If you’re reading this there’s a good chance that you, like me, are a millennial.

If so, you’ve probably noticed more and more cases of friends or acquaintances with diseases that you would normally associate with later adulthood – hypertension, type 2 diabetes or perhaps even the one that we’re all scared to name: cancer .

Millennials – people born between 1981 and 1995 – are the first generation at greater risk of developing tumours than their parents.

Between 1990 and 2019, cases of early-onset cancer among people under 50 increased by 79 per cent worldwide, and mortality by 28 per cent.

The truth is that around 80 per cent of cancers are “sporadic”, meaning they are not caused by hereditary mutations but by external factors that damage DNA over time.…