Average American Diet May Doom Prostate Cancer Survivors

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New research has found that prostate cancer survivors that eat the typical American diet that consists of red meat, cheese and white bread are far more likely to see their cancer come back and even kill them, and they are much more likely to die sooner compared to patients who eat a much healthier diet.

This is yet another piece of evidence that demonstrates that the "Western" diet actually increases the risks for cancer and a whole host of other diseases including heart disease and Alzheimer's.

Other studies have shown that it there isn't much adjustment to be done to greatly lower these risks.  The Mediterranean diet, for example, consists of plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables, olive oil instead of saturated fat, whole grains and more fish than red meat, and it has been shown to greatly reduce the risks of these diseases.

"Our results suggest that the same dietary recommendations that are made to the general population primarily for the prevention of cardiovascular disease may also decrease the risk of dying from prostate cancer among men initially diagnosed with nonmetastatic disease (cancer that has not spread)," said Dr. Jorge Chavarro of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who led the study.

Chavaroo and other researchers studied 926 men who had prostate cancer that hadn't spread who were talking part in the Physician's Health Study.  This study is a very large, ongoing research project that follows thousands of male doctors over their lives.  The men answered questions about their diets approximately five years after receiving the diagnosis for prostate cancer and then were watched for about ten years.

"We found that men diagnosed with nonmetastatic prostate cancer whose diet was more 'Westernized,' i.e., contained processed meats, refined grains, potatoes, and high-fat dairy, were more likely to die of prostate cancer," Chavarro said.

Chavarro's team reported  the journal Cancer Prevention Research that they were more than 2.5 times as likely to die of their prostate cancer than other patients eating very health diets and they were more than one and a half times as likely to have died over the course of the 10 years.

At least for Chavarro, the results were not shocking.

"Because cardiovascular disease is one of the top causes of death among prostate cancer survivors, our findings regarding all-cause mortality are what we anticipated and closely align with the current knowledge of the role of diet on cardiovascular disease," he said in a statement.

"Our findings with Western diet and prostate cancer-specific mortality, however, were surprising, in part because there are very little data regarding how diet after diagnosis may impact disease prognosis."

These findings could be important for many men diagnosed with prostate cancer.  The cancer itself is very common, being diagnosed in approximately 240,000 men in the U.S. every year and each year the disease kills about 30,000.