-As for cancer, a 2003 report on a 16-year study of 900,000 American adults found significantly increased death rates for several kinds of tumors among overweight or mildly obese people. Most of these apparently obesity-related cancers are very rare, however, killing at most a few dozen people a year for every 100,000 study participants. Among women with a high BMI, both colon cancer and postmenopausal breast cancer risks were slightly elevated; for overweight and obese men, colon and prostate cancer presented the most common increased risks. *For both women and men, though, being overweight or obese seemed to confer significant protection against lung cancer, which is by far the most commonly lethal malignancy. That relation held even after the effects of smoking were subtracted.*
In this study, the authors do find a SMALL increased mortality rate for *some* kind of cancers for extremely high BMIs (40+) but there is a list of at least a half a dozen different kind of cancers where there was absolutely no link between BMI and mortality rates. Furthermore, people in the "overweight but not obese" category actually had a decreased risk of cancer over people in the "ideal" weight group. But that wasn't reported. The study's authors lumped in the numbers for the overweight and the extremely obese and averaged them out. If you look at the numbers carefully, being a little overweight by government standards in terms of cancer prevention is better than being at your so-called "ideal" BMI.
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Date: 2007-02-07 08:19 pm (UTC)-http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/348/17/1625
In this study, the authors do find a SMALL increased mortality rate for *some* kind of cancers for extremely high BMIs (40+) but there is a list of at least a half a dozen different kind of cancers where there was absolutely no link between BMI and mortality rates. Furthermore, people in the "overweight but not obese" category actually had a decreased risk of cancer over people in the "ideal" weight group. But that wasn't reported. The study's authors lumped in the numbers for the overweight and the extremely obese and averaged them out. If you look at the numbers carefully, being a little overweight by government standards in terms of cancer prevention is better than being at your so-called "ideal" BMI.