Ever wonder how some people can eat whatever they want and never gain weight? It’s maddening!
While they may not gain weight, they are assuredly doing damage to their body and making it more prone to cancer
later on.
New research by Dr. Cynthia A. Thomson, Professor of Health Promotion Sciences at the University of
Arizona shows that high quality food is extremely important for a longer, healthier life; and is more important than
your weight (up to appoint) when it comes to cancer.
In the past scientists agreed that obesity contributed to specific types of cancer: breast, colon, uterus, kidney,
pancreas and esophagus. However, the Arizona team wanted to determine how dietary energy density (DED) – the
ratio of energy to food weight – can affect cancer risk.
DED measures food quality in terms of a ratio of calories to nutrients. Fruits, vegetables, lean protein, and beans
have a very high ratio of nutrients to calories; therefore, they are low in DEDs. The opposite is true for “junk” or
processed foods which are high in calories and low in nutrients: they’re high in DEDs.
Examples are: chips,hamburgers, sweets, and pizza; they’ll cause weight gain, but are also damaging to your overall risk for cancer.
The work was published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. As part of the Woman’s Health
Initiative, 90,000 post-menopausal women participated in the study by Dr. Thompson and her team. They used data
reflecting their diet and any cancer diagnoses and found that women with high DED foods were 10% more likely to
develop cancer related to obesity regardless of their BMI numbers.
Thompson was surprised at the findings saying the outcome was contrary to their original predictions, in that weight management by itself is not as predictive an element as previously thought. Rather, that high DED diets lead to a metabolic disruption independent of the weight
and raises the risk of cancer.
Thompson recommends that post-menopausal women should consume as many low-DED foods as possible and try
to maintain a healthy weight. She says that this regime can help control cancer risk.
The bottom line is that even though you might be able to eat whatever you want and stay the same size, you really
shouldn’t – unless you want to raise your cancer risk.
