Food and Cancer

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Anchor lead:  How much is what you’re eating impacting your risk for cancer? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Your diet, including how much you eat, may have a big impact on your risk for cancers of the digestive tract, a recent study found. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says the findings make sense.

Nelson: People eat a pound to a pound and a half of food a day, it’s the most complicated chemical mixture on the planet, far greater exposure than any other you get. So the idea that this would affect particularly those organs is a reasonable thought. In the end they believe there’s a fairly consistent deleterious effect of obesity and alcohol intake on these oropharyngeal, digestive kind of cancers. The estimate in the United Kingdom was that obesity would be responsible for six percent of cancers and alcohol intake for three percent of cancers.  :33

Nelson says the good news is these risk factors are in your control. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.