Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition, brought to you by nutritional weight and wellness. We are a company

specializing in life-changing nutrition education and counseling. I am Melanie Beasley, a licensed

and registered dietitian,

and I'm here with Kara Carper today. It's great to be with you again, Melanie. My name is

Kara Carper. I'm a licensed nutritionist and certified nutrition specialist. We're going to be

discussing the very important topic of colon cancer today. The American Cancer Society reports that colorectal

cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths when you combine the numbers for both

men and women. It's estimated that more than 148,000 new cases of colon cancer will be diagnosed.

And over 56,000 Americans, unfortunately,

will pass from colon cancer this year in 2024. I feel like colon cancer has risen to the point that everybody knows somebody who has struggled or is struggling with colon cancer. So I think this is really

timely. But Kara, 90% of colon cancer is thought to be preventable. And so we have to ask ourselves,

why are these numbers on the rise in our country and when it comes to diagnosis and death rates?

So that brings us to our show title today. Am I at

risk for colon cancer? Before we get too far into our topic, you and I had an interesting

discussion before our show about the terms used for colon cancer. So I think that's important.

It can be confusing. So we want to explain the different terms and what

they mean. Kara had just stated that colorectal cancer is the second most common form of cancer

for men and women combined in the U.S. The colon is our large intestinal tract. So cancer that's

diagnosed in the colon is called colon

cancer. And then the rectum is the last few inches of the large intestinal tract that's closest to

the anus. Rectal cancer is technically a cancer that occurs in that specific area, not to be

confused. So that's really the only difference. So if you

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