What is the relationship between obesity and cancer?

March 11, 2020 / / Obesity is one of the major factors leading to the development of cancer worldwide.
epidemiological studies, data showing disease patterns in the population suggest that what you eat can affect your risk of cancer.
, your risk of cancer is not the only factor affected by food.
if you have cancer, the food you eat can also have a significant impact on your response to treatment, and we don't know enough about it to make meaningful clinical decisions.
photo source: Dr. Barrie Peck of the Structural Biology Group at Berkshire Community College Bioscience Image Libraryvia Flickr London Cancer Research, in a recent review paper published in the journal Trends in Cancer.
, he has been a new head of cancer research UK Barts Cancer Institute.
"We know that obesity is a major risk factor for cancer, but your weight and diet can also affect the trajectory of the disease and how it responds to treatment," Dr. Peck said.
generally, obese patients respond worse to cancer treatment than non-obese patients, so their overall results are worse," he said.
but we can't make clinical decisions for these patients based on their obesity status or diet at the time of treatment.
"the basic cause of cancer where everything starts is damage to your DNA.
can take many forms, but in any case it can cause cell replication to spiral out of control.
cancer cells go through all kinds of changes that normal healthy cells don't -- they change energy sources, they change processes, they re-re-energize in unusual ways, and they do their best to survive.
, cancer is congenes.
for some types of cancer, DNA defects can be traced back to the fetus, while for others, exposure to cigarettes or sunlight causes DNA damage.
but what directly does the food you eat directly affect cancer cells? In a big way -- obesity increases your risk -- it's clear, but so far few studies have been done to assess the effects of diet on cancer.
Peck said: "We know, for example, that smokers are much more likely to develop lung cancer, and we know that they smoke at a much higher risk of lung cancer than non-smokers.
In terms of smoking, quitting smoking is obviously a good thing, but stopping someone's diet is obviously impossible, and we don't have reliable advice on what patients can change to increase the likelihood that their treatment will be effective."
little is known about how to adjust the diet of obese people for optimal cancer treatment.
people who are obese have an increased risk of cancer, we know exactly what changes they can make to reduce their weight and thus their risk of cancer.
, however, once you've been diagnosed with the disease, these dietary changes don't apply, and in fact, they can have the opposite effect.
If you go back to the example of lung cancer and change your diet, you might think, 'I've got cancer, I've heard that the antioxidants in 'super fruit' can prevent cancer, and the best thing I can do is take a lot of antioxidants.'
but research shows that when you're in therapy, it's actually a very bad idea.
when you are treated, the antioxidant levels in your body are too high, which can seriously hinder the drug's functioning," he said.
recent research shows that the same is true of breast cancer.
the same is true of obesity, but we really don't know the truth.
() Reference: Barrie Peck et al. Lipid Metabolism at the Nexus of Diet and Tumor Microenvironment, Trends in Cancer (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.trecan.2019.09.007.