Hey there and welcome to Pursuing Health. I'm Dr. Julie Fouche, Family Physician and

Former CrossFit Games athlete. Here is your bonus weekly CrossFit Health Tip, which

was originally published on CrossFit.com. Enjoy!

I'm here with Dr. Allison Betoff, who is an oncologist and cancer researcher, and we

are here today to talk about the role of exercise in cancer prevention and treatment. So nowadays,

most of us have been touched by cancer in some way, whether it's personally a family

member or a friend, so it's extremely common. But what do we know about the role of exercise

in cancer prevention?

So we know that lifestyle factors are key in preventing cancer. We've all heard that

stop smoking, limit the amount of alcohol, avoid obesity. This isn't a foreign concept,

right? Exercise is just another layer of these behavior modifications that we can do that

to help prevent cancer. We actually know that exercise reduces the risk of developing

cancer, somewhere around 20%, which is actually an incredible number.

Incredible. That's amazing. Are there specific types of exercise in particular that have

this effect in cancer prevention?

So we think this is a more general exercise effect. Now, a lot of us are scientists and

we think about how to study this in very precise ways. So most of the data are really in aerobic

exercise, telling patients to walk and maybe walk more quickly, even run if someone is a

survivor and maybe passed a acute cancer treatment. But really, the role of resistance training,

hit, crossfit, these types of things are less well understood. That being said, we're all

very familiar with the mental health benefits of crossfit. For us as normal healthy people,

and we can only imagine that as a cancer patient, identifying yourself more as an athlete and

...