"I. P. Freely" <fuhgheddaboutit@noway.nohow> wrote...

I do agree with you, IP. So many suggestions in food. We 'had to consume
flaxseed oil, because of the omega 3 fats'. Later they found out that
it's also a source of alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), a serious source of
stimulating the growth of Pc. I used many bottles, in stead of good old
cod liver oil.

I understand that there's no food that's able to avoid or stop
devellopping prostate cancer, so please eat what you like and/or don't
eat anything that 'might' help you. With every illness or sickness there
are people, making use of the voulnerability. Spend the mony on your
medicals or, like I do, to have some fun. Sorry for the errors in
English.

Douwe

I.P.,

You are correct of course - I was a bit sloppy with my wording.  What I
should have said instead of "If you already have PCa" to instead be "If
you already have any PCa cells".  Of course, the latter is something
that nobody can know for sure, so avoiding soy, flaxseed and any other
foods that are shown to preferentially bind to ER-beta is the only
rational course of action.

Ed Friedman

I agree. I don't walk a tightrope with my diet. I'll eat a pizza (I don't
just "eat pizza"; I eat *A* pizza) once or twice a year, but I just found
cold turkey the easy solution to poison like bacon and ribs. When I go to a
buffet, I usually save some room for half a dozen desserts . . . after
plates of salad, veggies, and some very lean meat. There's plenty of room
for QOL in a healthy diet.

I.P.

           "There is no evidence that diet has any effect on PCa."

Here's an article about a study published in the Journal of Urology,
August 10, 2005...

BY JOHN FAUBER
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MILWAUKEE - (KRT) - A provocative new study suggests that men with
early-stage prostate cancer who elect not to undergo conventional
treatment may be able to halt the progression of their disease by
making substantial lifestyle changes such as adopting a very low-fat,
vegan diet, exercising and meditating.

The authors of the study, published Thursday in the Journal of Urology,
say it is the first randomized clinical trial showing that lifestyle
changes can halt the progression of prostate cancer.

However, urologists not associated with the research said the length of
the study was too short, the number of men too few and the outcome
measures too imprecise to make definitive conclusions about the
benefits of the intervention.

In addition, maintaining the strict diet used in the study would be
very difficult for many men, they said.

"I don't know if Draconian is the word," said William See, chairman of
the urology department at the Medical College of Wisconsin. "(But) the
ability of the average Midwesterner to tolerate that kind of diet is
questionable."

The study comes at a time when there is growing controversy about the
best way to treat early-stage, localized prostate cancer. The study and
additional research that may stem from it could have implications for
some of the more than 230,000 men who are diagnosed with prostate
cancer each year. African-American men have a 60 percent higher risk of
developing prostate cancer than whites, and are twice as likely to die
of the disease.

Lead author Dean Ornish, director of the Preventive Medicine Research
Institute in Sausalito, Calif., and a longtime crusader of ultra
low-fat diets, said the study shows that adopting various lifestyle
changes can be beneficial to men with prostate cancer in addition to
whatever other conventional measures they take.

"(Improved) diet and lifestyle play a role in the progression of
prostate cancer and the only side effects are good ones," said Ornish,
a controversial author and clinical professor of medicine at the
University of California, San Francisco.

Other study authors included researchers from UCSF and the Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

"This is the first in a series of trials attempting to better identify
the exact role of diet and lifestyle in the prevention and treatment of
prostate cancer," senior author Peter Carroll, chairman of the urology
department at UCSF, said in a statement.

Earlier epidemiological studies have linked various lifestyle measures
such as a high-fat diet, especially animal fat, obesity and a lack of
physical activity with an increased risk of developing prostate cancer.

There is hope that various dietary measures, such as eating fruits and
vegetables or taking supplements such as lycopene, selenium and vitamin
E, can lower risk, but that evidence still is insufficient, according
to the National Cancer Institute.

