- Obesity is poised to take the top spot preventable cause of cancer as Americans’ waistlines continue to expand.
- The rise in obesity rates could threaten the steady decline in cancer death rates since the early 1990s.
- Being obese and overweight — long implicated in heart disease and diabetes — has been associated in recent years with an increased risk of getting at least 13 types of cancer
- Researchers at the American Cancer Society say that excess body weight is linked to about 8 percent of all cancers in the United States and about 7 percent of cancer deaths.
While the debate around drug pricing intensifies in the media and among politicians obesity continues to be the number one threat to American healthcare. About 7 in 10 Americans are overweight or obese, according to a 2015 article in JAMA Internal Medicine. People are considered overweight if they have a body mass index (BMI) of 25 to 29, and obese if they have a BMI of 30 or more.
According to the Washington Post “, the proportion of adults who are overweight has remained relatively stable in the past several decades, but the obesity rate has soared. In the early 1960s, almost 11 percent of men and nearly 16 percent of women were obese; in 2016, those percentages were 38 percent and 41 percent, respectively, according to the cancer society.
Why can’t we do for obesity what we did for smoking?
I talked to several high ranking doctors, and they all agree that the fight against obesity is complicated. It, of course, starts with awareness but it also has to be addressed in prevention at the PCP level and via communication between insurance providers and customers. They do, however, believe that a campaign to reach people about the dangers of obesity can be successful provided that
More Americans attribute stress and other unproven factors leading to cancer than recognize that alcohol, processed meat, and other lifestyle habits have clear links to cancer risk, according to a new survey from the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR).
“There is a clear crisis in cancer prevention awareness,” said Alice Bender, MS, RDN, AICR Head of Nutrition Programs. “It’s troubling that people don’t recognize alcohol and processed meats increase cancer risk. This suggests the established factors that do affect cancer risk are getting muddled with headlines where the research is unclear or inconclusive.”
The best way to cut drug industry profits is through people taking better care of themselves. That won’t be enough for some people but it’s a great start.