Since 1990, the number of new cancer cases has more than doubled, reaching 18.5 million diagnoses in 2023.
Global cancer deaths have risen by 74% since 1990, reaching 10.4 million deaths per year worldwide (excluding non-melanoma skin cancers).
A major global analysis published in The Lancet estimates that in 2023 there were about 18.5 million new cancer cases and 10.4 million cancer deaths across 204 countries. Together, cancer now accounts for 271 million years of life lost or lived with disability.
Despite advances in screening and treatment, both cancer diagnoses and deaths have continued to rise over the past three decades, making cancer the second leading cause of death globally.
In 2023 alone, an estimated 4.3 million cancer deaths—42 percent of the total—were linked to known, modifiable risk factors.
Men experience a higher proportion of cancer deaths linked to modifiable risks than women, largely due to higher rates of tobacco use, alcohol consumption, and occupational hazards.
However, women are significantly affected by preventable risks as well, including metabolic dysfunction, dietary factors, increased incidence of estrogen dominance, and more.
Traditional oncology teaches that cancer arises solely from random DNA mutations in a single rogue cell, and that eliminating those mutated cells is the only path to a cure. However, this gene-centric view overlooks the fact that cancer is deeply influenced by the body’s overall metabolic and structural environment, not just isolated cellular mutations. In a healthy organism, tissues maintain organized structure and energy balance, but chronic systemic stress, inflammation, and metabolic dysfunction create conditions that favor disordered growth rather than normal repair and regeneration.
Uncovering the causes of cancer requires an objective look at the way we are living. If cancer were purely a genetic disease, we wouldn’t see rates skyrocketing in young people. Our genes haven’t changed dramatically in the last 50 years.
However, there have been major changes to our environment and lifestyles.
Over the past 50 years, more than 80,000 synthetic chemicals have been introduced into the environment, many without long-term safety testing. Our food system has shifted dramatically. Hormone imbalances are increasingly common. We’re becoming more and more disconnected from nature, getting less sunlight, sleeping poorly, and living under constant stress and artificial light.
Some of these changes include:
- Consumption of ultra-processed foods (high in seed oils, additives, and chemicals)
- Use of polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) in nearly all packaged and restaurant foods
- Earlier puberty and widespread estrogen dominance
- Increased exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (from plastics, pesticides, cosmetics, and cleaning products)
- Decrease in daily sunlight exposure
- Increase in sedentary lifestyles
- Increased screen time and blue light exposure
- Environmental toxins (heavy metals, microplastics, industrial pollutants)
- Widespread sleep deprivation
- Increased C-section births and formula feeding
The ubiquity of seed oils is a major contributor:
Seed oils (soybean, canola, corn, and sunflower oil) have become nearly unavoidable in the modern food supply.
They became mainstream in the 1970s and 1980s, promoted as “heart-healthy” alternatives. Today, they’re found in nearly all processed foods, restaurant meals, condiments, snacks, and even baby formula. Their rise coincides with the growing burden of chronic disease.
PUFAs in seed oils:
- Disrupt thyroid function
- Disrupt glucose metabolism
- Increase the estrogenic burden on the body
- Generate toxic byproducts when exposed to heat and oxygen (like in our bodies)
- Disrupt liver function
Widespread estrogen dominance:
Estrogen plays a far more active role in cancer development than most realize. Estrogen dominance has been implicated in prostate cancer, thyroid cancer, endometrial cancer, and even colorectal cancer.
The fact that we are living in a world flooded with estrogenic stimuli, both internal and environmental, means that many people are living in a state of unrecognized hormonal imbalance that may be quietly increasing cancer risk.
There are several carcinogenic actions of estrogen that have been well-researched. Here are just a few:
- Estrogen stimulates uncontrolled cellular proliferation
- Estrogen metabolites can damage DNA
- Estrogen deprives tissues of oxygen
- Estrogen disrupts healthy metabolic processes and mitochondrial function (oxidative phosphorylation)
- Estrogen opposes progesterone & disrupts thyroid function
- Estrogen increases prostaglandins
- Estrogen increases inflammation and disrupts immune function
- Estrogen promotes fat storage which increases its own production
Why has estrogen exposure surged?
