Currently, between 30 and 50% of cancers can be prevented by avoiding risk factors and implementing existing evidence-based prevention strategies.
The combination of poor eating habits and physical inactivity is the second most important risk factor for the onset of cancer, preceded only by tobacco smoke , which alone causes about a third of cancer deaths.
The food habit that most of all correlates with an increase in risk is that of eating more than the energy requirement necessary to keep us healthy, leading our body to accumulate its energy stocks , until it reaches a state of overweight or obese .
According to the latest surveys by the WCRF, which is the International Fund for Research against Cancer, there is strong evidence that being overweight or obese in adulthood increases the risk of cancer in as many as 12 tumor sites .
Even if for simplicity it still refers to excess body weight , what really matters and is most correlated with the risk of cancer is excess adipose tissue , especially if it is located in the abdomen, the so-called ” visceral fat “.
The reasons for this correlation are various:
Body fat , when it is in excess, leads to the production of proteins capable of triggering a state of chronic inflammation in our body , which is considered one of the most relevant risk factors . The big problem with chronic inflammation is that it affects the cellular replications that take place in our body every day to meet the various needs of the organism. When these replications take place in a cellular environment that is constantly inflamed, then more opportunities are created for those cellular replication errors to occur which, if they accumulate, can give rise to disease.
Furthermore, excess adipose tissue leads to excessive production of insulin and other hormones capable of stimulating cell proliferation , and this too can favor the origin and growth of cancer cells.
A very intuitive way to get an idea of your amount of visceral fat is to measure the circumference of your waist . In women this circumference should not exceed 80 cm, while in men it should be less than 94 cm.
It’s never too late to make those lifestyle changes that can help you stay healthier, and not just in terms of preventing cancer. The excess of waist circumference and therefore of central fat is in fact also correlated with the increased risk of the most important chronic pathologies, such as cardiovascular diseases and diabetes .
In the next videos we will see the eating habits which are specifically more important for the prevention of cancer, both indirectly because they affect body weight and for their direct action on the quality of our cellular replications.
