Cancer risk?

[Ryank65]

I'm a 22 year old male. I used to be 315 lbs and ate a lot of junk food and candy for years before I lost 90 lbs 2 years ago. I used to smoke a pack of cigarettes every month and smoke weed everyday for 2 years.(I quit smoking all together 6 months ago)Last I also have had exposure to high radiation. I've had 3 abdominal x rays and 1 abdominal CT scan. I'm very scared I've increased my cancer risk for mostly leukemia and other cancers from the uneccesarry radiation, eating bad, and smoking. I'm constinantly in fear of cancer and have developed carcinogen phobia. It's ruining my life and I have been seeing a therapist. I'm wondering if anyone knows if I should be concerned and worried that I've increased my risk? I'm highly concerned that I have screwed myself.

[Leah88]

No I think you still can sway your odds by eating healthy in your 20's. You have at least 30 years till you're in a high risk category for cancer so eat well from now on and you'll probably be fine. I can't talk though as I too get this fear, I'm 27 and I always think I'll get cancer cause I never ate well as a teenager. Stupidly I scrolled through medical news today ( which I know is not very accurate) and I found an article about breast cancer linked to poor adolescent diet and this depressed me. I think it's a part of OCD and H.A to dwell on past behaviour and feel guilty about choices when in reality nothing bad will probably happen.

[axolotl]

When you read some things cause risk that isn't useful in itself, and the press is terrible at reporting it. For example a year or so ago all the papers here would have you believe that eating bacon would cause people to have pancreatic cancer, whereas in truth there was evidence that it could slightly increase the chance of something very unlikely to start with. Which still equals very unlikely. We have one paper, the Daily Mail, which cherry picks tentative conclusions from medical papers they barely understand and puts hysterical headlines about things causing or curing cancer on their front pages. It's a cynical way to sell papers by panicking people.

If junk food, moderate smoking, a bit of weed, and a handful of x-rays were enough to finish us the human race would be done for. Yes they're not healthy things, but it sounds like you've made effort to stop bad habits young (and I really don't think four x-rays would cause any damage, I've had more than that and never gave it a second thought).

End of the day you can't change the past, and you've not done anything more risky than the vast majority of the population, and you've realised you could live healthier at an early age and that should be applauded, especially the quitting smoking.

[PASchoolSyndrome]

In the USA study just got some spotlight and a lot of major papers have run with it to scare people. They're saying go hat colorectal cancer has increased dramatically in young people, one paper reported the incidence increased by 90%. What they so confidently failed to write is how your risk was at .01% before and now it's at .1% now.

Just keep trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Keep the weight off, make good food decisions more than bad ones, and exercise. It's never too late to start and it seems like you're doing a good job! Keep it up! There are other things more likely to go wrong than cancer when lifestyle is poor, unfortunately we tend to focus on the big bag C.

I'm not an epidemiologist but I think that the number one killers in America at least are a seditatry lifestyle and poor diet. The heart disease and cancer are just how it chooses to do it.