- Widespread use of hormonal birth control and hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which introduces synthetic estrogens into the body
- Obesity, which increases estrogen through heightened aromatase activity in fat tissue
- Liver dysfunction, impairing the body’s ability to clear excess estrogen
- Chronic stress, which suppresses progesterone (estrogen’s natural counterbalance)
- Environmental xenoestrogens, synthetic compounds that mimic estrogen, found in:
- Plastics (like BPA and phthalates)
- Pesticides (like atrazine)
- Fragranced personal care and cleaning products
- Industrial chemicals and packaging
- Contaminated water and food supply, where estrogenic residues from pharmaceuticals, animal hormones, and plastics make their way into drinking water and produce.
What can we do to minimize cancer risk?
- Eliminate seed oils from the diet
- Cook meals at home
- Cook with saturated fats (butter, tallow, coconut oil)
- Avoid processed foods
- Read ingredient labels
- Minimize chemical exposure
- Filter water
- Use glass or stainless steel for cooking / storing food
- Avoid plastic
- Buy organic
- Swap out nontoxic personal care products
- Ensure adequate sun exposure
- Address estrogen dominance
- Consider progesterone supplementation
- Avoid phytoestrogens
- Reduce exposure to xenoestrogens found in plastics, receipts, fragrances, pesticides, and cosmetics
- Manage stress, which depletes protective hormones like progesterone and DHEA
Our cells respond to the conditions we create. Cancer is not simply the result of genetic misfortune; it is often the body’s reaction to prolonged, unresolved stress: biological, emotional, or environmental.
A newly released global analysis highlights a troubling trend: cancer rates are rising worldwide, and in many regions the increase is occurring faster than healthcare systems are prepared to manage. The data show not only a growing overall cancer burden, but a particularly notable rise in cancers affecting younger populations. Importantly, researchers emphasize that this pattern cannot be fully explained by improved screening or longer life expectancy alone. Instead, the findings suggest that underlying biological, environmental, and metabolic forces are driving a genuine increase in cancer incidence.
This rise reflects a broader shift in modern health patterns. Cancer is increasingly being understood not as an isolated genetic accident, but as the long-term result of chronic stress on the body’s systems. Factors such as metabolic dysfunction, chronic inflammation, immune suppression, hormonal imbalance, and environmental exposures appear to create a physiological environment in which damaged cells are more likely to survive, proliferate, and evade immune surveillance. When these conditions persist over years or decades, the risk of malignant transformation rises substantially.
Recent cancer registry analyses have shown a concerning increase in cancer diagnoses among younger adults, particularly for colorectal cancer and several other tumor types. Large cohort studies comparing cancer trends over time report that individuals born more recently (for example, in the 1990s) have a higher lifetime risk of early-onset cancers compared to earlier birth cohorts — even after accounting for improved detection. This “cohort effect” suggests that factors beyond screening are contributing to the rise in early cancer incidence in many middle- and high-income countries.
The observation that cancer is appearing more frequently at younger ages highlights a broader shift in disease patterns that conventional explanations — such as aging alone or better diagnostic technology — cannot fully account for. While improved testing does identify more cases earlier, it does not by itself explain increases in age-specific cancer rates or the rising mortality seen in some younger populations. Instead, a convergence of metabolic, environmental, inflammatory, and lifestyle drivers appears to be reshaping cancer risk across the lifespan.
Lifestyle and environmental influences play a central role in this process. Diets high in ultra-processed foods, excess polyunsaturated fats, refined sugars, and additives can impair mitochondrial function and promote insulin resistance. Chronic psychological stress, sleep disruption, and inadequate sunlight exposure further suppress metabolic resilience and immune function. At the same time, increased exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, air pollution, and persistent infections places an additional burden on detoxification pathways and inflammatory signaling networks.
