"More than half of Americans that overweight and obesity can increase their risk for cancer."
Sorry to be 'that guy', but I'd expect official statements from the CDC to be better proof-read as this sort of thing really does impact the credibility of the message.
You'll want to be a bit more careful in how you cite that to people. That's the CDC, not the American Health Organization.
Also, it doesn't say that 40% of cancer is due to diet. It says that 40% of cancer diagnoses are types of cancer that are associated with being overweight or obese. This does not mean that 40% of cancers are due to diet for several reasons.
Being overweight or obese is not always due to diet. You could become overweight for other reasons and still suffer many of the negative health consequences.
Correlation is not causation. Just because a cancer is associated with being overweight doesn't necessarily mean that being overweight causes the cancer. Perhaps some cancers cause you to become overweight. Perhaps there are some third factors that cause both. Maybe one of those factors is diet for some cancers but not others.
Having a cancer that is caused by with being overweight or obese doesn't mean that it was a cause or the cause of your particular cancer. Just as there are nonsmokers with lung cancer, there will be a lot of skinny people in that 40%.
Don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, avoid smoked food, avoid processed red meat, avoid plastic food containers/beverage containers, buy bio food or food which has grown with minimal amount of pesticide
Exercise, that'll help not being overweight/obese/diabetic
Get vaccinated against hpv (you're probably too old for that one)
Don't live in a polluted area/city center, avoid owning furniture's that release toxic gases (a lot of things treated to be fireproof or fire resistant are awful)
Wear sunscreen or long clothes, get your weird moles checked
At the end of the day we all know it deep down, you can easily prevent a lot os health issues by not being overweight/obese and avoiding alcohol/cigarettes
> Across the UK, smoking remained by far the leading cause of preventable cancer, although it dropped from 19.4% in 2011 to 15.1%. Second was being overweight or obese . . .
Since obesity doesn't just randomly happen but has causes, shouldn't they say "caused by" the causes of obesity -- i.e. sugar, inactivity, etc?
> excess body weight, lack of physical activity, high consumption of processed meat and red meat, very high alcohol consumption
> “We know that smoking, alcohol, lack of physical activity, being overweight or obese, increased consumption of red meat – so basically, dietary factors and environmental and lifestyle factors – are likely playing a big role,”
> There could be correlations between obesity in younger adults, the foods they eat and the increase in colorectal cancers for the young adult population
> “I think younger people are on average consuming less healthy food – fast food, processed snacks, processed sugars – and I think that those foods also contain higher concentrations of carcinogens and mutagens, in addition to the fact that they are very fattening,”
> “it’s likely some kind of exposure, whether it be diet, medication, changing microbiome,” that is driving the rise in colorectal cancers in younger adults.
It’s not that simple. As the article correctly states:
> But he said the idea that obesity itself or eating too little fibre "causes" cancer was "somewhat simplistic" and still needed to be explored further.
Diet is certainly contributing to cancer risk but there’s no simple, direct line from sugar to cancer, or from inactivity to cancer.
For example, one aspect of cancer risk is that it’s simply a game of numbers: obese people have bigger cells (and, at least in the case of children, more cells!). More cells trivially translates into a higher cancer risk because every single cell individually has the potential of becoming a tumour precursor. But even a constant number of bigger cells increases cancer risk by a similar logic: more cellular mass increases the risk of a cell becoming cancerous because there are more molecules that can become abnormal, disrupt cellular processes and ultimately lead to DNA damage.
These are the facts. Whether this noticeably contributes to the increased cancer risk in obese people is an open question. Nevertheless, in this scenario it’s actually the obesity itself, and not the diet/inactivity that acts as a causal factor for cancer.
Ultimately this is probably a tiny contributor. Another comment correctly singles out that obesity causes (chronic) inflammation, which is almost certainly a much bigger single contributor to cancer risk.
>The charity also found that excess weight now caused 6.3% of all cancer cases - up from 5.5% in 2011
>Prof Mel Greaves, a cancer biologist at the Institute of Cancer Research, in London, said the study was an "endorsement" of the idea that many cancers were potentially preventable. But he said the idea that obesity itself or eating too little fibre "causes" cancer was "somewhat simplistic" and still needed to be explored further.
This article is saying a lot less than the title leads on. The article states half of all cancer deaths are caused by smoking, alcohol, and obesity. Nearly every patient in the developed world is aware that all three of these are bad, but the struggle is in changing course on these three behaviors rather than a lack of knowledge that they're bad.
https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/obesity-cancer/index.html
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