.
Here's what Harvard Medical School said about this a decade ago:
"A high consumption of saturated fat from animal sources is linked to an increased risk of prostate cancer ...."
"The menu consisted mainly of fruits, vegetables, whole grain products, legumes, and soy products. ... Blood samples from the lifestyle treatment group inhibited prostate cancer cell growth by 70%, while samples from the control group inhibited growth by only 9%."
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/lifestyle-therapy-for-prostat...
11
It is wise to prepare before being reminded of prostate cancer. So after digging up the root of japanese knot weed before the 20 below zero weather hit for the past 3 weeks I'm sipping the hot root tea as i read here
A research team at the New York Medical College observed that resveratrol triggered apoptosis, or “cellular suicide,” in prostate cancer cells. Men who drink a glass of red wine a day may cut their chances of prostate cancer in half. Men who drink four or more 4-ounce glasses of wine per week have a 60 percent lower incidence of more aggressive types of prostate cancer. Resveratrol also has been shown to inhibit the enzymes CYP1A1, CYP1A2, and CYP1B1 in tumour cells. This may be one of the mechanisms by which resveratrol affects cancer cells.
3
Trump's medical report will do serious damage to the already poor physical condition of America. A man who is grossly overweight and subsists on McDonald's and diet cokes with no inclination toward meaningful physical activity is a threat to national security. Children will not only be influenced to talk like a pig, but to look like one as well.
14
When eating well was never an option. I find this article off putting in so many ways.
4
What kind of fat, indeed. You guys are like a smarter version of every other clickbait factory some days. Any fat? What was in the new food they were eating?
9
Given all the contradicting scientific studies as to what makes us fat, what makes us sick, and what we should eat in order to have eternal health and life, perhaps this article should have appeared in the Religion section.
5
The Atkins people will no doubt argue this is "inconclusive." There is a lot of money to be made telling people they can lose weight eating bacon cheeseburgers as long as they skip the bun.
9
These correlation studies are complete nonsense. This one implies that one should avoid fat to avoid prostate cancer. There is no possible way this can be proven because overweight people who lots of fat also eat a lot of refined sugar and junk carbohydrates.
Did the study profile those who have been on a ketogenic diet for decades? It did not. And it cannot because such people barely exist.
So if you eat a lot of avocados, full speed ahead! They have nothing to do with prostate cancer. Nothing.
12
Lots of thoughtful replies here. The launching point for this article is the lack of scientific backing for the benefits of a low fat diet. When we as a culture switched to a low-fat (high carb) diet, as provided in the many processed foods we eat, we should have become healthier, right? Just the opposite. Sugar makes fat. Also missing from the analysis is a look at the quality and sources of the fat. Fat is a known storage depot for the many fat-soluble toxins. How many toxins are in the chow the lab animals are fed? Dairy of any kind contains growth hormones, esp. rGBH-fed dairy, and the IGF-1 growth hormone in cows is an identical molecule to that found in humans. How much IGF-1 is in the casein used in studies? Finally, how well can you translate lab studies using chow of unknown or dubious sourcing to humans? Take this study and the article trumpeting the conclusions with a block of salt.
14
Give me full fat everything or not at all.
If it was good enough for my grandparents who lived long lives, it is good enough for me.
Cheese please and lots of ice cream.
8
What's missing here is the ratio of obese to non obese men who develop aggressive prostate cancer. There may be nothing to do with actual obesity itself but the way the body processes fat.
2
Exogenous or endogenous fat?
1
Any information we can wring out of studies like this is helpful. Why load the dice against oneself with a fatty diet even if it is just a suspect in the disease? Thanks.
8
The study which I have now finished reading is important and I am grateful for the article. I can imagine no reason not to keep to a relatively low fat diet. Weight- and health-wise the benefits increasingly seem to be there as study continues.
9
Looks like a diet rich in mouse chow couldn't hurt.
27
Of course more work needs to be done, but I am encouraged that a relatively low-fat diet is generally called for. I have stayed with a relatively low-fat diet for years and am satisfied.
7
I looked at the diets being used in this paper. First off, this diet is NOT the same as the Ketogenic diet. The makers of the diet (06414) used in this study know this and have clarified that this diet is not a ketogenic diet. Unfortunately, the title of this article could be misinterpreted as the diet being referred to is ketogenic diet and then wrong conclusions may follow about keto diets.
