Another Reason to Rue The Obesity Epidemic

The prospect of heart disease has not sufficed to scare Americans into keeping their weight under control. Will the prospect of cancer do the trick? Health researchers have begun drawing more attention to the link between obesity and various sorts of cancer. Among the latest instances, an article last month in The New England Journal of Medicine described a long-term study of 900,000 adults by scientists at the American Cancer Society. One of the findings: After 16 years, the heaviest people in this pool “had death rates from all cancers combined that were 52 percent higher (for men) and 62 percent higher (for women) than the rates in men and women of normal weight.”