"Obesity causes cancer too"

[lnr]

I passed an advert today, with a phrase on the lines of "obesity causes cancer too" on the side of a mocked up cigarette packet. So I did some digging. Numbers approximate as of 2018.

Obesity is considered the second most common cause of preventable cancers in the UK. The first is smoking. Reading the graph on this BBC article it looks like roughly 54 thousand cancer diagnoses a year are attributable to smoking, and 23 thousand to obesity. Apparently there are about 6.1 million smokers in the UK, and in 2018 28.1% of adults had a BMI of over 30 (which works out as approx 13.8 miliion obese poeple). This works out as 0.88 percent of smokers and 0.16 percent of obese adults receiving a cancer diagnosis - making smoking 5.5 times worse than being obese.

0.16% chance of being diagnosed with a cancer that was caused by being obese is quite possibly still worth looking at - but reliably and permanently turning an obese person into a not obese person is not something which is easy to do. Even if giving up smoking is hard I would suspect this is a lot harder.

I don't know who those posters are aimed at, but I wish they'd stop. Raising awareness of the link between obesity and cancer is only *one* part of Cancer Research's campaign, but those posters do not mention *any* of the other things they are doing (policy on diet and obesity) and they are thoroughly over-simplistic. It's just one more thing to feel bad about.

I'm 104.7 kg, with an estimated body fat percentage of 49.9%, my blood sugar levels are slightly raised, and I know being thinner might improve that aspect of my health, as well as making hill climbing easier. I've done it before. Twice. And a set of simplistic weight loss tips is not going to suddenly make it easy.

Comments

[kaberett]

THANK YOU for this.

[lnr]

You absolutely do not need to thank me! I'll bang on this drum as much as I can, whether fat or thin!

[naath]

Obesity may or may not cause cancer, but it is NOT PREVENTABLE at the individual level (maaaaaaaybe at a population level) in the majority of cases. BRACA1 is a cause of cancer, but do we see people saying 'maybe don't have it'? no, because wtf. If obesity causes cancer and you (generic) are obese you may need more screening and preventative care, but bullying to 'be thin' is not in any respect helpful.

(I'd love to walk more, but CRU can try telling that to my shitty immune system because I kust can't)

[lnr]

I know! It's like last time they ran this poster campaign: if they want to do work at the population level that's *great* - but does not involve posters in the street!

[rmc28]

ARRRRGH Thank you for pointing this out. Although that graphic is quite anger-making. I DO ALL OF THOSE THINGS. They do not make me lose weight. I know how to make my body lose weight, but it is hard and slow.

Also the cancer I did have isn't even linked to obesity, but I bet the overlap between "people who vaguely know me and that I had cancer" and "people who will see that poster and assume my fatness caused my cancer" is non-trivial.

[lnr]

Oh god yes, I hadn't even thought of that! *hug*

[catyak]

Look at it another way - some people have an issue that causes weight gain, diabetes is one that springs to mind (OK, not directly, but taking insulin tends to be associated with weight gain and not taking it tends to be associated with death). It may well be that obesity is a symptom of something that makes cancer more likely, so while it may be a valid indicator of heightened risk, it is not the cause, and may not be amenable to a 'simple' fix.

[lnr]

Yeah, I hadn't even got on to correlation versus causation!

[barakta]

No recognition that a lot of these things are hard with people having to do things like commute further and in more nasty conditions to work, overwork - long hours etc, low income, access to shopping etc.

I'm trying many of those things as my activity level has dropped due to a mobility impairment that I'll need surgery to fix, but while the NHS is great, it's not fast, I'm expecting 6-12 and more likely 12-18 months before I'm properly mobile again... Makes not gaining weight really difficult, I can't get to shops to get better food and can't prepare fresh food easily for disability reasons. There's a limit to the amount I can ask vegetable phobic partner to prepare for me.

[lnr]

Phew, I really hope you get the short end of the waiting list!

[sphyg]

The campaign seems to be based on a year-old publication with the pertinent facts buried in the supplementary data (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5931106/). I had similar issues with a CRUK campaign a couple of years ago (how the risk factors were grouped), but can't find it now! I'm currently obese due to a variety of reasons (genes, PCOS, lack of spare time, sweet tooth) and I find this type of "news" far too simplistic.

[lnr]

I see the corresponding author is based at Cancer Research UK! The supplementary data is useful, but I still had to do quite a bit of reverse engineering of simplified versions of equations to get out how many *thin* people got kidney cancer.

[lnr]

And I remember last time: they had ob_s__y adverts up, and they'd lumped diet, exercise and weight together in order to claim it was worse than smoking!