Tomato Paste or Garlic Powder for Enlarged Prostate

Cranberries may help with enlarged prostate symptoms. What about a berry that’s a little tastier? Welch’s-funded researchers put purple (Concord) grape juice to the test for BPH but failed to show any benefit. If cranberries are the most effective fruit, what might be the most effective vegetable? A study in Italy found that men who ate the most garlic and onions had 28 percent and 59 percent lower odds of BPH, respectively, than those who didn’t eat them at all. However, in the Italian diet, garlic and onions may be frequently cooked in combination with other foods, such as tomatoes for pasta sauce. Maybe tomatoes are really what’s pulling the weight? 

Men with BPH were randomized to about three tablespoons of tomato paste worth of lycopene a day for six months or placebo. Prostate enlargement and BPH symptoms tended to end up better in the lycopene group, but the results were not statistically significant from placebo. Randomized controlled trials also failed to show lycopene prevented the development of BPH. Lycopene is the red pigment in red tomatoes, but there are lots of other compounds in tomatoes (with uncreative names like tomatine and tomatidine). How about just trying the tomato paste directly? 

The downside of using real food is that it’s hard to formulate a convincing placebo, but a before and after study was done on BPH patients asked to consume three “soup spoons” (50 g) of tomato paste a day for ten weeks. They experienced a significant decrease in PSA levels, which correlates with prostate volume, but not necessarily with BPH symptoms. How about just testing garlic directly? 

Garlic powder can reverse the emergence and progression of testosterone-induced BPH in rats, but only a garlic extract has been tested in people. Men with BPH were given the equivalent of about 4 cloves of raw garlic a day for a month. The International Prostate Symptom Score is the most common way to track BPH symptoms. A change of three points is considered meaningful. After a month on garlic, the men went from a score of 15.4 (considered moderate BPH) down to a score of 7.9 (considered mild), a drop of more than 7 points. Unfortunately, again, without a control group, we can’t know how much of that improvement was due to the placebo effect.