Secondly, the main components of the high-fat diet being used in this study have sucrose, maltodextrin as the two biggest compounds right after pork fat. The study is behind a paywall. I am wondering if the authors of this study made a conscious effort to differentiate the impact from sucrose and maltodextrin, and the fat components of the diet.
Bottomline: I am not discovering anything new from this paper abstract, in that the western style high-fat diet (not ketogenic diet) is not the most healthy diet, and should preferably be avoided.
28
You are absolutely correct, along with eating conventional food from factory farms, sprayed with chemicals, which is the real problem, not to mention the most a addictive drug ever, that would be sugar.
10
Genetically, our bodies are built to process the same foods available to Cro-Magnon humans, i.e., plants, insects, fish and animals. No processed foods there! I suspect modified, processed and chemically enhanced foods play a much greater role in cancers, including prostate cancer, than do natural fats.
19
What is your evidence for this claim? There are studies suggesting that processed meat (e.g. bacon) is linked to higher mortality. But I’m not aware of evidence for other forms of food “processing” per se. “Processed” is a relative term. This study and many others suggest that a diet lower in (saturated) fat is a good idea, but not that we need to eliminate processed foods (which may not even be high in fat). I agree that the kinds of foods you mentioned (plants like whole grains, legumes, vegetables and fruits, as well as lean animal foods like fish) are healthier and should make up the bulk of one’s diet. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t eat cookies sometimes. Humans are well-adapted to eat an omnivorous diet full of all sorts of things, and small to moderate quantities of foods with low nutritional value, no matter how processed they are, are unlikely to be seriously harmful.
7
Fat is not the enemy in our diets. It's quite simple - limit sugar intake, avoid processed foods at all costs (refined carbs), up the vegetables and stop worrying about natural fats. We've been duped by 'food nurtitionists' for decades.
71
A "high fat diet" for lab mice involves lots of refined carbohydrates (sucrose), dosed with extra refined seed oils (soybean oil) to make it higher fat content, similar to a standard junk food diet for humans. This "high fat diet" is a diet high both refined carbs and refined oils at the same time.
40
I have some concerns with the way the two diets are represented in the article. The control chow (Lab Diet 5008) is not vegetarian as suggested. The manufacturer lists fish meal as the fourth ingredient and porcine animal fat, meat and bone meal as other ingredients. Secondly, the experimental high fat chow (Teklad Diet TD.06414) also contains about 3-fold more sucrose (table sugar) as the control diet (approx. 3wt% in the control vs. 9wt% in the high fat). Therefore, I would suggest that the authors tested the effects of a diet with both higher fat and higher sugar. To my understanding the addition of sugar to the chow is important to promote overeating and weight gain by the mice, as they have a tendency to eat only enough food to maintain their body weight without added sugar. Hopefully future studies will clarify whether dietary fat is directly linked to this effect or whether increased body fat associated with overeating, whether ingested or synthesized in the body from excess nutrients including carbohydrates, is key.
32
While these results may be correct, from the overall sum of the data they look okay. BUT, when will journalists take investigators to task when they do such poorly controlled studies. In this case, as in many such studies, the mice were fed a highly purified so called High Fat Diet and compared with mice fed "chow". Take a look at the ingredients for these two diets, they differ in many, many more components than just the fat to carb ratio. (Tekland TD.06414 and Lab Diet 5508). So how can you tell it is the dietary fat that is causing the change? Investigators spend hundreds of thousands of dollars doing the study yet baulk at spending an extra $500 for the correct control diet.
18
I exercised regularly, watched my diet nad was diagnosed with prostate cancer six months ago at just about the same age as my father when he was diagnosed. I think that genetics have far more to do with it than anything else.
23
"Fatostatin"? Who chooses these names?
21
Not sure but the systematic chemical name for Fatostatin is (4-[4-(4-methylphenyl)-1,3-thiazol-2-yl]-2-propylpyridine hydrobromide
2
Great article... thanks for the investigative report....
7
A mouse study that only seems to have tested a “high-fat” diet. What about “high-sugar”?
14
As the article says:
The work leaves plenty of questions for future studies, Dr. Abate-Shen said.
High-sugar diets also cause obesity. Are the prostate tumors in men who became fat by eating high-sugar diets equally susceptible to metastasis? If they are, what is the mechanism?
