There has been a lot of studies about the relationship between a person’s diet and cancer. Over the years, there have been many speculations about different food items that are carcinogenic and those that aren’t and in almost all the cases, the studies have reported causing agents and preventive foods to be one and the same. If one study agrees on meat being carcinogenic, another study suggests that it prevents cancer.
There is one definitive thing that we do know, obesity is linked to thirteen different types of cancers, including colon, thyroid, ovarian, uterine, pancreatic, and in postmenopausal women, breast cancer.
SourceThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that about 631,000 Americans were diagnosed with with a body-fat related cancer in 2014, the number making up almost 40 percent of all the cases.
Humans seem to be losing the war on not just cancer, but also on what we eat and drink. Cancer cells use the food that we eat as fuel to generate more cancerous cells which repeat the process indefinitely, leading into the formation of a tumour.
The first cell is triggered when the oncogene is triggered. Increased amounts of insulin in the body is also one of the leading factors of tumour formation. Insulin activates the cells to grow and take up fuel to make new cells.
While we all need insulin to survive, it is the abnormally increased amounts of insulin in the bloodstream that causes the cells to grow and divide without control. Insulin is also directly linked with our cells’ ability to store fat. Therefore, increased fat levels in the body mean increased amounts of insulin which leads to cancer.
Hence, obesity can also be seen as more of an indicator of cancer and not just as a causative agent. The danger may not be eating too much but just eating some specific types of food which trigger insulin formation, namely sugars and carbohydrates.
