20 percent with the least eating in that pattern.

Each year, more than 30,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. The research was based on tracking about 1,000 patients who were taking treatment. Those with the Western pattern diet were compared to what is called a prudent pattern -- high intakes of fruits and vegetables, poultry and fish.

But Meyerhardt pointed out that the diet isn't a cure-all.

"It's not a substitute for standard treatments, so patients with colon cancer still should have surgery and discuss with their physicians about their need for chemotherapy after surgery," he said. "This is really an additional step patients can consider who have colon cancer to improve their outcome."