"It would be difficult to think of any article of diet which has not, at one time or another, been blamed as a cancer-producing substance. The list includes tea, coffee, cocoa, white bread – and also brown bread – cheese, butter, eggs, meat, fish, and poultry."

This is a quote from the Times newspaper, and many people will empathise with its sense of exasperation at the steadily increasing and sometimes contradictory list of things we are told apparently either causes or prevents cancer.

After all, how many of us have not at some point picked up a newspaper with a cancer-related headline and muttered something about scientists always changing their minds?

But what people might find surprising is that this quote appeared in the Times way back in 1927.

We tend to think of the idea that your diet affects your risk of cancer as being a relatively new thing, and it is true this area of science has only really come into its own in the last 30-odd years. But this quote suggests that while the evidence has been strong enough to form the basis of solid lifestyle advice only relatively recently, the feeling of being bombarded with health messages has a longer history.

Again, most people would not be surprised to see the Daily Mail run a story headlined "The truth about cancer", citing the reason for many cases as apparently a lack of potassium in the body. But what people might not expect is that this story was published in 1916.

The Guardian, meanwhile, was reporting in 1927 that "there does not appear to be any hereditary disposition to cancer", and that "cancer, as far as we know, is not caused by any special food or foods, nor by the absence of special foods". Research has since shown this is incorrect. When you realise that newspapers have been publishing these sorts of stories about cancer for at least a century, it is understandable that people are cynical about what scientists tell them.

At World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF), we commissioned a YouGov survey that showed 52% of people think scientists are "always changing their minds" about cancer. This is despite the fact that advice on preventing cancer and staying healthy – eating a diet with plenty of fruits and vegetables, being physically active and maintaining a healthy weight – has stayed largely the same for decades.

The YouGov survey makes grim reading for the science community, and raises serious questions about its ability to communicate its findings to the public. However, the media does not fare much better, with 46% of people saying they do not trust news coverage about cancer risk.

Think about that for a moment – roughly half of people do not trust the scientists who do the research nor the journalists who write about it. That's quite a vote of no confidence. You can argue about why this is – and, in fact, within the scientific community there is quite a lot of navel-gazing about why people do not trust scientists.

But the bottom line is that, from the 1916 story about potassium and cancer to its modern incarnations of the "Facebook causes cancer" variety, the scientific community and the media have worked together in a way that has consistently over-egged the significance of single studies, and have favoured the quirky over the reliable.

People are not stupid. They know scientific breakthroughs do not happen every other day, and that this means the results of studies are being overblown. But the problem is they do not know which ones. Because of this, large numbers have given up listening altogether. In essence, the media and the scientific community have become one big case of the boy who cried wolf.

The frustrating thing is that this situation comes after years of top-quality research by some of the world's leading scientists, so that we can now know much about reducing our risks of cancer.

In 2007 WCRF published the most comprehensive report on the subject. It analysed more than 7,000 separate studies and found there is now convincing evidence that, for instance, excess body fat, drinking too much alcohol and eating red and processed meats all increase cancer risk. In fact, scientists estimate that about a third of the most common cancers in the UK could be prevented through a healthy diet, regular physical activity and weight maintenance.

I do not think the levels of cynicism are so bad that they cannot be turned around. But if we are not still to be reading about spurious cancer "truths" in another 100 years, we need fundamental changes to the way scientists and journalists work together.