Obesity and Cancer Rates Rise in Lock Step

I like graphs. Pictures just seem to make things clearer to me than the numbers often do. I recently saw a graph that showed rates of obesity in the USA over the last 20 years. (Sorry about all the annoying popups. I don't really get how advertisers conclude that annoying people sells more stuff.) One particularly troubling aspect of this graph is the rise in obesity among our youth.

In fact, the rates of several cancers linked to obesity are on the rise among people ages 25 to 49 much faster than among older populations.

Between 1995 and 2014 the annual rates of gallbladder, pancreatic, uterine and colorectal cancers rose about 4% among 25 to 29 year olds. Kidney cancer risk was up about 6%. This is eerily in sync with the rise in obesity rates.

Now this doesn't prove that obesity causes higher cancer rates. But along with all the other problems caused by - lets be politically incorrect for a moment - being fat (high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea and more) here is one more reason to put an end to it.

At the end of the day, obesity is very much under our own control. The choices we make, the lives we live. Like Eric Cartman, we can blame it on being "big boned" and keep stuffing ourselves with crap food, or we can take control and eat ourselves healthy and slim.

The choice is yours.