Keeping That New Year Resolution Could Reduce Your Cancer Risk Significantly

Unsplash/Marion Michele

It’s so easy to start off a new year full of motivation to take steps to improve your health and well-being. Whether you’re interested in adopting a new diet, tackling a new style of exercise or letting cigarettes and alcohol fall by the wayside, there’s just something about the feeling of a fresh start that propels us into action.

Now, that momentum often falters within the first month (okay, week or so) of setting the initial goal, but new research from Cardiff University in the United Kingdom is offering us a major, added incentive to stay strong with our health-focused resolutions. Building new, healthy lifestyle habits could help you reduce your risk of developing cancer by one third.

The research used preliminary data from the UK Biobank, which is a prospective study of approximately 500,000 people, to cross-compare healthy behaviors and cancer risk over a span of several years. Researchers considered positive habits like not smoking, maintaining a healthy body weight, staying physically active, eating well and drinking alcohol in moderation. And, in the data pool, the people who made all of these healthy choices reduced their chances of getting any type of cancer by a third and reduced their likelihood of dying from cancer by even more.

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Now, we realize that was quite a list of good habits to follow, so it’s also worth noting that each individual healthy behavior on that list was associated with an 8 percent reduction in cancer risk. That means that each proactive choice you make for your overall well-being matters a great deal. So if exercise is a breeze for you but cutting back on the wine isn’t, you can still reap the real rewards of those sweat sessions you log each week. Every single win counts.

“The take-home message is that healthy behaviors can have a truly tangible benefit,” lead researcher Peter Elwood said in a statement. “A healthy lifestyle has many benefits additional to cancer reduction — it costs nothing, has no undesirable side effects… and is better than any pill.”

With this uplifting news in our back pocket, we have a feeling our sense of motivation is about to make a serious comeback.