The More Years You Spend Overweight Increase Your Chances For Cancer

This post from WebMd verifies the fact that excess body fat over several years increases a person's chances for Cancer. Now this post was written about women and the cancers that women are more likely to get. But overweight men that carry excess body fat for years are also at high-risk for those cancers that men commonly get later in life, like colon cancer and prostate cancer.
The more years a person spends overweight, the higher their risk of several cancers. Is it any wonder, with two-thirds of our adult population overweight, that it seems like all of us know someone that has or had cancer.
A study, which followed nearly 74,000 U.S. women, found that the longer a woman carried excess poundage, the greater her risk of breast, endometrial, colon and kidney cancers.
"We've known for a long time that excess weight is important in cancer risk," said Susan Gapstur, vice president of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.
The cancer society says excess weight contributes to as many as twenty percent of all cancer deaths.
"This study is interesting because it suggests that the number of years you spend being overweight also matters," said Gapstur, who was not involved in the research.
This fact alone should provide further incentive to avoid excess weight gain in the first place.
Currently, about 7 out of 10 adults in the United States are overweight, and more than one-third are obese, according to background notes with the study.
The new findings are based on data from the Women's Health Initiative -- a huge government-sponsored study that followed U.S. women aged 50 to 79. At the outset, researchers measured the women's current weight and height and asked them to recall their weight at ages 18, 35 and 50.
Over the next dozen years, just over 6,300 women developed a form of cancer that has been linked to obesity, such as breast, ovarian, endometrial, colon, kidney, liver or pancreatic cancer.
It turned out that the risk of developing any of those cancers rose in tandem with the number of years a woman had been overweight.
On average, the study found, the odds rose by 10 percent for every 10 years a woman had been obese. Similarly, they climbed by 7 percent for every decade she'd been overweight.
When the researchers took a closer look, four cancers were clearly connected to the duration of a woman's excess weight: breast, endometrial, colon and kidney. But the findings do not prove excess weight causes these cancers.
The findings suggest that when it comes to curbing cancer risk, "obesity and overweight prevention is essential, at any age," said lead researcher Melina Arnold. Why is excess weight related to cancer risk? According to Arnold, it's difficult to isolate effects of obesity, per se, since it often goes hand-in-hand with lifestyle habits and medical conditions that have also been linked to cancer.


Those include smoking, lack of exercise, poor diet and type 2 diabetes, she said. Being overweight usually means that a person's poor lifestyle habits may be causing the overweight problem or a health condition. Either way, the cause of cancer may be from poor eating habits or lack of physical activity that has slowed down body functions.

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Check out one of them, I think you can find all the info you need and plenty of tips on how I lost my body fat. 


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