OBESITY, CANCER & OTHER DEPRESSING TOPICS

Linda and an unidentified Stalcup grand child.

If there was a baby anywhere in the room, Linda would be next to it.

This was at the Bebee family reunion in Big Bear

So, it is a warm, sunny Saturday, the 1^st of September.  I just got through lunch (Blueberry Boy-Bait*  and ice cream).  I had intended to get on my exercise bike, but instead decided that my broken ribs still provided a viable excuse to do nothing instead.  I am going over to my friend Phil’s house later this afternoon for a beer, but I had time to kill.  This being the case, I plopped my weary bones down on an easy chair and picked up Quest, which is the quarterly magazine of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.  Earlier this morning I had weighed myself, then – on a lark – calculated my body-mass index.   I was within 1.7 points of “obese”.
 

The first 13 pages of Quest concerned how obesity, bad diet and a sedentary life style promote cancer and other forms of life-threatening health problems.  Bummer!
 

The American Institute for Cancer Research estimates that obesity is implicated in about 14% of all cancer deaths.  Women with a body-mass index of 40 or more (this is really obese) have cancer death rates 62% higher than similar, thinner women.  Obese men don’t come off well, either – their excess death rate is 52%.  One researcher in this field was quoted as saying that obesity is almost like the new smoking.  That’s certainly not good: people have to eat but they don’t have to smoke.  (Quiting can be damned hard, though – just ask me.)

So just why is obesity so bad?  Here are a few things I abstracted from these depressing few pages.

First, it turns out that fat cells actually secrete hormones, in particular estrogen, testosterone, and insulin.  Estrogen is well established as an accelerator of cancer development.  Too much insulin seems to function similarly.  Testosterone in obese men is converted to estrogen (surprise!) and has all kinds of deleterious effects, none specifically spelled out.

Second, for some reason too much fat leads to a state of constant low-grade inflammation, which can’t be good for you, although what it does and why it does it is not explained.  

Fred Hutch has a number of experiments going on in which people are fed precisely measured diets and/or subjected to precisely monitored exercise regimens.  Apparently diet and exercise are cancer-preventers in their own right, above and beyond their obvious role as weight-reducers. I get the impression that volunteers are fed free food, which would be a real plus.  Apparently Mexican food is better for you than Norte Americano food, which seems strange.  Maybe it's the margaritas that go along with it.

And so, on and on.  Everything I like to eat seems to be anathema: cancerous, fattening, or both (not to mention what it does to my heart.)  I drink way too much.  I don’t get enough exercise.  I sit around reading, or typing on this infernal lap-top (which has eaten parts of this essay twice in the last 10 minutes!),  way, way too much.   The peak of my exercise intensity involves nine holes of golf, on a short course.    So, should I change my ways and live to be 90, or should I ignore all this good advice proffered by Quest and live to be 88?  I’m not really asking – I know what I’m going to do.

By the way, you can get most of this information off the Fred Hutch web-site.  If you give them a donation, they’ll probably send you paper copies for the rest of your life.

*Believe it or not, there is such a thing - and it's delicious.  Google for the recipe.