10
What if we put people on a low-fat diet instead of treating them with drugs; would that work as well?
1
Note sure if Trump's medical exam included a test for prostate cancer. Since he eats a ton of junk food and is "almost obese" maybe they should test him.
3
In the interview with Dr. Jackson it was reported that Trump had a low PSA reading. But he uses Finasteride which is used for the treatment of male pattern hair loss. This will also lower your PSA reading. Not sure if his PSA level was given but it should be doubled to give a true reading.
4
I believe they did - PSA of 0.1.
1
How is this new information. According to this 2014, fatostatin treatment was being evaluated four years ago: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4084917/
2
This is very interesting. I wonder if there's also a connection to other cancers. And I wonder if you eat a healthy diet and eat in moderation this can be avoided.
4
It is exhausting keeping up with the “what we should eat” subject. As a male and vegan, some fats are essential to my diet. Nuts. Olive oil. Coconut oil. Etc. It is hard enough to convince men to eat healthy. Clarifying the health effects/benefits of non-animal fats on the prostate would give clarity to the plant-based diet argument.
27
This research is very interesting as the researchers argue that metastasis (cancer cells spread to other healthy cells) occurs by high-fat diet. This is totally opposing view of a group of researchers viewing cancer as metabolic disease led by Dr. Thomas Seyfried of Boston College. This research group believes that metastatis occurs when a new cancer cell, after the cell fusion of a cancer stem cell and macrophage, lives on glutamine instead of glucose because marcrophage uses glutamine for fuel. They advise kitogenic ( fats ) diet and glutamine inhibition as normal healthy cells can live on keton bodies instead of glucose that cancer cells love to ferment.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3941741/
We have recently found out that "A powerful new Lancet study reveals that the so-called breast cancer susceptibility genes -- BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 -- do not, in fact, cause breast cancer. Jolie's prophylactic mastectomy, for instance, was for naught." A powerful new Lancet study reveals that the so-called breast cancer susceptibility genes -- BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 -- do not, in fact, cause breast cancer. Jolie's prophylactic mastectomy, for instance, was for naught."
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(17)30891-...
I am curious where the main stream gene research will go after all new findings.
8
You very clearly misinterpreted the Lance Oncol study that you cite. The study did not look at whether BRCA1 or 2 causes breast cancer. It looked at whether carriers of the mutations who have breast cancer have a worse overall survival than women with breast cancer and no mutation who are younger than 40. This is a very different question....it is already well know that carriers of the mutation are at a 50 to 65 percent risk of developing the disease by the age of 70 vs only 12% in women without the mutation. This clearly shows that Jolie's decision was not for naught.
9
Stefan: Dr. Sayfried states:
"Any unspecific condition that damages a cell’s respiratory capacity but is not severe enough to kill the cell can potentially initiate the path to a malignant cancer. Reduced respiratory capacity could arise from damage to any mitochondrial protein, lipid or mtDNA. Some of the many unspecific conditions that can diminish a cell’s respiratory capacity thus initiating carcinogenesis include inflammation, carcinogens, radiation (ionizing or ultraviolet), intermittent hypoxia, rare germline mutations, viral infections and age. The evidence supporting this statement also addresses Szent Giorgy’s ‘oncogenic paradox’, as was described in a recent treatise on the subject (141). The paradox addresses the difficulty in knowing how a plethora of disparate carcinogenic agents might produce cancer through a common mechanism. Some of the rare germline mutations that increase risk for cancer through an effect on cellular respiration include p53, BRACA1, RB and xeroderma pigmentosum (18). Cancer-causing viruses can be linked to mitochondrial dysfunction (18). If respiratory damage is acute, the cell will die. On the other hand, if damage is mild and protracted, the cell will elevate lactate or amino acid fermentation in order to compensate for insufficient OxPhos."
We have known for many years that a low-fat diet can help prevent prostate cancer. A small amount of plant-based fat is healthy. But we don't need anything like the amount of fat people are getting from their animal-centered diets.
John Robbins in his best-selling 1987 book, "Diet for a New America," wrote, "Prostate cancer is highly correlated to fat consumption." He included a chart adapted from a 1980 article in "Advances in Cancer Research" that clearly showed how countries with lower fat consumption per capita had lower rates of prostate cancer. He also cites a Loma Linda University study: "This Twenty-year undertaking involved over 6,500 men, and found that those who consumed large amounts of meat, cheese, eggs and milk had 3.6 times the incidence of prostate cancer as men who ate those foods sparingly or not at all."
Dr. Michael Greger, in his recent best-selling book, "How Not to Die" argues that plant-based diets can help prevent and even treat many diseases, including prostate cancer. He writes of a study by Dr. Dean Ornish in which a group of prostate cancer patients was divided into two groups, with half put on a plant-based diet and advised to take up exercise, like walking 30 minutes a day. He writes, "among the healthy-living group, PSA levels (a marker of prostate cancer growth) decreased by 4 percent..."
As a long-time vegan, I see no reason we can't tell people to avoid eating fat. Indeed, we have a duty to warn people that what they eat can kill them.
17
@Dan Frazier:
Americans, on average, are eating _much less_ animal fats and are now eating _much more_ refined seed oils (plant-based!) compared to a couple generations ago. Your vegan religion and self-reported food survey studies aside, the quality of the fat matters, independent of whether it is plant- or animal-based.
"I see no reason we can't tell people to avoid eating fat" -- where have you been for the past 40 years? This was the dominant public health message for decades, from numerous agencies, doctors, and nutritional authorities. The official promotion of this advice tracks very closely with the modern epidemics of obesity and diabetes, with the usual correlation/causation caveat.
Isn't it funny how Ornish's studies always involve multiple interventions, and then all the benefits are chalked up to the veganism?
9
Plant based low fat diets are good for people, our healthcare budget, and the environment.
Join us, you'll live better and live longer - and with a cleaner conscience.
15
Agreed - why develop a drug to block fat reduction? How about a plant based diet?? So many great recipes, and menus can be achieved through a plant based diet, there is no sacrifice!!!
1
@Melanie:
A plant based low fat diet made me fat, sick, and constantly hungry. I lost weight and gained health when I ditched the grains and beans, and ate more fatty, nourishing animal foods. Not how that fits with your conscience, but lived experience outweighs your vegan religion.
3
This is the kind of article (and study) that has perpetuated the last several decades of erroneous thinking when it comes to dietary fats. I'd be interested to know more about the study (how it was carried out, methods, variable, variants, etc) before writing an article that sums it up by essentially saying "dietary fat intake fuels lethal cancer". For example, when one says the mice were fed a "Western diet" that includes a lot more than just fats, ie. loads and loads of carbohydrates primarily in breads, pastas, sugars, etc. They need to do a double-blind study to make sure that it's not something in concert with the fats that cause the cancer to become more aggressive.
And yes, there are many different kinds of "dietary fats"...what are we actually talking about here?
23
The paper is behind a paywall but high-fat diet model is pretty standard in mouse research and it is usually:
High-fat diet = 40% calories from fat (of which 78% are saturated fatty acids, 7% monounsaturated FAs and 15% polyunsaturated FAs), 40% calories from carbohydrate and 20% calories from protein
vs a chow diet (8% calories from fat)
4
Your explanation of "20% calories from protein" caught my attention. So this "High-fat diet" includes protein that of course contains glutamine that metastatic cancer cells love to use for energy after cell fusion of cancer stem cell and macrophage. Dr. Seyfried's group tries to inhibit glutamine to be fed to metastatic cancer cells. I wonder if researchers in this article have ever read research material written by Dr. Seyfried or following fusion research.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19055949/
2
Thanks for noting that high-sugar diets also contribute to tumor growth for other kinds of tumors.
It just illustrates how difficult it is to make dietary recommendations.
A low-fat high-carbohydrate diet might be the reason a person is obese in the first place, increasing his chance of getting not only prostate cancer but a whole bunch of other abdominal cancers. Obesity is the second biggest controllable risk factor after smoking, no?
A disciplined high-fat "keto" or Atkins diet, if it helps a person lose weight, might be a significant net positive in terms of cancer risk.
But if someone's already got a certain form of prostate cancer -- or, conceivably, is at high enough risk -- maybe it makes sense to go to a low-fat diet even given the risk of insulin resistance and obesity?
These are difficult tradeoffs, very difficult questions to answer through research.
14
A low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet is much less likely to promote obesity than the standard American diet (48% carbohydrate and 34% fat), because it is less energy dense. And with the SAD is that the high fat becomes not just a vehicle for the energy-dense fat itself, but as a vehicle for consumption of sugar and other refined carbohydrates; without the fat, simple carbohydrate foods are much less palatable.
