Tips on How to Prevent Colon Cancer

Video Transcript

"The first thing to say is that for any individual person, it's impossible to pinpoint exactly why they got colon cancer. But we know about a variety of things that increase your risk, or relatively can decrease your risk, and when you think about that, the ones that are modifiable, one can do to try to prevent their risk of colon cancer. The number one way to prevent colon cancer is to get screening, and again, there are recommendations to do screening at age 50 for the general population, and for some high risk patients, we may start that a little earlier. The potential other causes of colon cancer include having a family history, and there are a variety of different schemas in terms of how important a family history is relative to one's individual risk of colon cancer. If you have a family history either of colon cancer in an immediate relative, or even colon polyps in an immediate relative, this is something to discuss with your physician because they may recommend starting screening earlier than age 50 for you. The modifiable risk factors -- and when I say by 'modifiable,' things that we can do to change our risk as well as related to the cause of colon cancer -- include obesity, so there's fairly good evidence that people who have a higher body mass index have a relatively higher risk of colon cancer, so an avoidance of obesity and maintaining a healthy weight is important; increasing level of physical activity, decreases your risk of colon cancer, so being physically active over a lifetime helps reduce your risk of colon cancer. There are certain dietary factors that have been shown to relatively related to the risk of developing colon cancer. The one that's probably the most important so far has been red meat, and so higher intakes of red meat increases one's risk of colon cancer. It doesn't mean you have to totally avoid red meat. In fact, having probably about two servings or less a week is probably acceptable. A lot of people think about fiber as relating to their risk of colon cancer, and though early evidence suggested that fiber decreases your risk of colon cancer, more recent studies have essentially shown that the level of fiber that one takes in their diet does not relate to their risk of colon cancer."