VIDEO: Addressing the obesity epidemic will improve cancer control, health disparities
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Obesity, cancer and health equity are all interrelated, according to experts, and more must be done to address the obesity epidemic and, by extension, cancer and health inequities.
Kirsten A. Nyrop, PhD, a research assistant professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, said there are 13 cancers that are linked to obesity.
Writing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Nyrop and colleagues said “it is essential for the medical and public health community to take on the obesity epidemic with the same intensity and success as the antismoking campaign of 30 years ago.”
“There is a need to embrace the crucial role of healthy nutrition and exercise patterns in preventing cancer and other obesity-driven diseases and in reducing health disparities,” they wrote. “Unless and until current high rates of obesity are reduced at all ages and in all communities throughout the U.S., there will continue to be rising rates of obesity-related chronic diseases, and there will be little progress in reducing the disproportionate impact of these trends on minoritized communities.”
Nyrop told Healio that she has been looking into this issue since 2012 when she noted a link between breast cancer and obesity. Through her work at UNC, she also observed racial disparities: 62% of Black women with breast cancer had obesity compared with 32% of white women.
“It got me to thinking about the downstream consequences in terms of overall survival,” she said.
Nyrop also said that, when the pandemic began, it quickly became clear that the three main risk factors for COVID-19 were age, obesity and race.
“I got to thinking about the concentric circles, the overlapping circles of ... how many people within the Black community and Hispanic community had obesity compared to white, and that it was really not their race that was causing this issue, but it was the whole social determinants of health,” she said.
Nyrop and colleagues wrote that, when it comes to cancer control and prevention, a health equity approach “requires concerted clinical, research, and policy attention to reducing obesity as an actionable strategy to reduce health disparities.” They noted the reinvigorated Cancer Moonshot and the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health and ensuing National Strategy statement as the highest-level opportunities to get obesity and its disproportionate health effects on underrepresented communities to the forefront of prevention strategies.
“If we just sit back and say, ‘this is the way it is, obesity is a lifestyle’ ... then we're basically saying we're willing to accept the health equity implications of all the obesity related diseases, not only cancer ... but also heart disease and diabetes,” Nyrop told Healio. “Then we are basically undermining our ability to prevent these diseases and then we're not able to help reduce the disparities that we’re seeing again and again and again in health care and health outcomes in the United States.”