1
And here's another complexity: what about a high ("good") fat diet NOT linked with obesity that's successfully shrinking some tumors -- the Ketogenic diet? I've been in nutritional ketosis for a year... There are a lot of research findings that run counter to what's in this article.
38
And there's an even more significant bit of complexity here - which the NYTimes should have caught -- which is that one of the most significant findings in terms of prostate cancer research has been the direct linkage between casein (a milk protein) and the proliferation of prostate cancer cells. And the significant thing about that research is that all dairy products that are labelled low-fat and non-fat have HIGHER levels of casein than full fat dairy products. So by promoting this new research with a headline of "High-Fat Diet May Fuel Spread of Prostate Cancer" -- the take away that lots of men world-wide may derive will be: great, i''ll eat LOW-FAT products.. which in the case of dairy, will actually encourage the growth of prostate cancer cells. Prostate cancer specialists generally discourage dairy in the diets of their patients -- but argue that if you can't give up ice cream, yogurt, cheese, or milk -- go for the full fat stuff. I don't have an MD else I would write a letter to the NYTimes chastising them for such irresponsible science reporting. But I hope someone else does....
46
"....We investigated the association between intake of dairy products and the incidence and survival of PCa during a 28-y follow-up. We conducted a cohort study in the Physicians’ Health Study (n = 21,660) and a survival analysis among the incident PCa cases (n = 2806). Information on dairy product consumption was collected at baseline. PCa cases and deaths (n = 305) were confirmed during follow-up. The intake of total dairy products was associated with increased PCa incidence [HR = 1.12 (95% CI: 0.93, 1.35); >2.5 servings/d vs. ≤0.5 servings/d]. Skim/low-fat milk intake was positively associated with risk of low-grade, early stage, and screen-detected cancers, whereas whole milk intake was associated only with fatal PCa [HR = 1.49 (95% CI: 0.97, 2.28); ≥237 mL/d (1 serving/d) vs. rarely consumed]. In the survival analysis, whole milk intake remained associated with risk of progression to fatal disease after diagnosis [HR = 2.17 (95% CI: 1.34, 3.51)]. In this prospective cohort, higher intake of skim/low-fat milk was associated with a greater risk of nonaggressive PCa. Most importantly, only whole milk was consistently associated with higher incidence of fatal PCa in the entire cohort and higher PCa-specific mortality among cases. These findings add further evidence to suggest the potential role of dairy products in the development and prognosis of PCa."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3542910/
Which is consistent with the mouse study here.
4
I'd love to know more specifics from the research, especially what kinds of fats were introduced. It would be interesting to uncover if the cancer cells respond to, say, saturated fats differently, etc.
4
Here's a thought. Rather than taking an "obesity drug", how about switching permanently to a whole-foods plant based diet without refined fats/oils and sugars? Why not try giving the body the foods it actually needs to be healthy and eliminating the ones that essentially poison the body? Seems so much easier than wedding yourself to a lifetime of drugs that may or may not be effective and may carry side effects.
67
Yes when you already know all the answers, without any doubts, why bother to do all that difficult, boring, and expensive research?
You might want to think about why the Framingham Nurses Study, and I believe a number of later studies showed a U-shaped curve for fat in the diet. People on very low fat diets did almost as poorly as those on high fat diets.
15
except they never said "refined fats/oils" are the problem. They never said refined *anything* is the problem with respect to prostate cancer metastasis. "Fat" is not a four letter word. And we don't know what kind are the problem here. What if they find monounsaturated fats are the problem for prostate cancer? There's no reason that might not be the case.
But that's why much smarter people do research, instead of having us just come at problems with our assumptions based on whatever general knowledge was floating around at the time. Often times, we're wrong. If the data confirm what we think, awesome. If not, also awesome.
15
It is hard for the medical industry to profit in such a world. We have a for profit medical industry and their profits are very important. People should just use the treatment so as to support this very important and ethical profit making machine. The people have a purpose. To make money for the wealthy. Corporations, the wealthy and our leaders all know this. Most people know this too and voluntarily comply with their masters. Work hard, eat garbage and die young of a very expensive disease. That makes you the best american serf you could be.
12
...or, reduce one’s fat intake. A much more sustainable solution than pharmaceuticals.
16