The study involved 93 men with an average age of about 66 who were
diagnosed by biopsies with low-grade prostate cancer. All of the men
had decided to undergo so-called watchful waiting, which meant their
cancer would be monitored but they would not immediately undergo
conventional treatment such as surgery or radiation.

Forty-four of the men were put into an intensive intervention program
that included a low-fat, vegan diet, and daily tofu and soy
supplements, as well as 400 international units of vitamin E, three
grams of fish oil, 200 micrograms of selenium, two grams of vitamin C,
30 minutes of moderate exercise six days a week, and an hour a day of
stress management with techniques such as meditation and yoga.

The other 49 men did not undergo intensive lifestyle changes.

Researchers used the prostate-specific antigen, or PSA, test as a way
to monitor the disease progression in the men.

After one year, the men in the intervention program had an average 4
percent decline in their PSA test scores, compared with a 6 percent
increase in the scores of the control group.

In another measure, six of the men in the control group went on to have
surgery or some other treatment due to a progression of their disease,
compared with none of the men in the intervention group.

In addition, blood samples were taken from the men to see if the serum
could inhibit prostate cancer tumor growth in a laboratory dish. There
was a 70 percent inhibition of tumor cell growth from the blood from
the men in the intervention group, compared with 9 percent from the
control group.

"We are learning more and more about compounds that may prevent, if not
have therapeutic potential in prostate cancer," said Jason Gee, a
urologic oncologist at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison.
"In a select group of patients who are appropriate for watchful
waiting, some dietary changes may be helpful as suggested by this
study."

However, Gee said it was too early to make overall recommendations
based on the study, which needs to be validated by further research.

Howard Parnes, a physician with the National Cancer Institute, said the
study's results appear to support the hypothesis that dietary and
lifestyle measures can affect prostate cancer progression, "but there
are a lot of caveats."

One problem, he said, is that the PSA score, the primary measure in the
study, is only a surrogate for disease progression. It is not a
clinical outcome, such as mortality.

The PSA score could have been affected by the soy, which has a weak
hormonal affect, he said.

In addition, there were so many variables in the study that it was
impossible to sort out which ones may have caused the beneficial
effects, he said.

"To say to patients, `You've got to do all these things' puts a large
burden on them and creates a lot of guilt and stress," said Parnes,
chief of the prostate and urologic cancer research group in the
division of cancer prevention at the cancer institute.

"I don't think we should tell people you should do this." However, he
said the study was a step in the right direction. "This kind of work
does stimulate the research field to look at dietary and lifestyle
measures," he said.

In addition to lower PSA scores, the men in the intervention group lost
an average of about 10 pounds and had significant improvements in their
cholesterol levels.

In earlier research, Ornish has showed that similar intensive
intervention programs can reverse heart disease.

Here is the regimen researchers used on the men whose prostate cancer
appeared to improve:

A low-fat, vegan diet, and daily tofu and soy supplements
400 international units of vitamin E
Three grams of fish oil
200 micrograms of selenium
Two grams of vitamin C
30 minutes of moderate exercise six days a week
An hour a day of stress management with techniques such as meditation
and yoga

Medical research trumps anecdotal stories and commercially-sponsored
literature in my book.

I.P.

I agree with I.P. on the diet issue. I'm 55 and relatively fit, and I
eat whatever I feel like, except I never eat deep fried food, and avoid
manufactured food (e.g., trans foods), because what is best for us is
what our ancestors ate, (including meat, etc.), because that is the
kind of diet our bodies were designed for (as a result of
successive-generation gene variations). So go for organic foods, avoid
pesticides, chemicals and additives in your food, eat a healthy balance
of all the good foods in the world, and don't eat stuff that your
grandparents, and their ancestors, probably didn't eat. Eating deep
fried foods, IMO, is about as healthy as smoking cigarettes - the "deep
fat" often is never changed, and has been held at 600+ degrees for a
long time, which makes any health elements in it vanish, and god only
knows the negative health effects of the chemicals created by the
extended heating of the fat - if vegetable oil is used in this way, it
quickly becomes rancid because of the prolonged high heat exposure.