Obesity Has Raised the Post-2000 Generation's Risk of Some Cancers up to 25-Fold That of Their Fathers
In August this year, a study published in Med, a Cell Press journal, showed that between 2007 and 2021, obesity-related cancers were rising rapidly at an annual growth rate of 3.6%, and this trend was especially pronounced among the young. Overweight or obesity is driving high rates of 13 cancers in younger populations: breast cancer, colorectal cancer, endometrial cancer, esophageal adenocarcinoma, gallbladder cancer, renal cancer, liver cancer, meningioma, multiple myeloma, ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, gastric cardia adenocarcinoma, and thyroid cancer.
The rates at which people of different ages develop obesity-related cancers differ significantly. Compared with people born in 1962–1966 (the 1964 birth cohort), the relative incidence index of those born in 1997–2001 (the 1999 cohort) rose to 25.07. This means that the post-2000 generation is 25 times as likely to be diagnosed with an obesity-related cancer as their fathers' (or grandfathers') generation.
Cancer has become the leading disease affecting human life and health worldwide. As modern lifestyles change, more and more families are stricken by cancer. In China's rural areas about a quarter of people will eventually develop cancer, and in urban areas as many as one in three will.
Human life is becoming more comfortable, yet overall health is trending downward. Although average life expectancy is increasing with advances in medical technology, the latest research shows the quality of those added years is worrying: many people spend the last years of their lives racked by illness, and the prolonged years are not happy ones.
Modern lifestyles are not healthy, and modern nutritional concepts are unhealthy too, but many people have already accepted those fashionable ideas and find it hard to change. Perhaps it will take one or two generations paying a bitter price before we gradually turn away from these wrong habits!