Richard Meyer Article Summary, As I See It

Cancer death rates declining but

  • Death rates from cancer declined by 19%. Death rates from heart disease declined by 22% until 2011 but increased by 4% from then to 2017.
  • Cancer was still the major killer and had a higher death rate compared to heart disease. In fact, the cancer mortality rate in 2017 was nearly 40% higher than that for heart disease.
  • There is now strong evidence excessive weight is the cause of at least 12 cancers, five more than when the last WCRF recommendations were published in 2007.
  • Obesity is likely to overtake smoking as the “number one risk factor for cancer” within decades.

An estimated 80,110 new cancer cases among adults 20 and older in the United States in 2015 were attributable simply to eating a poor diet, according to a study, published in the JNCI Cancer Spectrum on Wednesday.

“This is equivalent to about 5.2% of all invasive cancer cases newly diagnosed among US adults in 2015,” said Dr. Fang Fang Zhang, a nutrition and cancer epidemiologist at Tufts University in Boston, who was the first author of the study.

The researchers found that colon and rectal cancers had the highest number and proportion of diet-related cases, at 38.3%.

So while the media and politicians continue to demonize pharma, rightly so in some cases, American’s are killing themselves because they can’t control their diets. Also, the vast majority of physicians (71%) believe that patients “don’t want to have a conversation around obesity.

But they are responsible for the vast majority of healthcare expenses

A visit to your primary care physician should also include a referral to an intensive weight-loss program if you’re BMI is over 30. That’s the latest recommendation of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of national experts in disease and public health that advises primary care physicians on best practices. The group published an evidence review and the recommendation in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Doctors think people with obesity are much less interested in losing weight than they actually are, an Australian-led study has found. According to research presented at the European Congress on Obesity 71 percent of health professionals believe people with obesity do not want to lose weight, although only 7 percent of people with obesity said they felt this way.

Unless we, as a nation, are ready to really tackle obesity with a multi-touchpoint strategy our healthcare costs are going to continue to skyrocket. We can’t just give patients an Rx for everything, we need to address the root causes of obesity NOW.