A new study seems to give us one of those “I knew that” kind of feelings. As bad as cancer is to those affected, often they are preventable. A new study out today shows that things like smoking, bad diet, lack of exercise, dangerous environment can all lead to cancers that are preventable

About 80 percent of all cancers are diagnosed in the elderly, and more than 80 percent of known risk factors are potentially preventable, U.S. researchers say.

Igor Akushevich of Duke University in Durham, N.C., said the primary purpose of the study was to develop an approach to estimate the contributions of measurable risk factors to cancer risk among the elderly.

“So far, we have not come to the stage where we are able to make specific recommendations regarding risk factors,” Akushevich said in a statement. “However, we can confirm several of them which are known. As expected, we see associations of cigarette smoking with lung cancer.”

The researchers said they were surprised at some of the findings. Cancer risk was not associated with alcohol consumption, as reported in other studies. A possible explanation may be that those age 65 or older tend to drink moderately. Read the rest of this entry »

Looking to make a change and lose some weight? I have reviewed the top diet on the internet and you can go and read over 200 comments people have made about why this diet has worked well for them, as well as some of the problems.

Exercise is good for more than just your waistline. A recent study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research’s Seventh Annual International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research suggests that regular physical activity can lower a woman’s overall risk of cancer – but only if she gets a good night’s sleep. Otherwise, lack of sleep can undermine exercise’s cancer prevention benefits.

“Greater participation in physical activity has consistently been associated with reduced risk of cancer incidence at several sites, including breast and colon cancers,” said James McClain, Ph.D., cancer prevention fellow at the National Cancer Institute and lead author of the study. “Short duration sleep appears to have opposing effects of physical activity on several key hormonal and metabolic parameters, which is why we looked at how it affected the exercise/cancer risk relationship.”

Even though the exact mechanism of how exercise reduces cancer risk isn’t known, researchers believe that physical activity’s effects on factors including hormone levels, immune function, and body weight may play an important role. The study examined the link between exercise and cancer risk, paying special attention to whether or not getting adequate sleep further affected a women’s cancer risk. Read the rest of this entry »

Dole nutrition has done extensive research on exercise and here is an article that summarizes how they thing you should exercise. Try working out harder for a shorter period of time and see how your body reacts to it.

Ladies, are you lollygagging when you ought to be lifting, puttering when you ought to be pumping, trifling when you ought to be training? According to a recent Gallup Poll, nearly half of adult women under 50 say they never engage in vigorous physical exercise — worse, the boys are beating the girls hands down: only 28% of men in that same age group wimp out when they work out.

While moderate exercise can help you improve fitness, taking it easy at the gym won’t take off the pounds. Plus, too many workouts at the same low intensity won’t provide the kind of stress needed to fight bone and muscle loss as your body ages.

Namby-pamby exercising won’t do much to reduce your mortality risk either, according to a recent study by the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Following fitness levels of a group of generally healthy women ages 35-93 over the course of a decade, researchers divided them into three categories: most fit, moderately fit and least fit.

While it may be no surprise that women who were least fit were three times more likely to die during the course of the course of the study than the most fit group — women in the middle fitness range were also two times more likely to die than those who were in the best shape.

Another report presented at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research zeroed in on the exercise-longevity link with regard to breast cancer. Physical fitness has already been found to lower women’s chances of developing breast cancer — but now it seems exercise can slash the risk of dying from breast cancer even after it has been diagnosed.

Using data from the large-scale, long-term Nurses’ Health Study, researchers focused on the fitness levels of women after they were diagnosed with breast cancer and found that women who walked just 1 to 3 hours a week cut their risk of dying from the disease by 25%. Those who walked 3 to 8 hours cut their risk in half!

So yes, while it may be true that a little exercise is better than none at all, when it comes to protecting your health and reducing your mortality risks, less is definitely NOT more!