NYT: High Fat Diets and prostate cancer?
 

As an older male, the possible connection of a high fat diet to prostate cancer is a concern:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/...ate-cancer.html

IMO when a reseacher uses terms such as may or suggests, it means they don't know. I work in biotech plenty of successful mouse studies don't pan out in humans. That's why biotech is a high-risk investment. I wouldn't sweat it, there are human genetic markers that would be a better predictor than a mouse study.

There have been many men on the forum whose PSA levels dropped once they went low carb.

Yes, mice are very different from people. Also even if the results do turn out to be true of humans, a high carbohydrate diet drives the conversion of unneeded glucose into triglyceride, i.e. high blood fats. Whereas a high fat low carbohydrate diet often leads to reduced circulating triglyceride levels in the blood. So if I were a man and the results were found true of humans I think I would still stick with a high fat low carbohydrate diet.

Here's the key part of the article for me:


Mice having eaten a high-fat western diet doesn't explain much in terms of what could be a triggering ingredient. High-fat western diet likely has sugar as well. This is why we can't jump to conclusions, as 1) it's mice, and 2) while the diet contained fat, it also contained other potentially harmful substances. Same story, though, when fat is present among other things, fat typically gets the blame.

Even if I was a mouse, I
would not let this study worry me.

Another thing about mouse studies is that the natural diet they're adapted to eat is not high in fat. High fat diets of the type many of us on this forum have improved our health on might sicken a mouse. So it's something to consider in interpreting high fat mouse studies, in whether negative effects will also apply to higher fat tolerating humans or not. Not meant as criticism of the present study or rodent studies in general. Researchers have to start somewhere.

Gina Kolata. Nuf said about that.

For cancer, we could look at the work of Feinman for example, where patients with cancer saw regression of tumors when they ate a ketogenic diet. This is a human experiment. It trumps mice and petri dish experiments.

https://feinmantheother.com/

Follow the link above, check the posts "Ketogenic Diets for Cancer". Link to discussion on the experiment (with link to Feinman's blog post about it in the first post) : http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=447278

Bear in mind this is a therapeutic experiment, not a preventive experiment. But it's easy to extrapolate and conclude that the same diet used as therapy here can be expected to prevent as well. Rather, it's absurd to conclude that the same diet used as therapy was also used to cause the disease, see?

Gina Kolata wrote the story. She's a big low-fat advocate and I wouldn't trust her spin.

Gina Kolata is good for one thing: getting the Piña Colada song stuck in your head! :)

Thanks a lot Rawnut. Now I'm doomed.

I have read the opposite that low-carb/(sugar), high fat diet starves cancer.
This article is also promoting a certain drug.

Life causes cancer.

Isn't prostate cancer usually so slow growing that when found in older men they just leave it? They are likely going to die of something else long before they die of the prostate cancer. Sure there are men who get it younger and more aggressive, but aren't those anomalies compared to older men who a high percentage die WITH prostate cancer, rather than die OF it?

Direct correlation on stuff like this is hard to define. I'm no expert by a long shot, but I have people in my extended family who have had lung cancer for instance and never smoked in their lives. I seem to remember during an American Indian museum tour...I think it was in Little Rock, where I learned that American Indians had cases of cancer long before white man arrived. Sure, the smoke in the teepees may have caused it, but maybe some of us just get cancer. A mutation that simply occurs and there is nothing you did to cause it...and it follows genetic lines.

Western culture has fallen in to the trap of believing whatever the latest "study" seems to reveal. We were told eggs were killing us at one point...weren't we? I think I would believe a millennia old Chinese fact and remedy before modern Western ones. There is too much money to corrupt stuff...and a LOT of that money is in medicine, treatment, and therapy...and diets!

I've said most of my life "Eat well, stay fit and get hit by a bus anyway". We are all born to die and we cant always control when we punch out. If we live our lives in fear of death and take few risks, preferring to be cautious about everything...that's not really living in the philosophical sense, that's just attempting to prolong life and waiting to die.

I'd rather live to 70 enjoying things and having the excitement that comes with risk, than live to 100 being careful and listening to the clock tick on the wall.

It just occurred to me. What did they use to cause cancer in the first place? Remember Collin Campbell's mice experiment with casein and cancer? He used aflatoxin to cause cancer. Evcen though he used mice, even though use used aflatoxin, even though he used casein, he declared meat caused cancer in humans. It's the same thing here, even though they used mice, even though they obviously used something other than fat to cause cancer, and even though they likely used some hydrogenated veggy oil, they imply (or at least that's what we are lead to believe) that animal fat causes cancer in humans.

Consider Feinman's work again. He used a ketogenic diet to shrink tumors. Doesn't tell us what caused cancer in the first place, but it certainly suggests that, a) fat does not cause it, and b) carbs likely allow or cause continued growth (after initial cause, which may or may not still be present).

Then we gotta ask, what is the thing that allows or causes growth? Is it fuel? Maybe. It's useful to look at other examples of growth. Child's growth - growth hormone. Fat tissue growth - insulin. Breast growth - estrogen and prolactin. Muscle growth - testosterone (it's more complicated than that, but it illustrates the point). Then we got growth distribution like the differences between men and women - primarily sex hormones testosterone and estrogen. Does fuel enter the equation at any point? Yes, but only insofar as we restrict fuel will it affect growth, even then there's still gonna be growth but at the expense of other tissues, i.e. fat tissue grows but we get tired and other tissues shrink, etc.

Feinman thinks it's all about the insulin. I agree. Cancer cells apparently have 10x the number of insulin receptors. I wonder why. I wonder why a ketogenic diet shrinks tumors, but not really, it's obvious - there's much less insulin cuz there's no carbs to stimulate it. Nevermind the fuel, cancer cells would get it anyway if there was ample insulin, but there isn't. Imagine a sort of diabetic type 1 cancer. Tons of glucose, but zero insulin. I wonder if there'd be any growth.

To summarize.

Cancer is initially caused by something that can be different than the growth agent. Cancer grows according to hormonal signaling. Fat (i.e. animal fat) does not cause cancer in humans, nor does it cause cancer to grow in humans.

They are not above lying.