Why Us?

I am a healthy eater. Even more before surgery. Spinach salad almost every day for lunch, not organic however. I read a study that correlated healthier eaters (higher intake of raw vegetables) with increased risk for prostate cancer. Pesticides/ insecticide dilemma.

Hard to know. I ate two eggs for breakfast daily for years, looking for low-calorie protein, and learned after diagnosis that Choline in eggs shows a bent toward encouraging prostate cancer. A former sister-in-law died at 61 recently after fighting stage IV breast cancer for 18 years by adding becoming "ultra vegan" to her radiation, chemotherapy, and surgeries. I'm just grateful prostate cancer is relatively treatable.

@smoore4 Totally - and regretfully agree! What was purported to be ‘moderate’ drinking for decades is now labelled ‘heavy’ consumption, and the correlation to a list of medical woes is extensive.
I gave up alcohol completely 3 1/2 years ago when a simple blood test showed me to be ‘pre-diabetic’.
How can this be? I wondered when I don’t drink soda, juices, eat candy, cookies, etc. Had to be the 2 scotches (2 measured shotglasses - no more!) I consumed every night before dinner… Well, no more ‘pre diabetes….
I kick myself hard in the ass because I’ve known since forever that alcohol is a cellular poison. Did it cause my cancer? Maybe, but nothing’s definite; but it surely raised the risk when combined with other toxins unintentionally ingested in the air, water and USDA certified foods we eat.
Like a plane crash, it is never ONE thing that leads to the calamity, but a succession of errors all adding up to a big fat disaster…
Phil

@heavyphil So what happened with alcohol is that initially the research community thought it had found a positive correlation between drinking red wine and cardiovascular health, and the beverage industry ran with that. But it turned out they'd missed some pretty obvious alternative causes and messed up the numbers.

Now the WHO classifies all alcohol, including red wine, as a Class 1 carcinogen, like tobacco (that means they are confident of causation) for 7 types of cancer: squamous cell cancer in the oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, and esophagus; colorectal cancer; liver cancer; and female breast cancer. 😢

AFAIK, prostate cancer is not currently in the list of cancers they're highly confident in linking to alcohol. And for the others, the risk rises significantly with heavy consumption.

@jime51 wrote ❝I ate two eggs for breakfast daily for years, looking for low-calorie protein, and learned after diagnosis that Choline in eggs shows a bent toward encouraging prostate cancer.❞

This is a good illustration of the problem @readandlearn mentioned about correlation vs causation.

There has been no convincing correlation discovered between egg consumption and being diagnosed with prostate cancer, but researchers did find a correlation between very high egg consumption and the severity of prostate cancer (once someone is diagnosed).

So as far as we know, very high egg consumption doesn't cause prostate cancer (you can rest relieved), and it might not even cause it to become more severe — choline is an essential nutrient, regulated by your liver, and you'd die without it — but people who like to eat a lot of eggs and people who have a higher risk of developing the more severe forms of prostate cancer seem to have some factor X in common.

Unfortunately, in the media and online forums that gets simplified and distorted to "eggs cause prostate cancer," as nearly always happens with correlation studies. 😒

@northoftheborder I think Mayo/Rochester has an exclusive Choline test used to evaluate for prostate cancer in some way. My cancer was Gleason 7 with unanticipated lymph node involvement.

@northoftheborder I think Mayo/Rochester has an exclusive Choline test used to evaluate for prostate cancer in some way. My cancer was Gleason 7 with unanticipated lymph node involvement.

@northoftheborder I think Mayo/Rochester has an exclusive Choline test used to evaluate for prostate cancer in some way. My cancer was Gleason 7 with unanticipated lymph node involvement.

after two recent falls, one on my bike, the other playing pickleball, the latter requiring a trip to the emergency room to get six stitches in my right hand middle finger and a CT to ensure no brain bleed, my doctor said "Kevin, I'm concerned about the level of your physical activity given you are on blood thinners..."

I responded, "thanx, you know, just getting up in the morning entails risk....