Want to prevent cancer?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7908675.stm

Clean living is the answer, according to the story above (and the study doesn't even address smoking, which accounts for 1/3 of all cancers).

But at the same time, The National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC has survey numbers from 2005 to 2006 that found that 34 percent of Americans are obese, and 32.7 are overweight.

Health care costs are rising at four times the rate of wages, as the President pointed out the other day. It certainly doesn't help when several estimates early in the 2000s found that overweight and obesity costs may have been running us about $120 billion a year at the time, (again, not including the cost of smoking, which is even greater than that; and that number just includes the medical costs, not the loss of productivity it causes).

To put it in perspective, costs related to obesity have been greater than the cost of the war in Iraq (which has been tremendous).

I find this stuff interesting and don't think it gets enough attention as one of the most significant reasons health care has become as costly as it is. It's also interesting that it has creeped into other countries. Americans are no longer just the fat ones. The UK, for example, has a growing obesity epidemic, with their rates more than doubling since the 1980s.