Re: Obesity is now the leading cause of cancer Originally Posted by HonestRN 
I don't believe they are looking merely at BMI's but lifestyles.
Sorry, I should have responded to this before - the researchers may have looked at lifestyle rather than, or in addition to, BMI but the very clear message is about size, not lifestyle, as evidenced in this thread's title:
Obesity is the leading cause of cancer.
Also, the National Cancer Institute may have found that 3.2% of 2002 cancer cases were linked to obesity and that 14% of cancers in men and 20% of cancers in women were "due to" overweight and obesity.
However, we also know that the initial scare figure of 400,000 obesity-related deaths a year has, on review of the methods and claculations, been revised down to 26,000. Not only were the projections so significantly fllawed that wevery American death in a person under 65 would have had to be caused by obesity, we now
know from skewed mortality figures that weight was counted as the cause of death regardless of other factors factored in regardless of other contributors (eg being hit by a car).
We also know that more Americans are overweight or obese (those figures are always conflated) than "normal" or underweight. And we know that
Heart disease, stroke, and cardiovascular disease are all down dramatically in the last 20 years. Mortality rates in nine of the ten types of cancer most associated with obesity have dropped in the last 15 years. Overall cancer rates and deaths from cancer have dropped every year for the last ten years. (source as before)
Hmm. If 67.2% of American men and 61.9% of American women are obese or overweight (
source) but only 14% & 20% of cancers (respectively) are obesity related, the cancer-protective nature of fat seems even higher than I thought. Hmm - statistics: they can be anybody's friend.
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