Men’s Body Click Diet part 4

Benign Prostatic Hypertrophy and Prostate Cancer

Benign prostatic hypertrophy is an enlargement of the prostate that's called benign because it is not due to cancer cells. Still, the enlargement can be far from benign if it results in a lack of control over functions that we all take for granted, including urinating when you want to urinate and only then. A single urinary accident in front of your classmates in the fir_st grade can constitute a major, unforgettable scar in one's childhood_; a repeat performance, like that of my sixty-year-old patient while standin_g i_n line at the check-in counter at O'Hare Airport, is no joke either. Nor is `benign' the right word to describe the condition that underlies such loss of control. BPH may also involve getting up frequently at night to urinate, with the intense urgency to do so unfortunately combined with a disconcerting hesitancy of performance and a lack of reward in the volume of urine produced.

Although the symptoms of BPH can be severe, it is ironic that men with prostate cancer often have no symptoms. As they age, most men, on biopsy, show signs of prostate cancer. In fact, by the time they are in their eighties, nearly all men have prostate cancer, as defined by the typical cancerous appearance of cells under the microscope. Yet, because this particular cancer grows slowly and spreads infrequently, only a small percentage of men actually become sick or die from the disease. (A man's lifetime risk of dying from prostate cancer is a little less than three per cent.)`'

Given the low odds of illness or death from prostate cancer, it's confusing from a medical standpoint when a 60-, 70- or 80-year-old man has a prostate biopsy and is found to have cancer cells. Because the question of the actual malignancy of the condition — how likely it is that the cancer will grow quickly enough to cause problems — is difficult to resolve, it encourages a more aggressive approach to therapy than might otherwise be warranted. Since aggressive therapy frequently involves either removing testicles or taking female hormones, which can produce dramatic changes in a man's body, this is not a trivial question.

Natural therapies for treating or, more important, preventing illness are not usually studied in the same way as pharmaceuticals, because no one can patent a naturally occurring substance like flaxseed powder and make enough money to justify the enormous expense of carefully conducted, controlled and double-blinded studies. Still, the studies show that consuming soy protein and other isoflavone and lignan-containing foods reduces the risk of prostate cancer. And the cancer data suggest strongly — and there is abundant anecdotal evidence to support it — that the same hormonal environment that leads to the high incidence of cancer in older men inour culture, but not in Chinese and Finnish men, is also associated with the risk for prostatic enlargement.⁵

The simple strategy for preventing the range and frequency of prostate problems is to consume more soy protein, flaxseed powder and rye fiber. If you happen to be a regular bacon, ham or sausage and eggs kind of guy, I urge you to substitute the shake, with its soy protein and flaxseed powder, at least four days a week. It's good that you're eating protein at your morning meal and getting the lift you need at the beginning of the day, but what you're eating will not protect your health like soy protein and flaxseed. (If you don't have time for breakfast, see the section for travelers in the appendix, where you'll find a quick shortcut that will help you get your soy protein and flaxseed every day.

The Body Clock Diet and Heart Disease: It's not Just the Cholesterol

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the number one killer of both men and women in the United States. Each year, more than five hundred thousand Americans die of heart attacks caused by CHD. Soy intake has been shown to lower cholesterol and decrease cardiovascular disease associated with high cholesterol. There is growing scientific evidence to support this; for example, one recent study showed that a diet high in soy protein reduced cholesterol by as much as 20 per cent. ⁶ Other research has demonstrated that soy protein lowers triglycerides and reduces the oxidation of LDL or 'bad' cholesterol, which contributes to blood vessel problems linked to cardiovascular disease? And flaxseed has also been shown to lower both total and LDL cholestero1. The Body Clock Diet, which includes daily intake of soy protein and flaxseed powder, ensures that you get this important protection.

But cholesterol is not the exclusive evil agent in heart disease. Some people, especially those with complicating conditions of diabetes, tobacco smoking and a strong family history of heart disease and obesity, carry cholesterol-related risks. But most people who have heart attacks and other complications of 'hardening of the arteries' have fairly normal cholesterol levels.

