Obesity will be biggest cancer killer
OBESITY will overtake smoking as the biggest cancer killer within the next decade, experts predict.
The condition is already to blame for up to 32,000 cancer deaths in the UK each year.
Researchers say diet and exercise regimes should become ‘standard’ treatment for cancer alongside chemotherapy and surgery.
Within the next ten years, obesity will cause more cancers in the US and the UK than smoking, the Harvard University academics said.
Not only does being overweight raise patients’ risk of developing cancer, it also means they are far more likely to die.
Around a quarter of adults in Britain are obese, but the World Health Organisation predicts this will rise to a third by 2030.
Only last week, NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens warned that today’s children faced a ‘rising tide’ of cancer, heart disease and ill health due to the effects of their excess weight.
The team of researchers has spent three years assessing the link between obesity and cancer by looking at previously published studies and using computer programs to model future trends.
They also warn the effects of obesity mean some of the most common cancers are occurring 20 years earlier in life than previously. This includes bowel cancer, which is typically occurring in adults in their 60s rather than their 80s.
The team will present their findings at the American Society of Clinical Oncology conference – the leading US cancer body – this week- end in Chicago. Lead researcher Dr Jennifer Ligibel, of Harvard Medical School in Boston, said: ‘We are at a critical point now. The risks of cigarettes have become more known, so the prevalence is decreasing, but the rise in rates of obesity has really been staggering.
‘People are aware that being overweight increases the risk of heart disease and diabetes but not that it increases their risk of cancer, and their risk of dying from cancer.’
In the past decade, successive governments have imposed a raft of policies aimed at cutting smoking, including raising tax on tobacco, banning smoking in public buildings, and cigarettes being hidden from view in shops.
Yet at the same time, calls for policies to cut obesity, including a tax on sugar, have repeatedly been ignored.
Only last week Downing Street refused again to consider such a tax.