Though I doubt Bill Nye the Science Guy will be talking about this any time soon, there is scientific evidence suggesting that drinking moderate amounts of beer and wine can reduce your risk of developing kidney cancer.

A British Journal of Cancer study revealed that people who drank more than two glasses of wine or two bottles of beer per week were 30 to 40 percent less likely to develop renal cell cancer than people who abstained from boozing entirely.

This could be for two reasons: 1) Past studies have shown that having one drink per day can improve insulin sensitivity. This, in turn, lowers the risk of diabetes and obesity, both of which have been linked to a higher risk of kidney cancer; and 2) Antioxidants found in grape skins and yeast may help stave off this form of cancer.

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Recently researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida have discovered that what harms you may actually help you: obesity both increases your risk for developing kidney cancer and then may reduce its severity once you have it.

Researchers looked at 970 patients with the most common form of kidney cancer, clear cell renal carcinoma, and found that the overweight or obese individuals had less aggressive tumors than those who were normal or underweight. Using BMI as the guide for weight parameters, at the 5 year point the survival rate from the cancer was 82 percent for the obese patients, 77 percent for the overweight patients, and only 62 percent for the normal-weight patients. This means, compared to patients with an ideal BMI, the death rate was decreased by 52 percent for the obese patients and 36 percent for the overweight patients.

It is still unclear if these findings are related to the obesity itself, or merely due to the fact that obese individuals are more likely to undergo screenings and/or be diagnosed at an earlier stage in the disease.

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