The tide of medical thinking is changing when it comes to heart disease. It looks as if issues related to carbohydrate excess, insulin resistan_ce and homocysteine and its control by folic acid will take center stage away from cholesterol. ⁹ The benefits of substances like flaxseed and soy are not due solely to lowering cholesterol. Soy and flaxseed do indeed lower serum cholesterol, but they also modify carbohydrate and fat metabolism, further decreasing your cardiovascular risk. You don't have to be taki_ngaim at your cholesterol to get benefits from soy, flaxseed and the Body Clock Diet.

Like many men, you may have a tendency not to think about your health, shrugging off warnings from your mother, spouse, doctor and children as well as newspapers and television programs that try to scare or educate you about activities that are dangerous to your well-being. Nor do you want to listen to me when I say that failure to adhere to basic circadian principles may eventually show up as something noticeably wrong with your health. But my advice is simple: there are some painless things you can do to reap what are potentially major rewards for your long-term health.

Men’s Body Click Diet part 2

What I'm giving you here is a chance to climb the ship's mast with me so that from its top we can see far over the horizon of medicine. The view from the masthead is based not so much on my daily activities as a practicing physician but on my mission to search the seascape of scientific research for courses that can help prevent my patients from developing prostate trouble. What I see from the top of the mast is a body of evidence that is solid enough to support these simple changes in behavior, especially considering that there's zero risk in consuming flaxseed and soy protein.

The best evidence is based on studies done in a couple of places in the world, where prostate troubles are rare. Solid epidemiological studies that show a lower incidence of prostate cancer in men consuming foods popular among Finns and Chinese — rye bread for Finns and soy for Chinese.² And he has carried out elaborate chemical analyses and experiments to show which substances in these foods provide the protection.

For years before his research was done, it was assumed that the Finns' genetic history accounted for their lower incidence of prostate cancer. Most modern Finns come from a small number of people who migrated to that part of the world many years ago, so they are a rather distinct linguistic, racial and genetic group. It turns out, however, that it's not their genes but their diet that protects them against certain cancers. And the dietary factor that is most significant is a sourdough rye bread that is eaten by people consuming a traditional Finnish diet. This whole-grain, heavy- duty bread is made out of ground whole rye seeds without anything removed. The leavening is provided by lactobacillus (acidophilus) instead of yeast, which is used to leaven almost all bread consumed in other parts of the world. What's key is that the rye fiber contains lignans that modulate hormone chemistry and reduce the risk of reproductive cancers.

Eastern Europeans have traditionally used flaxseeds as a source of food and medicine. Flaxseed oil, which makes up about one-third of the weight of the seeds, has extremely healthy properties that also provide particular benefits for the prostate gland. But here we're talking about the fiber in the flaxseed. The best way to use the seeds is to grind them in a coffee mill. You can then consume the fine, fluffy powder as part of a shake or add it to a variety of other foods. Your aim is to eat a heaping tablespoon per day.

Besides rye and flaxseed, there are other foods that contain lignans. Some of the best sources include legumes (especially lentils, kidney, fava and navy beans), seeds (like sunflower seeds), seaweed, cereal brans and whole grains.

There is also a solid body of evidence supporting the role of soy protein in reducing the risk of prostate cancer. For example, research has shown that isoflavones, substances contained in soybeans, modify testosterone metabolism, decreasing the risk for both benign prostatic hypertrophy and prostate cancer.³ Incorporating soy protein in your diet doesn't require you to change what you eat, although it's fine to eat more tofu, miso and other soy products if you enjoy them. The simplest, quickest way to consume soy protein is by stirring soy protein isolate, a relatively tasteless substance, into some of the food you are already eating.

Foods like soybeans, flaxseed and rye contain information derived from phytonutrients, which keep animals in synchrony with the rhythm of the seasons and which have profound effects on our own reproductive systems.