The rise in early-onset cancers is particularly alarming, as it suggests that these stressors are exerting their effects earlier in life. Rather than accumulating slowly over decades, metabolic and inflammatory insults may now be compressing into childhood and young adulthood. This reinforces the importance of supporting foundational health early — including blood sugar stability, thyroid and hormonal balance, gut and tissue microbiome integrity, and efficient immune surveillance — long before disease appears on imaging or lab tests.
At Connealy MD, this growing body of evidence strengthens our commitment to a truly preventative and systems-based approach to cancer care. Supporting metabolic health, reducing chronic inflammation, optimizing immune resilience, minimizing toxic burden, and restoring biological rhythms are not adjuncts to cancer prevention — they are essential pillars. The global rise in cancer serves as both a warning and an opportunity: by addressing root causes rather than symptoms alone, we can meaningfully alter cancer risk trajectories and support long-term vitality across the lifespan.
A comprehensive new global analysis published in The Lancet highlights the profound and growing impact of cancer worldwide. Using data from cancer registries, vital statistics, and modeled estimates across 204 countries, researchers found that in 2023 there were an estimated 18.5 million new cancer diagnoses and 10.4 million deaths, resulting in a staggering total of 271 million disability-adjusted life-years lost due to cancer and its long-term effects. These figures reflect a sustained increase in both incidence and mortality over the past three decades — more than double the number of cases and nearly three-quarters more deaths than were recorded in 1990. Even with improvements in detection and treatment in some regions, cancer remains the second leading cause of death globally, underscoring that biomedical advances alone are not sufficient to stem the rising tide of disease. ScienceDirect
The forecasts from this analysis underscore the challenge ahead: by 2050, the number of new cancer cases is expected to reach 30.5 million annually, with 18.6 million deaths from cancer each year — increases of roughly 60 % and 75 %, respectively, compared with 2024 estimates. This projected rise reflects both population growth and global aging, as more people live into age ranges with higher cancer risk. Crucially, over 40 % of cancer deaths worldwide are attributable to modifiable risk factors, including behaviors like tobacco use, unhealthy diet, high blood sugar, and alcohol consumption, as well as environmental exposures and metabolic dysfunction. These risk-attributable deaths have increased by more than 70 % since 1990, indicating that lifestyle and systemic metabolic stress continue to fuel the cancer epidemic globally. ScienceDirect
The disease burden is not uniform across the globe. While age-standardized mortality rates have declined in many high-income countries due to better screening and treatment infrastructure, low- and middle-income regions continue to experience rising absolute numbers of cases and deaths, reflecting gaps in prevention, early detection, and care delivery. In these countries, projected increases in both incidence and mortality are dramatically higher than in wealthier nations, highlighting deep disparities that parallel systemic differences in healthcare access, environmental risk burden, nutrition, metabolic health, and chronic inflammatory stress. Without strategic, equitable investment in early cancer prevention and holistic care, these disparities are expected to widen. ScienceDirect
From an integrative and functional medicine perspective — such as the model employed at Connealy MD — these global projections reinforce a fundamental truth: cancer is not merely a disease of age or random mutation, but the downstream result of long-standing metabolic imbalance, chronic inflammation, immune dysregulation, hormone disruption, and toxic exposures. The fact that a large proportion of cancer deaths are tied to modifiable lifestyle and metabolic risk factors highlights the immense potential for root-cause prevention — supporting metabolic resilience, optimizing detoxification, enhancing immune function, stabilizing blood sugar and hormone balance, and reducing chronic inflammatory burden across the lifespan. This analysis underscores that addressing cancer effectively requires not only advances in diagnosis and therapy, but proactive, systems-based prevention strategies that begin decades before a clinical diagnosis
Cancer rates are rising worldwide at an alarming pace. Since 1990, the number of new cancer cases has more than doubled, reaching 18.5 million diagnoses in 2023, while annual cancer deaths have increased by 74 percent, totaling 10.4 million deaths globally (excluding non-melanoma skin cancers). Today, the majority of cancer cases and deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries, reflecting widening global disparities in prevention, diagnosis, and access to care.
