More than 46,000 cancer cases in the United States might be prevented each year if almost all of us walked for about 45 minutes a day, according to an eye-opening new study of inactivity, exercise and malignancies.
People exercise on Bayhsore Boulevard in Tampa, Fla., on June 26, 2020.
At the same time, many studies show that being inactive raises our risks for various cancers. But scientists know surprisingly little about how those risks translate into actual cases or, more concretely, how many people each year are likely to develop cancers closely linked to moving too little. Finally, the researchers adjusted these statistics for body mass and other factors, gathered additional data about cancer risks and plugged all of the numbers into an equation, which then spit out the PAF for cancers linked to inactivity. That number turned out to be 46,356, or about 3% of all cancers annually .