[jessriedel]

Perhaps more importantly, a huge fraction of those "preventable" cancers are lung cancers that could only be prevented by giving up smoking.

> Lung cancer is by far the leading cause of cancer death among both men and women; about 1 out of 4 cancer deaths are from lung cancer.

http://www.cancer.org/cancer/lungcancer-non-smallcell/detail...

and from the article:

> About 82 percent of women and 78 percent of men who got lung cancer might have prevented it through healthy behaviors.

Back of the envelope: ~20 percent of all cancer deaths are lung cancer deaths that wouldn't have happened without smoking. That leaves just 5-15% of cancer deaths being "potentially preventable" once you've given up smoking. (Here, I'm not distinguishing between cancer cases and cancer deaths; please point to better data if you have it.)

I'd wager less than 5% of cancer deaths are preventable if you neither smoke nor are overweight.

I think this article, and especially its headline, is highly misleading.