Stress does not cause cancer. But when I’m unhappy, I get ill

What starts with an “o”, has an “s” in the middle, and ends with death? If you like crosswords and puzzles, you’ll love the posters that have been springing up around the country in the last few days. They’re like the billboards in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. But the culprit in this murder mystery is you.

Or perhaps I should say: the culprit is you, if you’re overweight. The word with the missing letters, is, of course, “obesity”. “OB__S____Y is a cause of cancer”, says the poster.

The campaign , I think it’s fair to say, hasn’t gone down well. The comedian Sofie Hagen, for example, asked her followers on Twitter whether anyone was “currently working on getting this piece of shit CancerResearchUK advert removed from everywhere”. It was “fat-shaming”, she said. “How is this OK?”

The thrust of her argument seemed to be that it wasn’t fair to link cancer with being fat. And in one sense she’s right. It isn’t fair to link cancer with being fat. It isn’t fair of God, or whoever it is that makes healthy cells go rogue, to make cancer a bigger risk for someone who’s fat than for someone who’s not. It’s hard enough being fat, without doling out a death penalty as an extra little sting. It isn’t fair at all that there’s a link between cancer and obesity. But it is, unfortunately, a fact.


Source : theguardian