If you’re looking for a way to bond with and spend time with your children, you can choose an activity that will have long-term benefits to their health. We should start teaching our children the importance of physical activity and a healthy diet at a young age. The benefits to being active and eating well manifest themselves in an obvious manner, that your kids will be at and maintain a healthy weight, but beyond that, the benefits to staying in good shape are too many to name. It’s well known that being overweight as a child can set you up for many life long health conditions, but a new study is linking childhood obesity with a very adult disease—colon cancer.
In a recently published study involving over 61,000 Danish men who were born between 1939 and 1959, a clear connection was made between childhood obesity and the likelihood that someone would have colon cancer as an adult. The study tracked the weight of the participants from as young as age 7 and showed that men who were obese at that young age were twice as likely to have colon cancer as an adult versus those who were at a healthy weight throughout their lives. One positive finding that the study made was that even if a child was obese at that young age, but was able to lose the weight and keep it off, they weren’t at an increased risk of colon cancer.
What’s The Best Way To Prevent Colon Cancer?
As interesting as this finding is, you might be thinking that there’s nothing you can do at this point to turn back the clock to when you were 7 and try to focus on attaining and maintaining a healthy weight. But the good news is that if you’re currently overweight, weight loss will almost always benefit your health. If you’re struggling to figure out the best way to do it, talk to your doctor and determine a healthy weight and a good method to work toward achieving it. Other ways to prevent colon cancer are to eat a balanced diet with a lot of fruit, veggies, and whole grains, exercise regularly, stop smoking, and limit your alcohol consumption. But the single most effective tool in the fight against colon cancer is proper screening. GI Associates performs colonoscopies in the comfort of our office, and you’ll be home quickly and comfortably that afternoon. Regular colonoscopies should be performed starting at age 50 for those with no risk factors of the disease. If you do have a higher risk of colon cancer or a family history of the disease, contact us today to discuss the potential for an earlier screening exam.
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