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Well, since we've started a thread here on the "General Health and Longevity" forum dedicated to Colon Cancer Prevention, I figured we might as well have one for prostate cancer too, particularly since CR practitioners are overwhelmingly male, and because among US men, prostate cancer is the most common cancer and second leading cancer killer based on CDC Statistics. Plus, there is a new study [1] showing how good my favorite diet (vegan) is for prostate cancer prevention. The study followed ~26,000 men (obviously) who are participating in the famous Adventist Health Study-2, and recruited between 2002 and 2007. It found that men eating a vegan diet were 35% less likely to develop prostate cancer (HR: 0.65; 95% CI: 0.49, 0.85) relative to omnivores during the mean follow-up period of 7.8 year, even after adjusting for age, race, family history of prostate cancer, education, screening for prostate cancer, calorie intake, and BMI. The last is significant because it shows that it wasn't just a result of the vegans being thinner than the omnivores that protected them from prostate cancer. Interestingly, and distinctively from other studies of this population where health benefits relative to omnivores have been observed among all the categories of vegetarians, the benefits observed here for prostate cancer avoidance were entirely restricted to the vegan diet group. Below is the summary table of relative risks for the different diet groups, broken down by race. Looking at data for white men I've highlighted. None of the other vegetarian categories have even a hint of reduction in prostate cancer risk relative to omnivores, not even the pesky pesco-vegetarians - only the vegans: So if you want to avoid the most common form of cancer among men in the US, and the second leading cause of cancer death, go vegan! --Dean -------------- [1] Am J Clin Nutr. 2015 Nov 11. pii: ajcn106450. [Epub ahead of print] Are strict vegetarians protected against prostate cancer? Tantamango-Bartley Y(1), Knutsen SF(2), Knutsen R(2), Jacobsen BK(3), Fan J(2), Beeson WL(2), Sabate J(2), Hadley D(4), Jaceldo-Siegl K(2), Penniecook J(2), Herring P(2), Butler T(2), Bennett H(2), Fraser G(2). BACKGROUND: According to the American Cancer Society, prostate cancer accounts for ∼27% of all incident cancer cases among men and is the second most common (noncutaneous) cancer among men. The relation between diet and prostate cancer is still unclear. Because people do not consume individual foods but rather foods in combination, the assessment of dietary patterns may offer valuable information when determining associations between diet and prostate cancer risk. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine the association between dietary patterns (nonvegetarian, lacto-ovo-vegetarian, pesco-vegetarian, vegan, and semi-vegetarian) and prostate cancer incidence among 26,346 male participants of the Adventist Health Study-2. DESIGN: In this prospective cohort study, cancer cases were identified by matching to cancer registries. Cox proportional hazards regression analysis was performed to estimate HRs by using age as the time variable. RESULTS: In total, 1079 incident prostate cancer cases were identified. Around 8% of the study population reported adherence to the vegan diet. Vegan diets showed a statistically significant protective association with prostate cancer risk (HR: 0.65; 95% CI: 0.49, 0.85). After stratifying by race, the statistically significant association with a vegan diet remained only for the whites (HR: 0.63; 95% CI: 0.46, 0.86), but the multivariate HR for black vegans showed a similar but nonsignificant point estimate (HR: 0.69; 95% CI: 0.41, 1.18). CONCLUSION: Vegan diets may confer a lower risk of prostate cancer. This lower estimated risk is seen in both white and black vegan subjects, although in the latter, the CI is wider and includes the null. © 2016 American Society for Nutrition. PMID: 26561618