A new study has demonstrated a link between teens and young adults who are overweight/obese being more likely to develop pancreatic cancer later in life. The study was recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association and compared the self-reported weight of 841 pancreatic cancer patients and 754 healthy people from a University of Texas hospital beginning at age 14. They found:

1. Patients who had been overweight from age 14-39 were 67% more likely to get pancreatic cancer.
2. Patients who were obese from ages 20-49 were about 2.5 times more likely to be pancreatic cancer patients.
3. Pancreatic cancer began 2 to 6 years earlier in patients who were overweight or obese from age 20-49.
4. Among pancreatic cancer patients, people who were overweight or obese in the year before their diagnosis had a worse survival rate, regardless of the stage of their tumor or whether they had surgery to remove it.

What these findings show are that the teen and young adult years are the most important to determining a person's future risk. Not that if you're healthy and thin as a youngster you can let yourself go in middle-age, but the more obese you are at a younger age the more problems you're likely to have with cancer in adulthood.

I think this study brings to light an important issue parents need to see: tell your kid to PUT DOWN THE FORK, step away from the TV and go outside and play. The present culture of parents who feel guilty about being at work so they let their kids do/eat whatever they want is absurd. Parents need to realize that by allowing their kid to eat Twinkies rather than broccoli they're sentencing their kids to a lifetime of weight-struggles and in some cases high risk for cancer. Wii does not count as exercise. Be a responsible parent and tell your kid to run around a little rather than making excuses for their pudginess. Fat kids = fat adults = unhealthy cancer patient adults. Do your child a favor, be a parent, and introduce them to vegetables and cardiovascular activity for once.