Hoping to start a discussion about diet and Pca ( I have advanced PCa with some mets to bone Hip diagnosed 2014 psa 180 now 10 ) I have met a couple of guys following the Jane Plant diet for prostate cancer and was impressed with there general well being so for the last four months I have have cut out all meats and dairy products etc hoping for positive results. Any input on diet appreciated
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Rogersw
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Diets are like religions - best to not critique a particular diet head on. New converts can be pretty intense - as well as those who practice an austere form. So I try not to mention food unless I can find credible studies.
There are plenty of studies associating dairy products with advanced PCa. & the possible reasons are plausible. High intake of calcium can suppress the formation of hormonal vitamin D. Milk is the only food that comes with its own growth factor - IGF-I. Plenty of studies to implicate IGF-I in PCa progression. There are other hypotheses too.
The so-called Budwig diet has a big site. Men with PCa seem not to linger. Budwig combines cottage cheese (quark) with flaxseed oil. Alpha linolenic acid in the oil is associated with PCa. Dr. Myers wrote a little book on the subject of flaxseed.
Myers advocates a Mediterranean-style diet on the basis of (a) proven efficacy in CVD, & (b) the fact that many new patients are more likely to die of CVD than PCa. No proof that it is good for PCa.
Except that it is likely better than patient diets he has described: high-carb / low-fat, such as Dean Ornish advocates. Will raise triglycerides even if they start out high. A number of papers implicate triglycerides, since they correlate to insulin resistance. Insulin promotes PCa growth.
Go to Amazon Books & search on <diet prostate cancer>. If you find a good one, please let me know.
Beware of anecdotal accounts. One book goes back to before PSA testing & the man never had a biopsy. Insists that he had PCa but cured himself. Another, a young doctor, promoted a paricular diet & failed to mention that he was on continuous ADT. When ADT failed, so did the diet.
I will post diet-related studies as they appear on PubMed.
Immediately after I was diagnosed with PC I went on a vegetarian diet (I do eat fish). It just seemed to make sense. If cows and chickens and pigs are fed hormones to make them bigger, fatter and grow faster, those things cannot be good for a hormone fed cancer. When I was diagnosed I had a PSA of 39 and Gleason score 9. My doctor at Johns Hopkins gave me 5 to 10 years to live. That was 24 years ago. I am not saying a vegetarian diet is a cure for PC but I do believe it gave me a fighting chance for a longer life. I try to eat local organic foods, and wild caught salmon and other sea foods.
I was 47 years old in relatively good health. I don't think I can tell you why I felt so strongly about turning to vegetarianism after being diagnosed other than the use of hormones in raising commercial animals.
The external causal factors for PCa are, for the most part, unknown, so it follows that causal factors specifically related to diet are even more so. As one educated in the sciences, I can see how enormously difficult it would be to tease-out diet causality from the myriad other, and often inter-related, factors that contribute to our state of health.
As for me, I have been blessed to be here another day. I love good food, I am a highly experienced and skilled cook, and I love feeding people and celebrating life with my good friends and loved ones by sharing a great meal. I eat good wholesome food the way my mother, and her ancestors prepared it, and dietary minutia, dubious health claims attributed to this, that or the other foodstuff, extract, potion or nostrum are just not things that I wish to obsess over during my remaining time here on this plane.
We've been given another day to live, and the most important thing for me is to never forget what life is for.
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