"Obesity causes cancer too"
Jul. 1st, 2019 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnrI 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.
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.
