These 4 Healthy Habits Can Cut Your Cancer Risk By 40%

New research finds that little tweaks to your lifestyle can have a major impact on your risk of developing cancer.

You’ve heard that maintaining a healthy lifestyle can lower your risk of developing cancer, but new research shows just how much of an impact it can have. According to a new study published in the journal JAMA Oncology, up to 40 percent of cancer cases can be prevented by making small healthy tweaks to your lifestyle.
For the study, researchers tracked more than 135,000 people and found that about 20 to 40 percent of cancer cases and about half of cancer deaths can be prevented by following a “healthy lifestyle pattern.” People who met that criteria never smoked or no longer smoked, didn’t drink heavily (women had one drink a day or less and men had two or fewer drinks a day), had a BMI between 18.5 to 27.5, and did either 150 minutes of moderate physical activity or 75 minutes of “vigorous” physical activity a week.
“There have been substantial data supporting the importance of lifestyle factors for cancer prevention,” lead study author Mingyang Song, M.D., Sc.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, tells SELF. “Our findings reinforced that.”

It seems pretty doable, and Dale Shepard, M.D., a medical oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center, tells SELF it is. “These are all very attainable things,” he says. “With some simple, modest lifestyle changes, you can have a really big impact on your cancer risk.”

While the things that lead to the development of cancer are complex, Amber Orman, M.D., a radiation oncologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center, tells SELF that it’s “impossible” to deny that lifestyle factors play a major role. “What we do to and put into our bodies every day has a lasting effect, and we must never underestimate the power we have over our own health,” she says.