Obesity to be top cancer cause

OBESITY will overtake smoking as the biggest preventable cause of cancer in women, a report from Cancer Research UK suggests.

The “crossover point” will take place in 25 years if current trends persist.

The charity wants to raise awareness of the fact that obesity leads to cancer, as it says only one in seven people in Britain is aware such a link exists.

Britain was last year named the most overweight nation in Western Europe, with obesity rates rising faster than in the US. Public health bodies have long warned of an obesity epidemic in the UK, with 62 per cent of the population deemed obese or overweight.

Conversely, the prevalence of smoking in the UK is projected to decrease by around four percentage points to 22 per cent of the population by 2025, while weight issues will increase by a similar amount over the same time.

The crossover point will be reached in 2043 among women, the report stated. Any such shift among men is unlikely to happen until a much later

date, because of a higher occurrence of smoking-related cancers among men and a lower incidence of forms of the disease caused by weight problems.

Professor Linda Bauld, a prevention expert at Cancer Research UK, called on the Government to launch a campaign to match that which helped lead to a marked decrease in smoking over the past two decades.

“The decline in smoking is a cause for celebration,” she said. “It shows how decades of effort to raise awareness about the health risks, plus strong political action, including taxation, removing tobacco marketing and a ban on smoking in indoor public places, have paid off.

“But, just as there is still more to do to support people to quit smoking, we also need to act now to halt the tide of weight-related cancers and ensure this projection never becomes a reality.”

The charity has called for measures to be brought in, including a ban on television advertisements for junk food before the watershed and for restrictions on shops and supermarkets in promoting unhealthy food and drinks with cut-price offers, echoing the combined awareness and legislative campaigns deployed in recent years in response to other public health issues.

The report marks the first attempt to quantify and compare the predicted rates of cancer caused by smoking and weight issues in the UK.

Together, smoking and obesity could cause more than 95,000 UK cancer cases in 2035 alone, compared with around 75,000 cases in 2015.