A substantial portion of this burden is preventable. Researchers estimate that more than 40 percent of cancer deaths worldwide are linked to modifiable risk factors, including tobacco use, unhealthy dietary patterns, high blood sugar, obesity, environmental exposures, and unsafe sexual practices. These findings underscore a critical opportunity: millions of cancer cases and deaths could be avoided through effective prevention strategies, early detection, and lifestyle-based interventions.
Looking Ahead: Projections Signal an Urgent Need for Action
Without decisive intervention, the global cancer burden is expected to rise dramatically. By 2050, researchers project 30.5 million new cancer diagnoses each year, representing a 61 percent increase from current levels. Annual cancer deaths are forecast to climb to 18.6 million, a nearly 75 percent increase, driven largely by population growth and aging worldwide.
While age-adjusted cancer death rates have declined globally—reflecting advances in treatment and prevention—this progress has not been shared equally. In many low- and middle-income countries, both cancer incidence and mortality rates continue to rise, highlighting persistent gaps in early diagnosis, infrastructure, and access to effective treatment.
Prevention Could Save Millions of Lives
In 2023 alone, an estimated 4.3 million cancer deaths—42 percent of the total—were linked to known, modifiable risk factors. Tobacco use remains the single largest contributor, accounting for 21 percent of cancer deaths worldwide. Other major drivers include unhealthy diets, excess alcohol intake, high blood sugar, obesity, air pollution, and occupational exposures.
Men experience a higher proportion of cancer deaths linked to modifiable risks than women, largely due to higher rates of tobacco use, alcohol consumption, and occupational hazards. However, women are significantly affected by preventable risks as well, including metabolic dysfunction, dietary factors, and infections linked to unsafe sex.
These findings reinforce a central message: cancer is not solely a matter of genetics or chance—lifestyle, metabolic health, and environmental exposures play a decisive role.
A Call for Global and Integrative Solutions
Experts emphasize that responding to the growing cancer crisis will require coordinated action at every level—local, national, and global. This includes:
- Expanding primary prevention through nutrition, metabolic health, and toxin reduction
- Improving early detection and screening
- Ensuring equitable access to high-quality, timely treatment
- Strengthening cancer surveillance and data collection, especially in resource-limited settings
As lead researchers note, current efforts fall short of the United Nations goal to reduce premature deaths from non-communicable diseases, including cancer, by one-third by 2030. Without increased investment in prevention and health system capacity, these targets will remain out of reach.
Modifiable Risk Factors Linked to Cancer
A substantial portion of cancer risk is influenced by modifiable factors, meaning areas where lifestyle choices, environmental exposures, and metabolic health play a decisive role. Researchers categorize these risks across several levels, ranging from broad behavioral patterns to specific environmental and occupational exposures.
Core Categories of Modifiable Risk
At the highest level, cancer risk is shaped by three main domains:
- Behavioral factors, such as diet, physical activity, tobacco and alcohol use
- Environmental and occupational exposures, including air pollution and workplace toxins
- Metabolic factors, such as blood sugar regulation, body composition, and energy balance
Together, these domains reflect how daily habits, living conditions, and internal metabolic health interact to influence cancer development.
Major Lifestyle and Metabolic Drivers
Within these core categories, several well-established risk factors stand out. These include tobacco use, unhealthy dietary patterns, high alcohol intake, physical inactivity, excess body weight, and chronically elevated blood sugar. Environmental contributors such as air pollution, occupational hazards, and unsafe sexual practices linked to infection-related cancers also play a significant role.
These factors often compound one another—for example, poor diet and inactivity contributing to insulin resistance and inflammation, which can create a metabolic environment that favors tumor growth.
