We shouldn’t treat people who are overweight, because it’s rarely a choice. But there is also another truth. In Europe, obesity is directly responsible for 200,000 new cancer cases per year. In the Netherlands for thousands.
‘People would rather not know,’ says Ann Gils, director of Prevention and Early Detection at Stand up to Cancer against Humo. “The taboo is possibly even greater than the link between alcohol and cancer. And yet we need to talk about it. It is not because you are overweight that you will get cancer, but it is the most important risk factor after smoking.”
Alcohol consumption is at the root of 4.4 percent of cancers (or 11 percent of preventable cancers), overweight and obesity account for 6 percent of cancers (or 15 percent of preventable cancers). Obesity can mainly be linked to breast cancer and colon cancer, followed by esophageal cancer, kidney cancer and uterine cancer. Only for lung and bladder cancer no connection has been shown, writes Humo.
For uterine cancer, the link with BMI is most striking. For every additional five units of BMI, the risk of this cancer rises by 50 percent, and according to a recent study by Cancer Research UK, as much as 88 percent. In the US, where obesity is an even bigger problem than ours, more than half of uterine cancers are due to obesity.
In Europe, colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer and the third leading cause of cancer death. At least 20 percent of those colon cancers are related to obesity.