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And as Abou-Alfa noted, it’s not just liver cancer.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced this month that being overweight or obese in fact increases a person’s risk for at least 13 different types of cancer
The cancers include those of the liver, brain, esophagus, thyroid, gallbladder, stomach, pancreas, kidney, uterus, and colon.
They make up 40 percent of all diagnosed cancers in the United States, according to the report.
CDC researchers found that in 2014 alone, more than 630,000 Americans had a type of cancer that was associated with being overweight or obese.
These cases amounted to more than 55 percent of all cancers diagnosed among women and 24 percent of all cancers diagnosed among men in the United States.
While it’s been common knowledge for decades that being overweight is a factor in diabetes and heart disease, obesity’s deepening links to cancer are still being discovered.
In a press conference on Oct. 3, Dr. Anne Schuchat, deputy director of the CDC, acknowledged that the “awareness of some cancers being associated with obesity and [being] overweight is not yet widespread” among Americans.
The CDC noted in its report that the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the cancer wing of the World Health Organization (WHO), says that there is “sufficient evidence” to link excess body fat to at least 13 different cancers.
The related issue, of course, is the prevalence of obesity, a chronic disease affecting more than 1 in 3 adults in the United States.
The CDC also announced this month that obesity rates among American adults has increased from just over 30 percent in 2000 to nearly 40 percent in 2016.
The report, which comes from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, measures obesity according to body mass index.
This is a rough measure of fatness that takes a person’s weight and divides it by their height squared.
Finding the connections between a higher body weight and certain cancers is a booming field of research.
But the public is just coming up to speed, experts acknowledge.
A study in 2003 published in The New England Journal of Medicine linked obesity to cancer death among American adults.
More recently, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) concluded in 2014 that obesity has surpassed smoking as the leading preventable cause of cancer.
Dr. Caroline Apovian, president-elect of the Obesity Society and a world leader in the field of weight loss, said the society has delved into the links between obesity and cancer and prepared a paper that will be published in the next month.
She said that while the public’s understanding of cancer’s link to obesity isn’t as high as the awareness of obesity’s link to various other diseases, the public is now discovering the studies.
“The research didn’t just appear overnight,” said Apovian, who’s also a best-selling author, professor, and director of clinical research at the Obesity Research Center, Boston University Medical Center.
Apovian joined the Obesity Society to continue the organization’s vision to understand, prevent, and treat obesity and improve lives through research, education, and advocacy.
The growing amount of research on obesity and cancer, including the latest study from the CDC, highlights the need for the national medical community to deepen its commitment to nutrition and diet.
And while it’s important to bring oncologists into the nutrition conversation, she said it’s “even more fundamentally important” to get to the patients before the cancer develops.
“The Obesity Society is focusing on primary care physicians first,” she explained. “Seeing the patient years before they develop the cancer, that’s where it needs to start.”
Apovian added that oncologists need to counsel on diet and exercise as well, “but if you don’t start with primary care, we’re never going to decrease the rates of cancers.”
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