I have been following a strict vegan diet program since 2015. I began to hopefully slow or reverse my diagnosed heart disease. Did the conversion help with either? Who knows? It is, I believe, not something that can be definitely proven. But, I believe it has helped, so I’m content with the change. But, my CAD and CHF continued, so I had quintuple bypass surgery in 2021. I’m still alive. The CABG5 rehab was a bitch in the middle of the pandemic, and I wouldn’t recommend heart surgery for anyone if you can avoid it. My cardiologist told me that I had no options, and because he is a smart caring normally non-invasive physician, I believed him.
Did being a vegan help prevent or postpone my PCa when diagnosed in 2019. Again, who knows? Maybe yes; maybe no. No one knows when PCa seeds itself and begins to grow and spread. Was I thirty years old, forty, fifty? Hmmm?
This Dr. Michael Greger HOW NOT TO DIE video presents RCTs stating that being a vegan helps to postpone the doubling-tîme of PSA progression following surgery and radiation for PCa. You can judge for yourself how you feel about making this lifestyle change. I think it has postpone more aggressive PCa progression, but again, who knows. Maybe I have a less aggressive strain of the disease than do other less fortunate men. Whatever helps prolong a quality life, I’ll try - within reason.
My problem with Greger is that he can be a little slippery. He is a devout vegan & sometimes uses PCa studies in a misleading way. But he has a lot of fans & I like that he uses studies to build his case. In other videos, as in this one, he makes much of the Ornish study (2005).
My RP had been a year earlier & I remember the paper very well.
Note that the diet was vegan + fish oil, & many vegans were upset with Ornish calling it vegan.
Note that the men all had a Gleason score of <7. This was at a time when a lot of Gleason 6 guys were receivng treatment, even though 70% of GS=6 do not progress. The men had elected to not have treatment.
Ornish also included men with GS<6! I forget how many - not many at all - but at least one GS=5.
"... patients with Gleason scores of 7 or greater were excluded because it is a unique prognostic category with biologically distinct and more aggressive neoplasms."
So the aim seems to have been to halt progression in lesser cancer, where only 25-30% progress.
The Ornish diet is only 10% fat. It is therefore high-carb (albeit lower calorie bucause of the bulk) & tends to increase triglycerides. The Ornish arm started out at 133 (+/-77) mg/dL and were at 138 (+/-96) after 12 months. (The controls went from 137.1 to 150.9 (+10%), which suggests that some had reduced fat intake.)
The mean change in PSA in the Ornish arm was -0.25.
The study had no impact on the PCa world of 2005 as far as I could see. However, Greger has elevated its importance over the years.
When I was diagnosed with CAD in 2015, I threw myself into the Cornish world and his research and many others convinced me that a low fat high fiber diet benefited cardiovascular health. I became a vegan.
When I read the Ornish PCa studies about PCa disease, I was saddened because I thought he manipulated the set-up, so I never placed any credence in his PCa work. I think he was reaching to prove results for his new California based lifestyle program. Frankly I found it all woowoo bullshit. But, a plant based, low fat nutritional program for CAD and CHF made sense to me. So, since I was a vegan anyway for heart health, I just hoped it was helping my PCa disease.
Twenty-odd years ago I was a vegan: this lasted seven years and when I transitioned into vegetarian. Along that route I saw a doctor who gave me all kinds of blood tests, many of which I never saw again. One test measured my amino acids done by some lab in the Pacific Northwest. The results showed I was not only deficient in all the essential amino acids, but even the non-essential ones. While a vegan-vegetarian, I got most of my protein from tofu: a crucial mistake. In those days tofu was touted as some kind of super food, so I figured, the more the better. I wound up hypothyroid, which I am to this day. Depending how you want to count them, East to West, beginning in Spain and ending in Turkey, there are ten Mediterranean countries. Basically there is no “The Mediterranean Diet.” However they all eat whole grains, vegetables, legumes, fruit, nuts, herbs, spices, fish, wine, cheese and olive oil--almost everything. They all eat some kind of meat (pig, goat, cow, lamb) to some degree. Two things they traditionally seem to have shared (less now) is physical activity and knowing when to push themselves away from the table. Two seasons of his “Searching for Italy” TV series on CNN show us how the Italians love their fatty cheese, fatty pork, butter cream, etc., and appear to enjoy their wins with everything, other than breakfast. What they didn't seem to eat is junk or fast food. I say didn't because they have probably transitioned to the "diabetic diet," along with the rest of the modern world.
An aspect of the Med diet that is never mentioned is location. PCa risk increases with lattitude. I recently posted an Italian paper that described PCa as the 4th greatest cancer risk for men! It's certainly not the 4th hereabouts.
To me, the PREDIMED intervention trial that showed a CVD benefit, convinced me that a 40% fat diet can be healthy, & might even be good for men with PCa.
I believe that Dr Myers started out thinking that a low fat diet was probably good. But he mentioned that patients who followed very low fat diets didn't do well. & Myers eventually became a promoter of the Med diet.
Myers uses nuts to ensure that his meals hit ~40% fat, and various studies have associated nut intake with relative longevity.
PCa studies of fats can be confusing. The only fats I use for cooking are butter & olive oil. I definitely do not avoid foods that are rich in fat. And there is always a bowl of assorted nuts in the kitchen. I wish that supermarket fish selections included one or two fatty fishes. I crave fresh herring. The last time I had a grilled herring was 58 years ago.
Aside from all of the studies, what it gets down to is what works for us as individuals. For me it has been 14 hours between my last meal and breakfast every day. The next is I watch my calories. I eat what I feel like eating, but keep the caloric load of each meal in line. My last PSMA scan and color doppler showed that I appear to be doing OK. As for fat, it is essential for a healthy myelin sheath that covers our nerve cells. My fatty fish of choice is sardines: to the dismay of my son, I even put them on pizzas.
Maybe you are not looking at this in the right way. Becoming vegan is not a cure for heart disease or cancer. It has been proven that a vegetarian or vegan diet over years or better over decades can "reduce" your RISK of heart disease or cancer.
I became a vegan a few days after I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. That was 30 years ago. A few years later I became a vegetarian (adding eggs, butter, etc.). In the last decades I added fish and some shell fish. My major concern was hormones and other chemicals in the meat of domestic animals. Chemicals to make them grow bigger, fatter and faster.
I do believe this diet is partly attributable to my long life with prostate cancer. It was not a cure. I have been through many treatments and drug trials over the decades. I did have bypass surgery, so the years of diet did not spare me from that. I did cheat a lot with candy and junk foods. I hope I have added some clarity to diets and disease.
Years ago watching out for the regional manager doing his twice a year visit to the factory to come towards us one of the old matter of fact maintenance guys said what's wrong with his face color (face was ash gray). The other old down to earth old blue collar man said "he went on on a vegan diet, he's dead but he aint laid down yet" lol.
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