According to a recent article published in Barrons on February 3, 2026, four out of every 10 cancer cases are contributable to a range of preventable risk factors identified as smoking, alcohol consumption, air pollution, overweight, and lack of exercise to name a few. This data was sourced from the World Health Organization. Sadly, the reality of the local numbers frame a far dire picture.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”
—Mark Twain
The problem with statistics, beyond the truth embedded in Mark Twain’s humor, is that they separate the real human impact from the statistic that the statistics represent.
There can be no doubt, we are in the midst of an epidemiological transition. According to the lead author of the Prospective and Rural Epidemiology Study, Dr. Latha Palaniappan from Stanford,
“We are seeing a new epidemiologic transition — from heart disease to cancer as the leading cause of death — which is occurring first in high income communities.”
This ‘epidemiological transition’ represents a fundamental shift in our metabolic and immunologic health that directly impacts cancer risk in today’s and future generations.
Obesity
Forty percent, according to the World Health Organization, seems like a lot. The problem with these stats is that healthcare is more predictable by the local environment and exposure. According to the CDC, 40% of cancers diagnosed in 2014 were associated with overweight and obesity. This equates to 631,000 obesity related cancers diagnosed in 2014. According to the same CDC, 40.3% of U.S. adults are obese and 74% are either overweight or obese.
Sadly, the obesity rates of adolescents, age 2 to 19, sits at 19.3% to 21.1% according to the same CDC; so, don’t expect those rates to change anytime soon. In fact, I would expect those numbers to continue to climb.
Obesity is linked to at least 13 distinct types of cancer, accounting for 40% of all cancers diagnosed annually. The currently recognized obesity-related cancers include:
- Esophageal adenocarcinoma
- Post-menopausal breast cancer
- Colorectal cancer
- Uterine
- Gallbladder
- Upper Stomach
- Kidney
- Liver
- Ovarian
- Pancreas
- Thyroid
- Meningioma
- Multiple myeloma
Diagnosis is one thing, but mortality data is lost in the statistics. New research highlights that age-adjusted mortality rates from obesity-associated cancers have nearly tripled in just two decades, soaring from 3.73 to 13.52 per million between 1999 and 2020. When one dives into the lives and families affected by these numbers, the reality of the impact of overweight and obesity on life rises beyond the numbers and percentages.
The obesity epidemic impact ripples through the human condition:
- Chronic inflammation (via adipokines and TNF-α)
- Immune suppression (reduced cytotoxic T cell activity)
- Hormonal signaling dysfunction (increased insulin, IGF-1, estrogen, testosterone)
The consequence is acute, long-term, transgenerational, and intergenerational immune dysfunction promoting a legacy of disease.
Obesity is one of the 4 horsemen. The other 3 horsemen include overuse of processed/ultra-processed foods, antibiotics, and environmental toxicants, i.e., glyphosate.
Processed and Ultra-Processed Foods
It is comical to even reference processed/ultra-processed foods as food at all. They starve and chemically injure the microbiome resulting in:
- Seeds alterations in gut microbiome—dysbiosis
- Alteration in gut metabolome
- Increased ‘leaky gut’
- Increased chronic, systemic inflammation—endotoxemia
- Increased endotoxemia leading to chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, and cancer
The consequence is real and research suggests is inheritable: Nutritional and chemical hostility to beneficial microbes seeding disease, i.e., cancer, instead of health and wellness.
Glyphosate
Glyphosate was recognized early as an antibiotic. It was approved by government regulators because humans don’t utilize the enzymatic pathway, shikimate pathway, disrupted by glyphosate. Unfortunately, it was lost on those involved in the approval process that the human gut microbiome does utilize the shikimate pathway. As a result, glyphosate inhibits the shikimate pathway in the human gut microbiome killing commensal bacteria, Lactobacillus, Actinobacteria, and Bifidobacteria in the gut microbiome.
