http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...5081100037.html

Diet May Inhibit Prostate Cancer

By LAURAN NEERGAARD
The Associated Press
Thursday, August 11, 2005; 2:57 AM

WASHINGTON -- A radical ultra low-fat diet and other lifestyle changes may help keep early-stage prostate cancer from worsening, says the first attempt to test the theory.

It's a small study that tracked men whose tumors weren't aggressive. Still, the research, published in the September issue of The Journal of Urology, promises to increase interest in whether diet might really help battle cancer.

The study was led by heart-health guru Dr. Dean Ornish, and used his famously strict regimen, where people become vegetarians, limit dietary fat to 10 percent of total calories, exercise regularly and learn stress-management techniques such as yoga.

Ornish's studies show that regimen can help heart disease, but why try it on prostate cancer? There is some evidence that diets high in fat increase the risk of prostate cancer, and that certain foods _ such as broccoli, or the nutrient lycopene from cooked tomato products _ are protective.

So Ornish and fellow researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, recruited 93 men who had decided against treatment for early-stage prostate cancer, a route known as "watchful waiting."

Half were randomly assigned to the Ornish diet and lifestyle regimen; the others weren't asked to vary their usual routines. The researchers sent participants' blood samples to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York to measure PSA, or prostate specific antigen, a marker used to track prostate cancer growth.

After one year, PSA levels had decreased 4 percent in the diet group _ unusual for untreated patients _ while PSA levels rose by 6 percent in the control group. That difference wasn't big but it's statistically significant, and the researchers plan to continue tracking the men to see if it really signals better health.

Also, six of the non-dieters had undergone cancer treatment in that year after all, because their disease was progressing. None of the dieters were treated.

Other cellular tests suggested the diet wasn't just affecting PSA production, Ornish said.

"It's hard to get too excited about these results because you took a population of men who, frankly, are likely to do well no matter what," cautioned Dr. Durado Brooks of the American Cancer Society. But, "this definitely should open the door to more research."

"This report undoubtedly will excite the aficionados and devotees of lifestyle changes for cancer but it should also give pause to the skeptics," wrote Dr. Paul Lange of the University of Washington in an accompanying editorial.

Indeed, it comes just months after another study suggested low-fat diets might help women avoid a recurrence of breast cancer.

Ornish stressed that his study, partly government-funded, doesn't mean men should opt for diet over conventional therapy.

But these men weren't getting conventional treatment anyway, allowing a clearer test of dietary effects, he explained. The diet may help men undergoing therapy, too, he added.

"I always find it amusing" that people call the diet hard, Ornish said. "Compared to having your prostate removed? ... The only side effects are you feel better and it helps prevent heart disease."

More than 230,000 U.S. men are expected to be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year, and 29,500 will die, the cancer society estimates.

Ornish orinish ornish..... I hate that guy.

Why didn't they just test their vitamin D levels and give them some D?

"Study was led by Ornish" kinda says it all right there.

Other stories about the study describe it as the patients being subject to the entire Ornish protocol: diet, exercise, group therapy, the works. It could be that the exercise is what counts.

- ldcowboy

Ornish never looks at the different parts of his program in isolation, which is too bad. The stress management portion of the program could EASILY account for all the improvements. Ditch everything else he's got to say, but the yoga and meditation is going to add years to your life.

Ornish always does his studies in such a way that he changes many variables, then proselytizes that it was the low-fat diet that caused any favorable results.

There may be other things at work here like eating lots of veggies with nutrients that might fight cancer, or just eating fewer calories, or not eating sugar and flour. All those can also be done on low carb diets too.

Ornish is a cure in search of a disease.

He has this regime he loves, religiously, and is looking for somewhere where it actually works.

And. . . 4% reduction in PSA? That's significant? For a treatment that is essentially a full-time job?

If anyone tried to sell an herb, or a pill, or an 'alternative treatment' with that sort of non-result, they would be denounced as a quack.

But Ornish gets a free pass, because after all, everyone 'knows' that vegan low-fat is the nirvana we mere mortals can never hope to achieve.

Feh.

Being a middle aged man, I have studied prostate problems. The conventional wisdom is the exact opposite of what the "alternative" experts recommend.

Conventional doctors recommend turning men into women -- i guess they are thinking that women don't get prostate cancer :-)

But they want to cut testosterone and all other hormones, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fat, and other things that make a man a man.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/...icle/000380.htm

But the alternative doctors boost testosterone, DHEA, fat, amino acids, and use herbs such as pumpkin seed and saw palmetto. They give a man more of what it takes to turn back into a testosterone spitting man.

http://www.vitacost.com/store/produ...L&ss=1&x=15&y=7

Iteresting enough, pharmaceutical companies claim that pumpkin seed and saw palmetto do not work. But they are trying to copy them in the lab, make it synthetic, and then patent it.

Note that prostate problems are related to male pattern baldness. So the popular drugs Rogaine, Propecia, and Proscar would be beneficial.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4729447.stm

A 4% reduction in PSA is not even within the radar screen of PSAs effectiveness in predicting prostrate cancer.


http://www.medpagetoday.com/Hematol...eCancer/tb/1331

Thats almost a 400% PSA level variation in what the cutoff level may be; 4% is noise.

What's funny is that he claims high fat foods promote prostate cancer, and also claims that lycopene in tomatoes can help prevent it.

Of course, he doesn't tell that lycopene is liposoluble and that with too low a level of fat in the diet, you do not absorb it properly.

Ah, the dilemmas of lowfatdom.

PSA is an imeffective method of predicting prostate cancer. GIGO Nyah Levi

Side note, but I thought saw palmetto blocked androgens somehow?
Both me and my sister are prone to PCOS when we don't watch our diets. She was taking saw palmetto supplements for her PCOS (before she stopped eating so many carbs) this was from advice she received on PCOS communities, it is a popular remedy. Since the cause of the PCOS symptoms is ultimately excess and unbalanced sex hormones (high androgens from insulin screwing things up), if saw palmetto helps PCOS symptoms wouldn't it mean it does something to blunt androgen expression/production/etc?

Yea it's really like a religious thing for them. Clearly they associate fat with a host of undesirable traits like gluttony, excess, contamination, waste, being overburdened, lack of empowerment and so on.
The fact that fat is an essential nutrient that is required in the diet, in high quantity, means nothing to them. They'll never change their faith in the sanctity of their anti-fat crusade. This is about emotion and not logic. As far as they're concerned the word fat may as well be interchangable with plague or poison (morally/spiritually and physically).

I don't know who's more rational, the dogmatic vegan extremists (PeTA and friends) or the dogmatic anti-fat crusaders.