Prevent prostate cancer without statins....

Today's post: Monday, 4-27-2009

It was in today’s health news in several places that taking statins seemed to make prostate cancer less aggressive and for its tumors to grow more slowly.

1. Not long ago, there was also news that people taking purified fish oil as omega 3 supplements or who regularly ate fish high in omega 3 oils tended to have similar results if they got prostate cancer. Their cancer was less aggressive, it grew more slowly, and the percentage of people who survived it was higher.

Since statin drugs reduce inflammation and separate studies show similar results in people where they have higher or lower levels of inflammation with lower levels slowing cancer and high levels speeding it up, this effect of taking statin drugs may be real from just this reason alone.

But taking purified fish oil as omega 3 supplements or regularly ate fish high in omega 3 oils but wild caught only once to three times a week lowers inflammation; & so does NOT eating or drinking foods made with high fructose corn syrup, refined grains, starchy foods, or sugar at all often. Interestingly, regular exercise and eating raw or dry roasted nuts regularly if you aren’t allergic, lowers inflammation also. (It’s been shown separately, I read recently, that a high intake of sugars and similar carbohydrates tends to cause the early development of prostate cancer which clearly fits this model of inflammation helping to cause prostate cancer.)
Eating onions often also helps lower inflammation and triglyceride levels.

But each of those methods has other health benefits while statin drugs have side effects, some of them quite harmful. (If you do each of those things, you’ll also be less fat, less likely to have type 2 diabetes, and much less likely to have heart disease or other cardiovascular diseases.)

So, there are superior ways to lower inflammation to slow prostate cancer other than taking statin drugs.

2. Keeping your LDL cholesterol down, which statins also do, may also be protective. This may well be the case since people who take beta sitosterol and/or saw palmetto tend to have less prostate enlargement and urinary problems from it. And, both of these supplements are sterols which reliably lower LDL cholesterol levels as do the sterols in nuts, vegetables, and some red wines as we posted about last week.

A combination of eating right, regular exercise, taking these sterol supplements and taking as little as 600 mg a day of niacin not only lowers LDL levels, it does so MUCH better than statin drugs because while statins mostly only lower LDL, the combination we just described lowers triglycerides and increases HDL at the same time. This lowers the kind of small particle LDL that causes heart disease MUCH better than statin drugs. That means that you can not only protect yourself from prostate cancer better in this category without statin drugs and their costs and risk of harmful side effects, your heart protection will be better too.

3. There are also several kinds of methods that protect against prostate cancer that look to do so in other ways than the two than statin drugs do.

Eating raw broccoli or raw cauliflower has been found to prevent half of the aggressive prostate cancers the people eating them get compared to men who eat none.

In addition, eating these vegetables several times a week and also eating cooked tomato products or taking lycopene supplements, the main carotenoid in tomatoes may make this even more protective. Not only has doing these things been shown to be protective against prostate cancer separately, the combination of doing so with eating raw broccoli or raw cauliflower apparently works even better than either by itself.

One double-blind study found that taking 200 micrograms a day of selenium reduced prostate cancer by 63 percent & others have found that taking this much selenium tends to result in a doubling the survival rate from getting cancer of any kind.

The gamma tocopherol fraction of natural vitamin E had a five-fold reduction in prostate cancer risk from the people who got the least to those who got the most. (Solgar makes a 200 iu natural vitamin E plus mixed tocopherols that has gamma tocopherol. You can also get it by eating nuts and avocados and the greens that have natural vitamin E.

Taking a curcumin or a turmeric supplement or eating curried food has been shown to curtail the growth of prostate cancers. (Curcumin is in the spice turmeric which is what gives curries their yellow color.) Since the incidence of all cancers in India is quite low and eating foods often with curry is so common there, it looks as if taking curcumin may well help prevent all cancers. Similarly, very few people in India develop Alzheimer’s disease. So taking curcumin supplements may be triply protective against prostate cancer, all other cancers, and against getting Alzheimer’s disease. If you want to spend money to protect yourself from prostate cancer, curcumin may do a lot more good per dollar spent that taking statin drugs.

Lastly, the supplement boron has been shown to cut the incidence of prostate cancer in half and to help people stay alert when they are tired. I’d been taking boron for years to help me stay alert only to find I may have also doubled my prostate cancer protection without knowing it!

4. You can also take steps to avoid ALL cancers.

Taking curcumin is one way.

Eating organic vegetables & eating very little fat from grain fed meat by eating plant proteins or beef fed only grass or very lowfat chicken and turkey instead also helps. Grain fed animals bioconcentrate pesticides and herbicides in their fat. Similarly, it helps to avoid using pesticides and herbicides to the maximum extent you can particularly in your home and yard.

Not smoking or being around second hand smoke is also known to prevent something like third of all cancers.

Lastly, we now know that many people have been and are low in vitamin D because they now work inside more and get less sun exposure. But getting the 2,000 to 3,000 iu a day your body prefers to have by taking at least 2,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 has been studied and apparently it both makes your immune system less likely to cause autoimmune disease by attacking things it should not AND MORE likely to attack and kill cancer cells of any kind. So taking that much vitamin D helps ensure you have enough to enable your immune system to kill off cancer cells in their earliest stages.

So, as you can see, you have many ways to prevent prostate cancer and its more aggressive and dangerous forms than taking statin drugs. And, the two things statin drugs do well there are safer and more protective ways to get the same effects.

So, you CAN prevent prostate cancer and its more aggressive and dangerous forms quite well without statin drugs. This also saves you from getting the common and the more harmful side effects of taking statin drugs.