The result? Glyphosate-induced gut microbiome changes alter global methylation patterns, leading to accelerated aging. The important aspect of aging here is not the external macro phenotype but the internal micro impact on the cells, particularly the immune system. The result is an increase in senescent cells, which drives aging, aging-related disease, and cancer.
The direct consequences include foundational gut microbiota loss impairing immune priming as life begins. The reality of the situation is that we are engineering the immune system, immune engineering, to promote disease and not health. Antagonistic pleiotropy is the generational, unintended consequence of our self-inflicted disruption of the human gut microbiome.
Overuse of Antibiotics
One of the greatest discoveries of the 20th century that dramatically impacted infectious disease has a dark downside. The dark side is not the discovery and use of antibiotics, but the overutilization of antibiotics by the medical community for decades. This overuse of antibiotics has left a lasting negative imprint on the human gut microbiome and the immune system as a result. The overuse of antibiotics is especially harmful in early life (birth – 3 years).
The following impacts are the direct impacts of antibiotic overuse:
- Decreases Bifidobacterium reducing regulatory T cells and butyrate
- Repeated use prevents recovery leading to long-term dysbiosis
- Leaky gut
- Systemic inflammation and endotoxemia
- Metabolic dysfunction leading to overweight and obesity
- Linked to increased colorectal, pancreatic, breast, lung, renal cell carcinoma, lymphomas, multiple myeloma, and prostate cancers
The consequence is the destruction of beneficial microbes, chronic dysbiosis, and immune dysregulation.
Extinction Event
Babies born without Bifidobacterium are raised for disease. What we have as a result of the 4 horsemen is a silent crisis—an extinction event. According to the My Baby Biome study update, 25% of infants born have no detectable Bifidobacterium at all. Seventy-six babies exhibited low or undetectable Bifidobacterium levels. Most alarming, 92% of infants lacked a key human milk oligosaccharide HMO Bifidobacterium species—B. infantis. This extinction event is a strong driver of gut dysbiosis, impairing immune priming, delaying immune maturation, which result in immune-related diseases—cancer.
We are seeding gut microbiome extinction events that raise our children for disease. Unfortunately, the seeding event is transferred to the next generation, intergenerational. A 2025 meta-analysis of Bifidobacterium transmissibility looked at the intergenerational question. This meta-analysis of 810 mother-infant pairs found an estimated 30% vertical transmission of Bifidobacterium species from mother to child. The species shared included multiple Bifidobacterium strains, with B. longum strains persisting in the infant gut for up to six months. The transmission was highest in vaginal births compared to caesarean.
A 2018 animal study took this concept much further. Maternal obesity and overnutrition, ultraprocessed and high-fat diets, alter the maternal gut microbiome. In this animal model, the altered maternal gut microbiome is vertically transferred to offspring, effectively reprogramming their gut microbiome and metabolome, increasing obesity risk. Moreover, this study expanded the window from pregnancy and birth to now, including breastfeeding. This animal study linked intergenerational transmission of the gut microbiome and gut metabolome to metabolic reprogramming in F1 offspring. This maternal overnutrition and obesity connection, which alters the maternal gut microbiome, is vertically transferred to F1 offspring, altering the gut microbiome and gut metabolome, and has been shown in human studies as well. Additional studies have added systemic inflammation to the sequence:
- Maternal diet and obesity leading to altered maternal gut microbiome
- Altered maternal gut metabolome
- Vertical transmission of altered gut microbiome to offspring
- Vertical transmission of altered gut metabolome
- Altered gut barrier and intestinal permeability leaky gut
- Systemic inflammation
The impact of transgenerational inheritance of gut dysbiosis is yet to be established in the science, but the age-adjusted mortality rates from obesity-associated cancers that have tripled in just two decades, soaring from 3.73 to 13.52 per million between 1999 and 2020, is the smoke that feeds the fire of possible.
