Of Diet, Obesity and Gum Disease: Their Link to Our Immune System and Cancer

Bumping into this article reminded me of My Top 10 Cancer Beaters.

After all, living and eating healthy all boils down to a strong or robust immune system that lessens our risk of having major diseases and of course, cancer.

Indeed, the link between the increasingly common lifestyle factors, the immune system and cancer, with the ultimate goals of preventing and better understanding cancer development are the issues under dissection at the American Association for Cancer Research’s Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research meeting.

Like the gum disease-prostate cancer link. Harvard School of Public Health’s epidemiologists were able to show that diseased gums increase the risk of pancreatic cancer.

To confirm the initial findings, together with colleagues from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the University of Puerto Rico are now looking how and whether inflammation (specifically, systemic inflammation from periodontal disease) might be related to pancreatic cancer.

Another one is diet-induced obesity that wrecks the immune system of patients receiving cancer vaccine and that a man’s prediagnostic BMI (body mass index) pretty much determines his chances of surviving lethal prostate cancer.

So I guess we are all being reminded to eat healthy and take care of our gums and teeth. Let’s all watch what we eat: let’s eat healthy, be merry and never forget to brush out teeth. (I wanted that to rhyme, but i guess it didn’t…oh, well.)

Read the full report at AACR.