Men truly are what they eat

A new study at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center has concluded that the low-fat, fish oil diet reduced the number of rapidly dividing cells in the prostate cancer tissue.

This finding is important because the rate at which the cells are dividing can be predictive of future cancer progression, as the lower the rate of proliferation, the lesser the chances that the cancer will spread outside the prostate, where it is much harder to treat.

Researchers also found that the men on the low-fat, fish oil supplement diet were able to change the composition of their cell membranes in both the healthy cells and the cancer cells in the prostate. The study also found that blood obtained from patients after the low-fat, fish oil diet program slowed the growth of prostate cancer cells in a test tube as compared to blood from men on the Western diet, which did not slow cancer growth.

The study appeared Oct. 25, 2011 in Cancer Prevention Research, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.