Obesity and Cancer: The HIDDEN Link Your Doctor May NOT Have Told You About! | Dr. Jason Fung EP 674

0:03Hey everyone, this is Lewis Howes and I am so excited to invite you to the Summit of Greatness 2024 happening at the iconic Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California. This is more than just an event. It's a powerful experience designed to ignite your passion, boost your growth, and connect you with a community of other inspiring achievers. Join us Friday, September 13th, and Saturday, September 14th for two days packed with inspiration and transformation from some of the most incredible speakers on the planet. Don't miss out on this chance to elevate your life, unlock your potential, and be part of something truly special.

0:38Make sure to get your tickets right now and step into greatness with us at the Summit of Greatness 2024. Head over to lewishouse.com slash tickets and get your tickets today and I will see you there. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

1:02As it seems like you hear about it more and more recently that so many people are getting cancer or the early stages of cancer, what are the main causes of cancer? Yeah, that's a great question. And that's something that we've always been trying to deal with. And sometimes some people say, well, we don't know what causes cancer. That's sort of a cop out because we actually do know a lot about what causes cancer. and these are things that cause cancer are called carcinogens. And the World Health Organization maintains a huge list of these carcinogens. But if you want to break it down into what causes cancer in most people, you can look at the sort of, a couple of studies have looked at the sort of percentage contribution of these carcinogens to cancer.

1:47And the biggest one, of course, is tobacco smoke. So that's sort of, by far and away, the biggest contributor to cancer at around 35%. And these estimates were from 2015. So it was higher before when more people were smoking. But as a contributor to cancer, it's the biggest. Interestingly, the second biggest and almost as big is actually our diet. So it's a huge, huge part of what contributes to cancer in general. And far outstrips of those two are way above any other causes of cancer. So when you worry about things such as radiation or chemicals, sunscreens and pesticides and stuff like that, they do cause cancer.

2:36But the contribution in a whole population is very small. all. So what's interesting about diet is that we know this from our studies, but what part of the diet actually contributes to cancer? And that's where things sort of bogged down a lot. So initially in the 70s, people talked about fibres. People thought about, oh, hey, well, you know, maybe if you eat a lot of fiber, what you're going to do is have a lot of big bowel movements, and that's going to clean out your bowel, and then you're not going to get cancer. Turns out that wasn't true. Then the next thought was, hey, maybe it's dietary fat.

3:14So if you remember the 80s and 90s, there's this huge movement against fat that, you know, all fat is bad for you. It caused heart disease and all this sort of stuff, much of which has sort of been, you know, overturned at this point. But there's this thought, maybe it causes cancer too. Turns out that wasn't true either. Then people talked about vitamins. So maybe cancer is like a vitamin deficiency. So we did many, many studies, millions of dollars, decades of research, where we would randomize people to say one group that took a certain vitamin and one group that didn't and see if there's any difference in cancer.

3:49So we tested vitamin A, didn't work. Vitamin D, B, didn't work. Folic acid, didn't work. Vitamin C, didn't work. Vitamin D, didn't work. Vitamin E, didn't work. Selenium, didn't work. Omega-3 fatty acids, didn't work. So all of those supplements didn't actually make any difference to the incidence of cancer. So we were sort of stuck at that point in the mid-2000s saying, oh, no, it's the diet, but what part of the diet? And that's when it became sort of more and more clear that this cancer is actually an obesity-related disease. So what happened, of course, is that in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, people didn't really think about it.

4:34But then we had this obesity epidemic, so it became a bigger and bigger problem. So obesity in 2003, when they started to look at the studies, that was the first really definitive studies that said, hey, obesity is actually a huge risk factor, as well as type 2 diabetes. And both of those conditions will actually increase your risk of certain types of cancer along. So it really depends on what type of cancer you're talking about. If you're talking lung cancer, obesity plays almost no role in it, right? That's smoking. Or if you have asbestos, which causes mesothelioma, which is a cancer of the lining of the lung, again, obesity plays no role.

5:12But things like breast cancer and colorectal cancer, which are sort of really important cancers, they actually are obesity-related cancers. So that was the sort of big link to this, you know, at this point, the World Health Health Organization considers 13 different types of cancer as obesity-related cancers, which is huge because from 2003, we didn't even know. Like when I went to medical school, nobody thought obesity caused cancer. Really? It's almost as big as smoking. It's a huge, huge thing. So therefore, if you know that, that's super powerful because if you can maintain a normal weight, you're going to reduce, just like stopping smoking, right?

5:52you're going to reduce your risk of these types of cancer.

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