Your Muffin Top Will Give You Butt Cancer

That gut you’ve got may be adorable and fun to grab hold of, but it’s going to kill you, says Science.

Every extra inch on your waistline raises the odds of bowel cancer even if the rest of your body is trim, doctors have warned. The dangers of a pot belly or ‘muffin top’ were highlighted by a large-scale review of studies into Britain’s second biggest cancer killer. Crucially for the millions battling to contain middle-age spread, it found that you don’t need to be overweight for a generous waistline to cause problems.

Even worse, almost everything that’s fun to eat, “including bacon, ham, pastrami, salami and hot dogs — significantly raises the chances of bowel cancer” (also known as “colorectal cancer” or “cancer of the ass”). Sometimes life is exactly as unrelentingly awful as you expect it to be.