Doing these 4 things can cut your chances of getting cancer in half

You guessed it.  Exercise is one of the four; but what about the other ones?

The list is about as basic as it can get.  Fix your diet  to maintain weight, cut down on smoking and lower your alcohol intake.  Combined with exercise, these four strict habits can lower your risk of many of the over 200 known types of cancer.

What sets this apart is that the study recently conducted at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, appearing in the journal JAMA Oncology suggests that if people adopt these habits we will see a 40%-70% decline in all new instances of carcinoma (cancers that are not carcinoma, including skin, brain, lymphatic, hematologic and nonfatal prostate cancers, were not studied).

“Cancer is preventable. In fact, most cancer is preventable – with estimates as high as 80% to 90% for smoking-related cancers,” Graham Colditz, the Harvard Chan School adjunct professor of epidemiology, said in a co-authored accompanying editorial. “Our challenge now is to act on this knowledge."

The study conducted in Boston covered nearly 136,000 Caucasian men and women.  The criteria for a healthy lifestyle included not smoking for at least 5 years, moderate, to no alcohol consumption (one drink per day for women and two for men at most), having a body mass index between 18.5 and 27.5, and doing aerobic physical activity of at least 150 moderate-intensity minutes every week.

By hitting all four of these points, people immediately found themselves in the low-risk category.  If, even one of these categories were unmet the people were considered high risk.

Overall, the study found that adopting a healthy lifestyle, that is meeting all four requisites, means that there would be a sociological reduction in cancer rates by 59 percent for women and 67 percent for men.

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