Why Does Cancer Risk Result from Excess Fat Tissue?

Here I'll point out a recent popular science article on the mechanisms underlying the correlation between cancer and obesity. It is well known and well proven by the scientific community that being overweight is bad for you, even if large sections of the public appear to be solidly in a state of denial on this topic. If you choose to carry excess visceral fat tissue for any great length of time as an adult, even decades later, even having lost that weight, the demographic data strongly suggests that you have a significantly increased risk of suffering all of the common age-related conditions: cancer, heart disease, dementia, and so forth. If you maintain that fat - or keep adding to it over the years, as an increasingly large fraction of the population does - then your odds become even worse. The more fat tissue you have, and the longer you have it for, the shorter your life expectancy, the more you will spend on medical expenses, and the less healthy you will be over the long term. When trying to explain why this is the case, what it is under the hood that connects fat tissue to ill health, the first candidate mechanism on the list is chronic inflammation. In fact, whether or not you put on weight with age, the growing dysfunction of your immune system will cause rising levels of chronic inflammation, and this inflammation contributes to the pathology of near all of the common and fatal age-related conditions. Fat tissue makes this progression faster and a lot worse, howeve...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs