"Changing a Man’s Diet After a Prostate Cancer Diagnosis"
A cancer diagnosis is seen as a teachable moment in medicine
where we can try to get people to eat healthier,
but research suggests that male cancer patients in particular
may be reluctant to introduce dietary modifications.
This has been attributed to dietary changes
often being viewed as mimicking “feminine” eating behaviors,
such as emphasizing an increase in fruit and vegetables.
Although healthy eating might enhance long-term survival,
few men with prostate cancer make dietary changes
to advance their well-being.
Many of the cancer survival trials for example,
required adherence to strict, plant-based diets,
and though researchers tried providing extensive nutrition
education and counseling programs,
dietary adherence was still a challenge.
The way Dean Ornish was apparently able to reverse
the progression of prostate cancer with a plant-based diet
was home delivering prepared meals to their door,
figuring men are so lazy
they'll just eat whatever's put in front of them.
After all, male culture tends to encourage men to go for
convenience food, meat, and beer.
Take Men’s Health magazine, for example.
Included in their list of things
men should never apologize for:
liking McDonald’s, not offering a vegetarian alternative,
and laughing at people who eat trail mix.
It featured articles with titles like,
“Vegetables Are for Girls,”
and sections like
“Men and Meat: There’s Only One Kind of Flesh We Like Better,
and Even Then, She’d Better Know How to Grill!”
To appeal to male sensibilities,
doctors are advised to use ‘body as machine’ metaphors,
framing men’s health in terms of mechanical objects,
such as cars requiring tuning.
But if men are so concerned about their masculinity and manhood,
maybe we should instead share a bit about
what prostate cancer treatment entails.
The prostate is situated at the base of the penis,
and so when you core it out
with a radical prostatectomy,
you lose about an inch off your penis,
IF... it gets erect at all.
Only 16% of men undergoing the procedure
will regain their pre-surgery level
of erectile functioning.
Patients are typically quoted erectile dysfunction rates
around 60% or 70%,
but studies have generally considered erectile function recovery
as just the ability to maintain an erection
hard enough for penetration
about 50% of the time.
So getting it up occasionally is considered recovery.
But when a surgeon tells a patient he will recover function,
the patient probably assumes that means the kind of function
they had prior to surgery.
And that only happens 16% of the time,
and only 4% of the time in men over 60.
Only 1 in 25 get their baseline sexual function back.
And it’s not just erections,
but other problems like OAP, orgasm-associated pain
even years later, and urinary incontinence
during foreplay, stimulation, or orgasm.
The vast majority of couples overestimate
how much function they’re going to recover.
Couples reported feeling loss and grief.
Having cancer is bad enough
without the additional losses.
You’d think that would be enough
to motivate men to improve their diets,
but almost a fourth of men newly diagnosed
with prostate cancer state that they would prefer
to have their lives cut short rather than living
with a diet that prohibits beef and pork.
More men would rather be impotent
than improve their diet.
It appears pleasures of the flesh
may sometimes even trump…
pleasures of the flesh.