An Apple A Day, Keeps the Prostate Away. By Brian Simpson

     I have a strange sense of déjà vu (/ˌdeɪʒɑː ˈvuː/; French pronunciation: [deʒa vy]) from French, literally “already seen”), when writing this; have I done it before, or did I think that I did it before? Anyway, not to worry, because no one else will.

     Most of us men here are at that time of life when the prostate causes problems, even on a good day. To put it politely, it is like having a roof with a box gutter; you know at some point it will leak, and your house will be subjected to water damage. Even your prized comic book collection may get ruined, if things turn really bad. It can bury you, which is like the house collapsing, totally.

     However, researchers have found that a combination of micro-nutrients, can knock down many prostate cancers, and may even help with benign prostatic hyperplasia:

“High-throughput screening of a natural compound library was performed to identify the most efficacious combinatorial treatment on prostate cancer. Ursolic acid, curcumin and resveratrol were selected for further analyses and administered in vivo via the diet, either alone or in combination, in a mouse allograft model of prostate cancer. All possible combinations of these natural compounds produced synergistic effects on tumor size and weight, as predicted in the screens. A subsequent untargeted metabolomics and metabolic flux analysis using isotopically labeled glutamine indicated that the compound combinations modulated glutamine metabolism. In addition, ASCT2 levels and STAT3, mTORC1 and AMPK activity were modulated to a greater extent by the combinations compared to the individual compounds. Overall, this approach can be useful for identifying synergistic combinations of natural compounds for chemopreventive and therapeutic interventions.”

“Combinatorial treatment with natural compounds in prostate cancer inhibits prostate tumor growth and leads to key modulations of cancer cell metabolism,” A. Lodi (et al.), Precision Oncology, 1, Article number 18 (2017).

     The media reports make it sound like all that is needed is to eat apples (ursolic acid), grapes (resveratrol) and curry (curcumin), but when you research this a bit more, you will find that the doses may be too small, and curcumin has a low absorption rate. There are tablet forms of all of these nutrients available, that could be taken with the foods, with many more bioavailable forms of curcumin, and resveratrol equivalent to hundred of glasses of red wine. But, I guess, I would probably rather drink hundreds of glasses of red wine, at least numbing the problems of male ageing.