Dr. Kerry Courneya

Thank you for having me, Rhonda.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, as you know from previous podcasts, exercise has a lot of benefits for the cardiovascular system, the muscular system, the immune system, and many other organs benefit from exercise.

So it's really one of those behaviors that has positive health benefits throughout the body.

And the improvements in those health parameters throughout the body really reduce the risks of various chronic diseases and help you manage those chronic diseases if you are diagnosed with them.

So every year in the U.S., about 2 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer.

And the American Cancer Society estimates that about 40% of those cancers could be prevented if everybody followed sort of the optimal lifestyle guidelines.

suggestions that they make.

So we could reduce those 2 million diagnoses every year to about 1.2 million.

So they're not all preventable, but we could certainly prevent a bunch of them.

So number one on the list, I'm sure everyone will know, is smoking.

That's the biggest risk factor for cancer and it's the one that many of the public health people have focused on for many years, reducing cancer rates, making great gains in cancer, reductions in cancer rates because of reductions in smoking.

Assuming you're not smoking, which is 80% to 85% of the American population, obesity is actually the second on the list of risk factors for developing cancer.

Unfortunately, obesity is going in the other direction.

As smoking rates go down, obesity rates are going up.

So we're starting to see more obesity-related cancers.

Assuming you're not smoking and you're not obese, next on the list is actually alcohol consumption.

You might have heard of the Surgeon General's warning recently about the link between alcohol and cancer that many people are not aware of.

So there's a lot of alcohol-related cancers as well.

After those sort of big three lifestyle changes, yes, exercise and diet are important.