Regular exercise can help prevent, combat cancer
Regular readers of my column know I’m always pounding the table about the many benefits of exercise to promote health and well-being. However, an oftenneglected benefit is that regular exercise can help reduce the risk of cancer, including some of the many forms of breast cancer.
Here’s what to know about how regular exercise can reduce the risk of cancer and why:
Can increased estrogen levels increase your risk of breast cancer?
In women, genetic and environmental factors can impact breast cancer risk, but a key factor is estrogen, a risk factor common to all women. Estrogen can feed and promote some breast cancers, which means having more estrogen in the body, especially over a prolonged period of time, increases your cancer risk. For example, early onset of menstrual periods and late menopause results in longer exposure to higher levels of estrogen. But as important, if not more so in today’s society, excess body fat can promote estrogen production, elevating the amount of estrogen circulating in the body to a dangerous level.
The risk of excess body fat is not limited to women and breast cancer. Excess body fat increases inflammation in the body. When fat storage cells are stuffed with fat, they can release chemicals that promote inflammation in surrounding tissues. That’s bad news because inflammation is a driving force behind many serious diseases, including cancer. When inflammation is chronic, as occurs in obesity, there can be cell mutations and other disturbances that create an environment that increases the risk of cancer.
How does increased body fat impact your risk of cancer?
Excess body fat also disrupts hormonal function, especially insulin. When you add fat around your waist and organs you risk becoming insulin resistant. I have written about insulin resistance several times as a cause of Type 2 diabetes. Cells resist the effects of insulin resulting in increased insulin in the bloodstream, and because insulin is a growth factor, increased concentration triggers more rapid cell division. In turn, cells may divide without control and newly formed cells can invade neighboring tissues, creating an opportunity for cancer to start and spread.
In addition to reducing body fat and all the problems it creates, exercise contributes to a stronger immune system that may stop cancer from gaining momentum. The immune system creates T cells, a special form of white blood cells, and sends them out to find “foreign” cells that don’t belong and need to be destroyed. This includes cancer cells. Exercise also increases the production of several factors that activate some of the many other types of immune cells, stimulating them to fight cancer cells.
How can exercise help if you’re diagnosed with cancer?
If you have been stricken with cancer, is regular exercise a good idea? The answer is yes, and exercise appears to be especially effective in battling breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer, lowering the odds of dying by as much as 40% to 50%, according to a recent study.
However, despite this impressive statistic, mainstream America does not see a preventative role in exercise. On the contrary, the prevailing belief is if you have cancer you need to rest and preserve your strength. This also was the case years ago for heart attack victims, but now we know better, and exercise in a cardiac rehabilitation program is assumed, and the sooner you start the better.
A major breakthrough has been the use of exercise for those undergoing cancer treatment which can be devastating, causing fatigue, gastrointestinal upset, an
increased risk of infection, plus the mental and emotional toll of fatigue, anxiety, and depression. Research shows that exercise reduces these effects, reducing the overall trauma of treatment, and helping to sustain a higher quality of life.
How exercise can help lessen the odds of dying of certain cancers
A new factor that supports exercise to lessen the odds of dying of certain cancers has been uncovered by researchers from Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. Their research involved men with advanced “late-stage” prostate cancer.
As a result of an exercise program, the research team found elevated levels of a protein called “myokines” in the blood of participants. Myokines are produced in skeletal muscle, the muscles you use when exercising, and they help in two ways. One, they can stunt the rate of growth of existing cancer tumors, and two, they fight cancer cells, helping to prevent new tumors from forming.
Not only did participants benefit from the ongoing exercise program, but researchers also found benefits from just one bout of exercise. When participants performed 34 minutes of high-intensity exercise on a stationary cycle, there was a substantial boost in myokines that suppressed the growth of prostate cancer cells “in vitro” (test tube analysis of cells removed from the body).
Researchers were delighted with the results and concluded “this is helping us to understand why patients who exercise exhibit slower disease progression and survive for longer.”
In other words, there is more to the already impressive exercise story than keeping a check on body fatness to reduce inflammation and circulating insulin levels, plus bolstering the immune system. Now we can expand the roster to include the benefits of myokines.
Let me add, the researchers recommend not only high-intensity aerobic exercise but also resistance exercise to grow muscles. More muscle mass produces more myokines.