Roughly half of cancer deaths in the United States could be prevented or forestalled if all Americans quit smoking, cut back on drinking, maintained a healthful weight and got at least 150 minutes of exercise each week.

These same measures would also reduce the number of new cancer diagnoses by 40% to 70%, according to a new report.  (emphasis added)

For men, universal embrace of this lifestyle could avert or delay 67% of cancer deaths and prevent 63% of new malignancies each year, researchers calculated. If all of the nation’s women did the same, their yearly cancer mortality rates would fall by 59% and new cancers would drop 41%.

The findings, published online this week in the journal JAMA Oncology, underscore how extensively public health measures aimed at fostering healthful lifestyles could cut into a disease that will claim the lives of 600,000 Americans this year and upend the lives of 1.6 million by turning them into newly diagnosed patients.

The new analysis was based on cancer rates and health behaviors in two large and long-running studies of health professionals — the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. The researchers, from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health […]