Prostate Inflammation or Nonspecific Prostatitis

Your prostate gland usually doesn't speak to you until it's in some advanced state of trouble. When it does, it has only two voices. One is expressed through pain or difficulty with urination and the other is just plain pain, which is almost invariably felt in the midline of your body. The spectrum of difficulties includes inflammation, enlargement and cancer. While there are more or less pure representations of each one, the lines between them are often blurred. All three, but particularly enlargement and cancer, are addressed by the preventive measures included in the Body Clock Diet.

Let's start with inflammation, which is the medical term for some combination of redness, pain, swelling and heat that almost always accompanies infection but may also represent your body's reaction to noninfectious irritants or allergens. The flame of prostate inflammation is experienced as burning with urination. This is as much a result of inflammation of the tube through which the urine passes out of the penis (the urethra) as it is due to inflammation of the prostate, per se, which lies astride this tube, just beneath the bladder. Germs that infect the urethra, such as the gonorrhea germ, may ascend it and get into the prostate gland. There, the alkaline environment and blood supply, which are conducive to bacterial growth, make it much harder to treat the infection with antibiotics than, say, a sore throat, a boil or an uncomplicated pneumonia. Because the germs that infect the prostate are difficult to extract from apatient for a culture it has become a common practice for doctors to treat symptoms of prostate inflammation with antibiotics without knowing what germ, if any, might be there.

The diagnosis in this situation is 'nonspecific' prostatitis, which is a well- accepted medical term. But when you stop to think about it, it's peculiar. According to medical principles, when there is an infection, the perpetrator is almost always a particular germ. The prostate, like all internal tissues, is not likely to be infected by more than one germ at a time. The implication is that if there's an infection, it's quite specific. How then do we come up with the diagnosis 'nonspecific' prostatitis? It's a result of several factors; efforts to recover a germ are to no avail, the prostate acts as if there's an inflammation — with swelling, pain, difficulty urinating and sometimes cloudy or pussy urine — and antibiotics are at least temporarily soothing. But after antibiotic treatment, this problem recurs more often than other infections.

Overweight and Cholesterol intake in your diet

The effect of dietary cholesterol on cholesterol levels in the blood is less crucial and more variable among individuals than the effects of saturated fat - nevertheless, it plays an important contributory role and this is why the recommended limit for cholesterol consumption has been set at 300 mg per day. Of course, the average person has no means of measuring the amount of cholesterol in various foods, but what you can do is identify those which are rich sources and ensure that you eat them in moderation only (see below).

Foods high in cholesterol

Beef, butter, chicken, turkey, duck, cream, all full-cream dairy products, fish, lamb , mutton, pork, tongue

Foods very high in cholesterol

Brains, caviar, egg yolks, giblets, kidneys, liver, prawns, shrimps

These foods are also high in saturated fat and should be eaten only occasionally. (Saturated fats raise blood cholesterol levels far more than does dietary cholesterol in animal foods.)

Overweight and heart disease

The role of obesity or overweight as an independent risk factor for CHD has not been clearly established, but what is known is that it is associated with risk factors such as raised LDL (`bad') cholesterol and total blood cholesterol, lower HDL (`good') cholesterol, hypertension(high blood pressure) and diabetes mellitus. Hypertension is much more common in overweight people; moreover, when weight is reduced and then maintained at a lower level, blood pressure tends to drop as well - if the weight goes up again, so does the blood pressure. There is a particularly strong link between obesity and hypertension in children and for this reason, it is important that children and adolescents do not gain excess weight - in fact, maintaining an ideal body weight should be a goal for the population in general.

Obesity also seems to be a significant, independent predictor of coronary heart disease, especially in women. Although women generally have lower blood cholesterol levels than men, these tend to rise after the menopause. Smoking also seems to be on the increase in women and this can be an important contributory factor. It has been shown that if you are overweight, a cigarette smoker and you take oral contraceptives, your risk of having a heart attack increases significantly.

In summary, the maintenance of ideal body weight by means of a combined diet and exercise programme makes good sense because of the relationship between obesity and an increased risk of heart disease. Also, for a large number of people who suffer from hypertension, weight control can be an effective way of treating the problem and may prevent the necessity for drug treatment.