Emerging Hallmark of Cancer-Obesity (About all the recent cancer posts and fat cows being offended). What is cancer? Cancer is not uncontrolled growth or cell divisions, that was the old way of thinking. Today, we see that there are many hallmarks to cancer and in each hallmark, something unique happens, sort of like promoters. So, the way I think of cancer is that it is a failure of homeostasis. So how does fat cows relate to cancer? One way is our innate immune system is not designed to handle chronic infections but only acute infection and then the body goes its merry way. However, one of the hallmark of cancer is "inflammation." During inflammation, lot of things are happening at the target site at a high rate, and sometimes some of these key proteins, chemicals etc might not function properly and dna transcription can lead to errors, the possibility of misshap is increased. There are checks and balances at stages for DNA transcription by special proteins known as p53 and others. Being fat cow will increase the risk of injury, leading to inflammation and creating a environment where cancer can develop. Plus, as I stated earlier, cancer is a failure of homeostasis, being a fat cow does lead to stress on the body, which leads to heightened immune response, which also leads to cancer development.  This is very simplified explanation but there are hallmarks of cancer on can read on and shitload of NIH research. Here is direction if you all want to explore further. Anyhow, my research paper was on how gut microbiota may affect the development of cancer, and all research points to that it does. Its another emerging hallmark of cancer just like obesity. http://www.cell.com/trends/endocrinology-metabolism/fulltext/S1043-2760(16)30107-2