Half of cancers aren’t result of “bad luck” but bad lifestyle new study

A new report indicates if Americans curbed bad habits, such as smoking, drinking, and unhealthy eating, and worked in 150 minutes of exercise a week, half of all cancer deaths could be prevented. The same efforts would also lower the instances of new cancers by 40% to 70% the study reveals in the Los Angeles Times.

The effects of maintaining a healthy lifestyle varied in relation to gender and cancer type. Men would benefit the most, avoiding or delaying 67% of cancer diagnoses and impede 63% of new mutations each year, according to researchers. If women followed suit, their annual cancer rates would drop by 59% and 41% respectively. The study’s results were published online earlier this week in the Journal JAMA Oncology.

Observations were gathered by studying cancer rates and lifestyle habits of two large and continuing surveys of health professionals, the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Scientists from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, also collected data from the National Cancer Institute’s comprehensive Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program.

Particularly, women would reduce their risk of lung cancer by 85% and colorectal cancer by 60%; for men, the recorded figures were 90% and 50%. The study’s findings challenge earlier studies that suggested as many as 80% of cancers might correlate to factors that individuals can’t account for, in other words, because of chance. The evidence gathered from the new study points to bad behaviors over luck as the primary culprit.  “Primary prevention should remain a priority for cancer control,” cautioned the study authors, Drs. Mingyang Song and Edward Giovannucci.

What is now considered an epidemic, scientists found that 38% of Americans are obese, which is official if one’s body mass index is above 30. And nearly 33% of the population have a BMI over 25, technically overweight. But Song and Giovannucci permitted a BMI as high as 27.5 in their designation as a “healthy lifestyle.” That still leaves, however, 80 million American adults who continue to lead an unhealthy lifestyle.

The JAMA Oncology analysis reflected that people who got less than 75 minutes of high-intensity or 150 minutes of medium-intensity exercise were classified as having an unhealthy lifestyle.

As for drinking, 60% of Americans consume less than a single drink per week, but heavy consumption is prevalent for nearly 20% of adults; a quarter of the sampled population admit to binge-drinking at least once during the month.

“As a society, we need to avoid procrastination induced by thoughts that chance drives all cancer risk or that new medical discoveries are needed to make gains against cancer,” Dr. Graham A. Colditz and Siobhan Sutcliffe of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis said.