Another Reason to Leave Your Plate Half Full (or Is That Half Empty?)

Here's some food for thought the next time you sit down to shovel in a wheelbarrow or two from the breakfast buffet:

"Obese People Much More Likely To Develop Esophageal Cancer"

I've seen enough esophageal cancer in my career to have developed a profound loathing of this ugly malignancy. Its bite is as deadly as a coral snake's, and the treatments developed to eradicate the disease are, to put it mildly, challenging to take. The five year survival rate for esophageal cancer has risen from 4% in the 1960s to 17% in the modern era.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what my guru calls progress, but then again he also told me to bet the farm on the Red Sox in the 1986 World Series. The farm still misses me.

An obese person runs six times the risk of developing esophageal cancer (cancer of the gullet) compared to people of healthy weight, according to an article that appears in the journal Gut.

Do doctors actually use the term "gullet" in their professional discourse? I prefer "foodpipe", but that's just to avoid panicking folks who might be worried about their windpipe. Anyway, back to our story.

The researchers made a comparison between 800 patients with esophageal cancer and 1600 randomly chosen people without it, and found that in addition to GERD (gastrointestinal reflux disease), obesity was an independent risk factor for developing the malignancy.

A person with GERD has five times the risk of developing esophageal cancer, compared to a healthy person. A person who is obese and experiences frequent acid reflux is 16 times more likely to develop cancer of the gullet.

However, the authors also found that obese people - with a BMI (body mass index) of over 40 - who do not suffer from reflux disease are six times as likely to develop cancer of the gullet, compared to a person with a BMI of between 18.5 and 25.

There's that word again...it sounds harsh to the ear...almost guttural [Editor's note: pun intended, the nerd]. "Doc, are you tellin' me I might lose my gullet?" "Good morning students - this afternoon I shall endeavor to elucidate the latest advances in remedies for cancer of the gullet." Hmm...I just can't bring myself to say it.

The take home message today may sound familiar to readers of this gullet, I mean blog: maintain a healthy weight for your height, seek medical attention if you have chronic heartburn, shun all tobacco products, and have an esophagogastroduodenoscopy ("upper endoscopy" in the vernacular) if indicated.