Obesity warning as Irish cancer deaths rank 3rd in EU

Ireland has the third highest rate of cancer deaths in the EU and unless people begin to change their lifestyles it could get a whole lot worse.

That’s according to one of the country’s foremost cancer experts, Prof John Crown who said that after smoking, obesity was the second biggest cause of cancer. With cancer accounting for close to a third of all deaths in Ireland in 2011, according to figures published by Eurostat, only the Netherlands and Slovenia have higher rates.

This compares to Bulgaria and Romania, two of the EU’s poorer countries, where cancer accounts for fewer than one in five deaths, while the EU average is about a quarter.