Specific Dietary and Exposure-Related Risks
More granular analysis identifies particular dietary and exposure patterns associated with increased cancer risk. These include diets high in processed and red meats, excess sodium, and low intake of protective nutrients such as calcium, fiber, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and dairy foods. Tobacco exposure—whether through smoking, chewing tobacco, or secondhand smoke—remains one of the most powerful and preventable cancer drivers worldwide.
Environmental exposures such as particulate air pollution, residential radon, and occupational carcinogens further contribute to cumulative cancer risk, particularly in communities with limited regulatory protections.
High-Risk Environmental and Occupational Exposures
At the most specific level, researchers identify exposure to known carcinogens that significantly elevate cancer risk. These include ambient and household air pollution, especially from solid fuel use, as well as workplace exposure to substances such as asbestos, arsenic, benzene, cadmium, chromium, nickel, diesel exhaust, formaldehyde, silica, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Chronic exposure to these agents can damage DNA, impair cellular respiration, and promote long-term inflammation.
Traditional oncology teaches that cancer arises solely from random DNA mutations in a single rogue cell, and that eliminating those mutated cells is the only path to a cure. However, this gene-centric view overlooks a profound truth: cancer is deeply influenced by the body’s overall metabolic and structural environment, not just isolated cellular mutations. In a healthy organism, tissues maintain organized structure and energy balance, but chronic systemic stress, inflammation, and metabolic dysfunction create conditions that favor disordered growth rather than normal repair and regeneration.
In classical biology, tissues are viewed as highly organized structures where cells respond to signals from their surroundings. When this organization breaks down — due to inflammation, fibrosis, cellular stress, or impaired energy production — cells can lose their normal cooperation with the body and enter a state of disordered growth. Tumors are not just “clones of mutated cells,” but rather organ-like structures emerging from an environment of tissue stress and energetic imbalance. Even cells recruited into a damaged area can be altered by the surrounding hostile conditions, illustrating how systemic tissue state influences cellular behavior.
One of the most striking features of tumors is their increased stiffness and fibrosis. Like a failing heart or chronically inflamed tissue, cancerous tissue accumulates collagen and becomes hardened — not merely a mass of rogue cells, but a matrix shaped by chronic inflammatory signaling. This fibrosis is not incidental; it alters cellular metabolism, increases cellular energy demand, promotes lactic acid production, and sets up vicious cycles of hypoxia and further collagen deposition. In this way, the extracellular matrix and tissue mechanics are central to tumor development rather than mere bystanders.
Cancer also increases dramatically with age, and aging itself is marked by progressive collagen accumulation and stiffening in tissues. This shift in the mechanical and biochemical environment makes tissues more permissive to disordered cell growth. In contrast, young tissues with healthy energy metabolism and barrier functions are more resilient, highlighting the importance of holistic tissue and metabolic health in cancer prevention. Cancer is starting to become more common even in the young now, however, demonstrating that a failure in energy is occurring at younger ages.
Importantly, a focus on mutations alone has shaped a treatment paradigm that often ignores the systemic conditions that promoted the tumor in the first place. Radiation and chemotherapy may kill cancer cells locally, but they also create damage and inflammation that can attract repair cells into the area — cells that are then exposed to the same stressed environment, potentially perpetuating a cycle of damage and recurrence. A systemic perspective suggests that healing requires addressing the metabolic, hormonal, inflammatory, and structural context, not just the tumor mass itself.
From this broader view, prevention and treatment strategies naturally emphasize reducing chronic inflammation, improving oxygen utilization and energy metabolism, supporting connective tissue health, and restoring systemic resilience. Substances that reduce fibrosis and inflammation — such as aspirin, progesterone, adequate thyroid support, antioxidants like vitamin E, and metabolic substrates that support oxidative energy metabolism — all align with this paradigm. Increasing carbon dioxide levels (through improved metabolic efficiency and respiration) and minimizing agents that stiffen collagen (such as polyunsaturated fats) help maintain a tissue environment less conducive to disordered growth.