To explore the theoretical possibility of transgenerational inheritance of gut dysbiosis and failed immune priming, I propose a generational impact disease timeline. The cumulative effect of industrialized practices, particularly the Four Horsemen, manifests as a clear potential trans-generational progression in health decline, and acceleration in disease risk across the decades:
Gen 0 (1970s to 1980s)
Widespread glyphosate approval and growing antibiotic use
- Soil and infant gut microbiome begin decline
Gen 1 (1990s to 2010s)
Ultra-processed foods dominate diet and early-life antibiotic overuse, obesity rise
- Increase childhood inflammation, metabolic dysfunction
- Increase childhood obesity
- Increase asthma, eczema, autoimmune diseases, childhood cancers
Gen 2 (2010s to 2030s)
Children of depleted microbiome parents; all four threats combine
- Change in cancer demographics with increase in early-onset colorectal, pancreatic, breast, endometrial, and thyroid cancers
Gen 3 (2030s to 2050s)
Potential for full generational microbiome extinction; inherited damage, ecosystem collapse of baseline health
- Predominant chronic disease with inflammation-driven early cancers
- Epidemic of young adult cancers
- Treatment-resistant tumors
The theoretical, but plausible, timeline illustrates a real and concerning trajectory: each generation inherits a more compromised immune foundation, leading to earlier and more aggressive disease manifestation.
The truth in the statistics is that the real affected lives are likely significantly worse than the WHO’s statistics. Obesity alone is associated with 40 percent of cancers. There is little doubt that the combination of early and overutilization of antibiotics, glyphosate, and processed or ultra-processed foods only increases the percentage of lives impacted. Glyphosate is the only toxicant included here in the four horsemen. Try to comprehend the cumulative impact of organophosphates, organochlorines, atrazine, paraquat, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, dioxins, furans, polychlorinated biphenyls, bisphenol, phthalates, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances PFAS, heavy metals arsenic, cadmium, and hexavalent chromium, and many others. No lives, friends, family, city, county, or state will be left untouched by this scourge called cancer.
We have seeded disease. As a result, we are harvesting which we have sown.
References
Flores Ventura, E., Esteban-Torres, M., Gueimonde, M., van Sinderen, D., Koren, O., Hall, L. J., Segata, N., Valles-Colomer, M., & Collado, M. C. 2025. Mother-to-infant vertical transmission in early life: A systematic review and proportional meta-analysis of Bifidobacterium strain transmissibility. npj Biofilms and Microbiomes, 11, Article 121. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41522-025-00720-y
Mann PE, Huynh K, Widmer G. 2018. Maternal high fat diet and its consequence on the gut microbiome: A rat model. Gut Microbes, 9, 143-154. doi 10.1080/19490976.2017.1395122
Gilley, S. P., and colleagues. 2022. Associations between maternal overweight or obesity, infant gut microbiome composition, and fecal short-chain fatty acids: implications for early adiposity risk. Pediatric Obesity, 17, e12921. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijpo.12921
Soderborg, T. K., Borengasser, S. J., Barbour, L. A., & Friedman, J. E. 2016. Microbial transmission from mothers with obesity or diabetes to infants: an innovative opportunity to interrupt a vicious cycle. Diabetologia, 59, 895-906. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00125-016-3880-0
Mokkala, K., Röytiö, H., Munukka, E., Pietilä, S., Ekblad, U., Rönnemaa, T., Eerola, E., Laiho, A., & Laitinen, K. 2016. Gut microbiota richness and composition and dietary intake of overweight pregnant women are related to serum zonulin concentration, a marker for intestinal permeability. The Journal of Nutrition, 146, 1694-1700. https://doi.org/10.3945/jn.116.235358
Houttu, N., Mokkala, K., & Laitinen, K. 2018. Overweight and obesity status in pregnant women are related to intestinal microbiota and serum metabolic and inflammatory profiles. Clinical Nutrition, 37, 1955-1966. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clnu.2017.12.013