Prostate vs. a Plant-Based Diet

Michael Greger M.D. FACLM · September 24, 2012 · Volume 10

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Eating a plant-based diet may protect against BPH (benign prostatic hypertrophy, an enlarged prostate).

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Transcript

If individual plant foods reduce the risk of prostate enlargement, what about an entire diet composed of plant foods? Here’s where the Pritikin researchers step in again. Remember how they dripped the before and after blood on prostate cancer cells? Well, they did the same thing for BPH. Took a bunch of men, put them on a plant-based diet for just two weeks, and then dripped their blood on normal prostate cells in a petri dish, and saw, as with the cancer, a significant drop in growth—and so quickly, too!

The flip side, of course, is yeah, it’s amazing you could see an effect after just two weeks on a healthy diet, but if they ended the study after just two weeks, how do you know the effect doesn’t just go away? Maybe your body accustoms itself to a healthy diet, and prostate cell growth rates start slowly creeping back up?

Well, they looked at that! They tested blood of people that had been eating plant-based diets for up to 28 years straight, and found the same thing, both against benign prostate cell growth, and as we saw, against cancerous prostate cell growth. As long as we continue to eat healthy, growth rates go down, and they stay down.

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Kerry Skinner.

Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.

Sources

Barnard RJ, Kobayashi N, Aronson WJ. Effect of diet and exercise intervention on the growth of prostate epithelial cells. Prostate Cancer Prostatic Dis. 2008;11(4):362-6.

Acknowledgements

Image thanks to Wikipedia

Topics

If individual plant foods reduce the risk of prostate enlargement, what about an entire diet composed of plant foods? Here’s where the Pritikin researchers step in again. Remember how they dripped the before and after blood on prostate cancer cells? Well, they did the same thing for BPH. Took a bunch of men, put them on a plant-based diet for just two weeks, and then dripped their blood on normal prostate cells in a petri dish, and saw, as with the cancer, a significant drop in growth—and so quickly, too!

The flip side, of course, is yeah, it’s amazing you could see an effect after just two weeks on a healthy diet, but if they ended the study after just two weeks, how do you know the effect doesn’t just go away? Maybe your body accustoms itself to a healthy diet, and prostate cell growth rates start slowly creeping back up?

Well, they looked at that! They tested blood of people that had been eating plant-based diets for up to 28 years straight, and found the same thing, both against benign prostate cell growth, and as we saw, against cancerous prostate cell growth. As long as we continue to eat healthy, growth rates go down, and they stay down.

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Kerry Skinner.

Please consider volunteering to help out on the site.

Barnard RJ, Kobayashi N, Aronson WJ. Effect of diet and exercise intervention on the growth of prostate epithelial cells. Prostate Cancer Prostatic Dis. 2008;11(4):362-6.

Image thanks to Wikipedia

Doctor's Note

Some Prostates Are Larger than Others introduced the problem of BPH, and Prostate vs Plants talked about which individual foods to pursue, and which to avoid. This is part of our prostate cancer series that began with Ex Vivo Cancer Proliferation Bioassay (which was preceded by Engineering a Cure, and followed by Is It the Diet, the Exercise, or Both?). I featured this series in my full-length 2012 presentation, Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death. What’s the mechanism behind the extraordinary physiological shifts that occur within weeks of eating healthy? That’s the topic I’ll turn to next.

For further context, be sure to check out my associated blog posts: Treating an Enlarged Prostate With Diet, Vegan Men: More Testosterone But Less Cancer; Pollutants in Californian Breast Tissue; and Flax Seeds for Prostate Cancer.

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