Curiously Awesome

Obesity increases the risk of a large number of cancers…by as much as 50 percent in some cases. It has now been formally concluded that excess body fat causes some cancers.

Researchers conducted an analysis of 144 prior studies that included 282,000 people. They compared the cancer rates of those whose body mass index (BMI) increased from normal to overweight or from overweight to obese with those whose BMI remained normal or overweight.

BMI is a measurement of weight relative to height.

An increase in body mass increased the risk of rare blood cancers in both women and men (including adult leukemia, multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma). In men, it increased the risk of colon and kidney cancers by (24 %) and the risk of thyroid cancer (33 %).

Women who became overweight suffered a 34 percent higher incidence of kidney cancer and a 59 percent higher incidence of gall-bladder cancer.