Yes, Jeff, I am saying that it is not the ingestion of choline that is the problem - it is the lethal form of PCa which does not allow the men to process it properly, so it winds up having high concentrations in the blood and cells.
Choline is found in many, many foods - the highest concentrations being in meat, dairy and eggs…ergo don’t eat those things and you won’t die from PCa. But choline is essential to life - it is the precursor of acetylcholine, without which you simply could not exist, as it is responsible for all neuronal synaptic transmission: all movement, breathing, talking, blinking, etc. The study didn’t separate men who ate yolks from men who ate egg whites, follow them for 30 yrs and look to see which group died from PCa; it said that egg whites don’t raise choline levels….so what? We agree that it’s in the yolks.
As for flaxseed, we all know of its health benefits (like eggs?😉), but they were finding very high levels of alpha lipoic acid (ALA) in their blood and in PCa cells….sound familiar?
So they did the dietary questionnaire thing and zeroed in on flaxseed because it has the highest levels of ALA of all foods…ergo, flaxseeds cause prostate cancer.
But Dr Waanefried (sp?) and her team in Minnesota, came up with a plan: biopsy men scheduled to undergo prostatectomy in one month; feed half of them a lot of flaxseed, the other half a placebo for 30 days. They measured 5 or 6 biomarkers for PCa activity in the pre- surgical biopsies and compared them to the post- surgical biopsy levels of the same biomarkers.
The men who ate the flaxseed had something like 50% less activity for PCa, using these biomarkers as a gauge. So the flaxseed DEcreased the potency of the cancer; the ALA therefore did not CAUSE PCa but was CORRELATED to finding it.
Further study showed that many of the men who expressed the highest levels of ALA in both blood and cells did not, or could not metabolize ALA properly - either because of their own genetic predisposition OR their prostate cancer did not allow them to.
You have stated that you are BRCA positive, which is a huge factor in the aggressiveness of your particular cancer. Could it not be possible that this inherited genetic condition alters many chemical pathways in your body and allows certain compounds to build up because they are not metabolized properly? Who knows what they are unless you set out to test for them? But we don’t know what we don’t know so where do you begin? You say you are way past castrate resistance, yet here you are because of drug therapies that are keeping you alive. Are these drugs targeting choline? ALA? Are you not dead because you stopped eating eggs a year or two ago? Do you think that if you had avoided eggs, dairy and meat all your life, your BRCA gene would have been turned off and you would not have gotten PCa at all?
A disease like Hemochromatosis causes high levels of iron to accumulate in the liver, often leading to cirrhosis…..IRON CAUSES CIRRHOSIS!! See what I mean? Unfortunately this disease only strikes those of Hibernian (Irish/Celtic) ancestry - similar to Tay-Sachs disease only striking Ashkenazi Jews.
The upshot is that many Irish patients in the past presenting with cirrhosis were simply dismissed as alcoholics, since that is the most common reason for the disease. Sad but true…
Anyway, biochemistry is sooo complicated that it often takes decades to find a smoking gun. Don’t think that gun- or the silver bullet- is right around the corner, but we’re finding out more about this disease every day. These nutritional studies are invaluable and where they might leave us still looking for answers, they can, at least, perhaps point us in another direction. Best
Phil