If you’re overweight and you’re still a young adult, a flurry of news coverage about a new study may have caught your eye. It’s an important study, because it warns about the link between obesity and cancer, and the rise of cancers that are usually for older people in young adults. We know it can be hard to figure out what information to pay attention to the most. Here’s our list of top ten things to know if you’re young and have a few extra pounds. Hint: We are a cancer site.
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The word “carcinogen” is usually used in the context of chemicals contained in products or burning cigarette paper. But “carcinogen” actually just means “cancer causing.” Carcinogens don’t just come from products – excess body weight is a carcinogen, too.
3) 6 cancers on the rise.
6 types of cancer associated with obesity are more likely to occur in young adults than they used to be. “Incidence significantly increased for six of 12 obesity-related cancers,” the study reports, “(multiple myeloma, colorectal, uterine corpus, gallbladder, kidney, and pancreatic cancer) in young adults (2549 years) with steeper rises in successively younger generations.” That means that younger generations are getting these six obesity related cancers, and the increase is getting worse and worse every generation.
4) Childhood obesity isn’t OK.
A lot of people think it’s cute for little kids to be “chubby.” But childhood obesity is one of the leading predictors of adult obesity. Plus, if you are young, exposure to fat may have particularly risky effects. “Exposures to carcinogens during early life can affect an individual’s cancer risk by acting during crucial developmental periods and increasing cumulative mutagenic damage,” the study says. So because you are young, obesity will have a set of effects that are detrimental to cancer risk.
5) Obesity can affect treatment.
Cancers linked to obesity are often treated surgically, but “a patient who is obese will be at higher risk for complications and often times more severe complications from surgery than someone at an optimal weight,” MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Dr. George Chang told CNN.
6) More than 40% of Americans are obese.
The prevalence of obesity was 18.5% and affected about 13.7 million children and adolescents between ages 2 and 19, according to the CDC’s latest (2017) findings.
7) Weight loss counseling could be available.
“Despite national guidelines recommending screening of children and adults for obesity with appropriate provision of (or referral to) ‘intensive, multicomponent behavioral interventions,’ fewer than half of primary care physicians regularly assess body-mass index in their patients,” the study says, “and only a third of obese patients report receiving an obesity diagnosis or weight loss counseling.”
8) In some cases, weight gain may be even riskier at a young age than later in life.
“A recent study of data from 20 pooled prospective cohorts suggests that excess bodyweight during early adulthood (ages 1821 years) could be a more important influence on pancreatic cancer risk than weight gain later in life,” according to the study.
9) The study marks a pretty new line of research.
“Because most epidemiological studies have primarily focused on older populations,” the study says, “the effect of excess bodyweight in early life or of weight change from young adulthood on cancer risk in different stages of the life course is not well characterized.” In other words, not that much research has been done on the risk of cancer on overweight populations of different ages.
10) The study isn’t designed to test causation.
Even though these cancers are “linked” to cancer, the study wasn’t set up to test “causation.” In other words just because we know these cancers are more likely for people who are over weight, we don’t know that obesity is the reason for cancer. They could both be symptoms of something else, to name another possible relationship, or could have another relationship entirely. All that we know is that in young adults, where there is one, you are more likely to find the other than we thought.
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