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Healthy Habits May Help Heart and Block Cancer
 Want to prevent both heart disease and cancer? Here's how: Don't smoke, maintain a healthy weight, and control blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
That's the conclusion of a study by researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago, who set out to see if preventive measures used for heart disease would work for cancer as well.
People who followed the seven goals for heart health set by the American Heart Association (AHA) reduced their risk for cancer by 38 percent.
Those seven AHA goals are: not smoking; maintaining a normal body mass index; getting regular physical activity; following a healthy diet; and maintaining safe cholesterol, blood pressure and fasting blood glucose levels.
For the study, presented at a recent AHA meeting, researchers followed more than 13,000 healthy people for 13 years. During that time period, they noted 1,800 new cases of cancer among the participants. But the more heart-healthy goals the participants had met, the less likely they were to develop cancer.
Compared with people who had met none of the seven goals, having just one reduced the risk for cancer by 20 percent. Meeting three goals lowered cancer risk by 22 percent, and hitting five to seven goals pushed the risk down by 38 percent.
So, even a modest improvement in heart-healthy factors is important, says Christopher Cove, M.D., at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. "If you lower yourself by one point [risk factor], that's a significant decrease in cancer risk and a lower risk of heart disease," he says. "That's exciting."
When the researchers stripped out smoking as a risk factor, the association between healthy lifestyles and cancer prevention dropped but was still noticeable.
"This says that, yes, smoking is really important, but we still see the trend when smoking is taken out, so adhering to a healthy diet and having a low BMI are still important for cancer risk," says lead author Laura J. Rasmussen-Torvik, Ph.D., at Northwestern University.
Although the researchers aren't sure why a heart-healthy lifestyle would help prevent cancer, they speculate that inflammation might be the link. Both heart disease and cancer can be triggered by chronic inflammation.
Always talk with your health care provider to find out more information.
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