A leading oncologist has said Britain needs to tackle the obesity crisis if it wants to drive down current and predicted rates of cancer.

Speaking to GB News, Prof Angus Dalgleish, Professor of Oncology at St George’s, University of London, said:

“I said at the time of lockdown that anybody’s lives saved for lockdown would be more than tripled by the number of people who died because of lockdown.

“And we know that with cancer, getting an early diagnosis is absolutely crucial for a cure.

“It’s really amazing how well we’ve improved over the last 20 years; we can cure a lot of cancers that couldn’t be cured before but only if we get them early.

“And what we are witnessing is people who’ve had the symptoms, they’ve tried to get tests and they’ve been cancelled two or three times.

“By the time it’s sorted, they go to the treatment they’re being treated for a stage three or stage four cancer when they should have been stage two – potentially completely curable. And that is the problem.

“The other thing that’s come on, that we’re dealing with is the number of people who are now susceptible to cancer because of their lifestyle and one of the biggest is actually obesity.

“We’ve recognized obesity for a long time, but it is a major cause. It was picked up initially with renal cancer then endometrial cancer, but actually, when you look back it’s all cancers.

“There’s a report that it’s costing us £100 billion, which is nearly the cost of the NHS.

We’re going to have to start tackling this sort of thing to bring down the cancer rate.”

“When I started doing oncology, it was one in 10 people were going to get cancer or needing treatment and then within 20 years it was one in three and now one in two patients will get cancer in their lifetime.

“So the demand just from the current population, let alone the excess population, is just enormous and I don’t feel that we’ve actually planned to deal with that.

“I know there are some experts more expert than me in these fields who actually say that diet and obesity is now a bigger cause of cancer than smoking or anything else put together.

“It’s beholden on us not to ignore that and to act on our policies, because it could save us so much in the long term.

“And it’s not just cancer, you get to see all the other things go with it such as diabetes and hypertension.”