There are certain ailments one expects as an unfortunate consequence of getting older.
For men, frequent late night trips to the bathroom and increased risk of prostate cancer
are regarded as inevitable aspects of aging, with treatments ranging from medication to invasive
and debilitating surgery. But whatif prostate enlargement and cancer could be prevented
and even reversed? What if what your doctor isn’t telling you could save your life?
Hi it's Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget.
Despite the serious complications and even fatal outcomes, the topic of prostate health is rarely
addressed in an appropriate, constructive or respectful manner.
With an astounding array of prostate-themed jokes poking fun at increased urination and
the horrors of rectal exams, an enlarged prostate seems more like a right of passage into infirmity
than a medical condition. And with heaps of supplement scams, prescription-pushing physicians
and scalpel-wielding surgeons, and it’s hard to know what information or approach
to trust.
In this fourth installment of the Men’s Health Series with Dr. Greger of Nutritionfacts.org,
we’re going to see what the science says about preventing, treating and reversing Benign
Prostatic Hyperplasia (BPH)—the medical term for the non-cancerous enlargement of
the prostate—and prostate cancer. If you’ve seen the first three installments on testosterone,
erectile dysfunction, and soy’s effect on hormones, you’ll notice a common theme of
the medical profession—ignoring simple and effective treatment in favor of ineffective
and debilitating measures.
Prostate surgery, the various methodologies of which read like a list of medieval torture
practices, can leave men with ongoing erectile dysfunction and urinary incontinence issues,
among other side effects.
Let’s take a quick look at what two of the leading institutions have to offer. In regards
to Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia and prostate cancer respectively, the American Urological
Association and National Cancer Institute do give a cursory nod to the effects of exercise
and diet on prostate health, but fail to expand upon what that means in practical terms.
If we look at the AUA’s extensive guidelines for BPH treatment, there is “watchful waiting,”
essentially meaning, let’s just see what happens, during which period no recommendations
are made for dietary intervention. Then there are medical therapies, meaning drugs, which
receive seven pages of prescription possibilities, a potentially promising section on alternatives
only addresses dietary supplements, and surgical procedures shine with a six-page spread.
Perhaps the worst offender is the AUA’s Prostate Health Playbook, in which they attempt
to convey this misinformation through strained football analogies in an astoundingly patronizing
and condescending manner—as if possession of a prostate renders one borderline incompetent,
requiring spoon-fed sports comparisons for basic comprehension.
The information Dr. Greger will share can spare you the pain of the devastating effects
of potentially unnecessary surgery and even save your life. And the fact that you’ll
never hear this from your doctor is why you should be pissed about your prostate.
Emily: So prostate health is a huge concern for men. What we usually hear the most of
is enlarged prostate and prostate cancer. The way that these are presented, though,
by the medical field, it seems like they are almost inevitable aspects of aging. Can prostate
cancer and an enlarged prostate be prevented and how so?
Dr. Greger: Some of the most compelling data for eating healthy for men and women has come
out of Dr. Dean Ornish’s lab, who firstshowed that— was first to do a randomized controlled
trial showing that indeed heart disease could be reversed with a plant-based diet and other
healthy lifestyle behaviors. Opening up arteries without drugs, without surgery.
And so, after conquering killer #1 he’s ok next and went on to kill the #2 cancer
and took men with prostate cancer and put them on a plant-based diet. Same kind of regimen
and actually got a reversal in the growth of prostate—early stage prostate cancer.
And indeed it’s interesting when you take serum, when you take blood from men who have
been on a plant-based diet for a year and drip them on cancer cells growing in a petri
dish, they suppress the growth of that cancer about 8 times better compared to the blood
of people men eating the Standard American Diet.
What’s interesting is a different group of researches said, well wait a second, I
wonder if the same effect on normal prostate cell. So the same experiment and found indeed
you go on a plant-based diet and this time it was just the diet without exercise and
stress management components. You go on a plant-based diet your blood indeed is better
able to suppress the growth of the normal prostate cells.
