4 Healthy Habits Can Prevent Most Cancer Deaths: Study

Good news about cancer doesn’t come around every day and when it does, it’s cause to celebrate. A new study shows that nearly half of deaths from cancer can be prevented if you make some simple, healthy lifestyle choices.

Researchers from Harvard University’s School of Public Health found that healthy habits reduced the incidence of cancer in women by 25 percent and the risk of death by cancer by an incredible 48 percent. For men, those four good habits reduced cancer risk by 33 percent and the risk of death by 44 percent.

What were those four habits?

1. Don't drink too much -- no more than one drink a day for women; two for men
2. Don't smoke at all.
3. Exercise -- at least 150 minutes a week at a moderate intensity, or half that much for vigorous exercise
4. Maintain a healthy weight -- between 18.5 and 27.5 of your body mass index.

The lifestyle habits of about 135,000 people – all white health professionals – were examined for the new study. Those who drank lightly or not at all, didn’t smoke, exercised, and maintained a healthy body weight (defined more generously than standard health guidelines) were placed in a low-risk group. All the others – even those who checked three out of the four boxes – were considered high-risk.

Lung cancer had the strongest correlation, to nobody’s surprise: Don’t smoke and you lower your lung cancer risk about 80 percent. It was about 40 percent for bladder cancer.

There are lots of asterisks on this study. The researchers only looked at white people. They didn’t look at all cancers: They excluded all cancers of the skin, brain, lymphatic system, and hematopoietic tissues, “because these cancers likely have other strong environmental causes,” they said. However, the cancers they studied account for about 90 percent of all cancer deaths among U.S. whites.

One of the “asterisks,” however, gives us reason to believe the impact of healthy habits might be even greater than the authors found. Even the “high-risk” group had better habits and better outcomes than the general U.S. population, perhaps since they were studying health professionals. The authors said that, compared with the general U.S. population, their low-risk group was 41 percent (women) and 63 percent (men) less likely to develop cancer.

Last year, a study changed the conversation about cancer, asserting that random mutations in stem cells had more to do with cancer risk than had previously been thought. It was a disempowering finding, seeming to prove that people really can’t do much to reduce their cancer risk. But this new research refutes the strength of those claims, insisting that we have great power to control our destiny. The authors call the stem-cell theory a "bad luck hypothesis" and say it "created confusion for the public regarding the preventability of cancer."

We all know the exceptions: People who exercised religiously and ate nothing but brown rice and seaweed and still died young from cancer -- or the two-pack a day smoking, fried-food chowing drinker who lived to be 100. But according to this study, those outliers are just that: the exception to the rule. The rule is, don't drink too much, don't smoke, don't get too fat, and exercise, and you've gone a long way toward preventing cancer.