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Last spring, when Americans rushed to stockpile essentials, toilet paper and hand sanitizer weren't the only items being tossed into virtual and real-life shopping carts with abandon:

Sales of packaged cookies and crackers shot up substantially, as did online purchases of alcoholic beverages — while baking supplies such as yeast all but vanished from shelves. So perhaps

it's not surprising that now, more than six months into the pandemic, many people are admitting to having gained the “quarantine 15” (or more). "I've had so many patients

coming in and saying, ‘I haven't been behaving; I've definitely been drinking more,'” says Radhika Acharya-Leon, D.O., medical director of the UCHealth Cancer Center in

Highlands Ranch, Colorado. “Everyone is gaining weight, too. I call it the COVID 19 because everyone is gaining [around] 20 pounds.” Seeing the scale tick upward can be alarming for a host

of reasons, but oncologists including Acharya-Leon are concerned that weight gain — plus other troublesome lifestyle shifts — could predispose more women to breast cancer, a disease that

already hits 1 in 8 of them. "There are some things in life you can't control, such as your genetics, but some aspects of breast cancer risk we can control,” says Deborah Lindner,

M.D., chief medical officer of Bright Pink, a breast and ovarian cancer education and advocacy group. Though lifestyle alone rarely determines whether someone gets breast cancer — genetics

and simply getting older tend to be more influential factors — 85 percent of breast cancers occur in women with no family history of the disease. You should also know that not everyone who

carries a genetic predisposition will develop cancer: “Something has to trigger it,” Acharya-Leon says. “We know that lifestyle plays a big role." Ask a cancer expert about which

pandemic-related lifestyle changes are most worrisome and you'll learn that delaying routine health screenings, including mammograms, tops the list. (Staying on top of screenings

doesn't prevent cancer, but it helps catch it in the earliest, most treatable stages.) Next in line? Gaining weight, being sedentary and consuming too much alcohol. THE CANCER-WEIGHT

CONNECTION An estimated 22 percent of adults have gained weight during the pandemic, according to a recent survey. Increased stress and boredom, decreased physical activity, and lack of

sleep (which affects hunger hormones) may all be contributing to this trend.