Being a healthy weight could prevent 22,000 cancer cases
More than 22,000 cases of cancer - enough people to pack the O2 arena - could be prevented every year in the UK if everyone was a healthy weight, new cancer prevention research shows.
Details from World Cancer Research Fund's Continuous Update Project (CUP) - which looks at the most recent cancer prevention studies - shows 18 per cent of the 123,000 weight-related cancer cases in the UK could be prevented annually.
Currently, 63 per cent of the UK population is either overweight (Body Mass Index over 25) or obese (BMI over 30) - one of the highest levels in Europe.
Professor Alan Jackson, chair of the CUP panel and professor of human nutrition at the University of Southampton, said: "A significant number of cancer cases could be prevented by people maintaining a healthy body weight. Through keeping levels of body fat low, a lot of people will avoid getting cancer in the first place - forestalling the pain and anguish associated with the disease.
"The CUP report published today looks specifically at pancreatic cancer, which is the fifth most common cause of cancer death in the UK with very low survival rates. Fewer than one in five patients survive the first year after diagnosis but we have found that 15 per cent of new cases could be avoided every year by keeping body weight within the healthy range."
As well as pancreatic cancer, body weight has an effect on risk for cancers of the breast, bowel, oesophagus, kidney, womb and gall bladder.
There are several ways that excess body fat can affect cancer risk. Fat releases hormones and influences other parts of the body as well. For example, fat cells release proteins (called cytokines), which cause inflammation and may encourage the growth of cancerous cells. Excess body fat also leads to increased blood levels of insulin and related hormones that encourage cells to grow and divide more quickly, promoting tumour development. Fat is also an important source of oestrogen, so can promote the growth of oestrogen-sensitive cancers like those of the breast and womb.
In examining pancreatic cancer it was calculated that, from 8,383 annual cases in the UK, 1,257 could be prevented through being a healthy weight (roughly equal to a BMI of between 18.5 and 25).
The most recent global figures from the International Agency for Research on Cancer show the UK ranks 31st in the world for incidence of pancreatic cancer with a rate of 6.1 cases per 100,000.
WCRF recommends reducing pancreatic cancer risk by maintaining a healthy weight and not smoking. WCRF has produced the following BMI checker:
wcrf-uk.org/cancer_prevention/health_tools/bmi_calculator.php
The CUP is the world's largest ongoing review of scientific evidence on diet, physical activity, body weight and cancer. It has added more than 2,600 papers on eight cancers - breast, prostate, bowel, pancreatic, endometrial, ovarian, bladder and kidney - and is in the early stages of reviewing new research on breast cancer survivors.
An independent panel of scientific experts judges the research findings as each cancer type is updated and draws conclusions to make recommendations on reducing cancer risk - ensuring WCRF's Recommendations for Cancer Prevention are based on the most current evidence.