Cutting Bad Habits Could Save Your Life
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MIAMI (CBSMiami) - Your bad habits could be killing you.
New research shows that about about half of all cancer deaths are due to bad habits.
Researchers say Americans need to adopt a healthier lifestyle by quitting smoking, cut back on heavy drink, maintaining a healthy weight and doing at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week.
If that happened, it would reduce the number of new cancer diagnoses by 40% to 70%, according to the study's findings which were posted online in the journal JAMA Oncology.
The effect of a healthful lifestyle varied according to gender and cancer type.
In men, a healthier lifestyle could avert or delay 67% of cancer deaths and prevent 63% of new malignancies each year. For women, the annual cancer death rate would decrease by 59% and new cancers would drop 41%.
For individual cancers, women and men could reduce their risk for lung cancer by 82% and 78% respectively, 29% and 20% for colon and rectum, 30% and 29% for pancreas, and 36% and 44% for bladder.