And I talk about in the video indeed this kind of it’s kind of inevitable consequence
of aging. You get older, your prostate enlarges - No, that’s inevitable consequence of eating
the Standard American Diet and aging.
So I talk about the statistics in the US. It effects—so an enlarged prostate—and
when I say enlarged prostate, what does that mean? It kind of squeezes off the urethra
where the urine goes through and so you have to frequently get up at night a couple times
because you can’t, you have this kind of weak, hesitant urine stream and you can’t
completely evacuate your bladder and then so your bladder fills up over and over again.
And anyway.
And then is a stagnant pool of urine can set more than likely be infected. Fifty percent
of men in their 50s are affected, 80% of their men in the 80s. It’s an epidemic in the
US. 16 million American men. A billion dollars a year is spent on drugs to treat it and another
billion on supplements, lots of surgery that’s done. And the reason we know that it’s not
an inevitable consequence of aging is because you can look at different populations around
the globe.
So for example in China, there was study that found at the Medical College of Beijing, they
didn’t have 80% of me infected. They found 80 cases period. Eighty-four over a 15 year
period. It was such a rare, it was considered kind of rare condition until of course China
started eating like us.
And so there are particular food that appear to help. Garlic and onions, allium family
vegetables. Cooked vegetables appear to work better than raw vegetables and legumes, beans,
flip peas, chickpeas, lentils as well as flax seeds. And there are actually head to head
challenges of ground flax seed versus the leading drug prescribed for PBH patients and
it worked just as well without the side effects but as a group Pritikin researchers showed
its not just these individual plant foods, but if you go on an entirely plant-based diet,
you can dramatically slow down the growth of the suppressed cancer cells so you don’t
have to deal with this as one gets older.
I hope you found what Dr. Greger shared to be helpful and eye-opening. On a personal
level, when researching for this video, I did not at all expect to get so angry about
prostates.
But the more I looked into the studies so graciously compiled by Dr. Greger, and compared
their data to the guidelines of major medical organizations, the more angry I became.
Everyone deserves to be fully informed about their health, and offered all of the possible
treatments. As longs as doctors present BPH and prostate cancer risk as just a part of
aging and fail to alert their patients to effective, non-invasive methods of prevention
and reversal, countless men will continue to undergo unnecessary surgery and even lose
their lives.
For more on why your doctor is lying to you, see this video with Dr. Greger. Please see
the blog post for this video linked below for more information and links to Dr. Greger’s
extensive content on prostate health, including more about which foods to avoid and include
in your diet, and to his NYT best seller How Not To Die, which includes an entire chapter
on prostate health.
To make sure you’re getting the prostate-healthy nutrition you need, I wanted to let you know
about Cronometer. It’s a free website and app that I’ve used in several of my videos
because of it’s uniquely detailed nutrition reports and ease of use. Plus, they’ve reached
out to help sponsor the Men’s Health series to get this vital educational information
out to those who need it. Click the link in the description, or go here to make your free
profile. It’s not an affiliate link, but it will let Cronometer know that Bite Size
Vegan sent you.
Please share this video around to help men take hold of their health. Be sure to subscribe
to the channel to not miss out on the rest of the Men’s Health Series.
To support free education like this, please see the support links below or click the Nugget
Army icon or the link in the sidebar.
Now go live vegan, get pissed about your prostate, and I’ll see you soon.
So even though vegan men tend to have significantly higher testosterone levels, than both vegetarians
and meat-eaters—which can be a risk factor for prostate cancer, the reason plant-based
diets appear to reverse the progression of prostate cancer may be due to how low their
IGF-1 drops. High testosterone, yet low cancer.
The bottom line… is that male or female, just eating vegetarian did not seem to cut
it—didn’t do their body many favors. It looks like to get a significant drop in cancer-promoting
growth hormone levels one really has to move towards eliminating animal products altogether.
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