Eating a rich omega-3 diet that includes foods containing essential fatty acids such as salmon and others, seems to reduce the risk of an aggressive form of prostate cancer according to research appearing in the April 2009 issue of Clinical Cancer Research.
This association was most pronounced among men with a genetic predisposition to an aggressive form of this type of cancer.
Men who ate one or more servings of fatty fish per week had a 63% lower risk for being diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer than men who never ate this type of fish.
This isn’t the first research to find that men who ate this type of healthy fatty fish had a decreased risk for the this most dangerous, deadly forms of cancer.
Still more clinical trials are needed to see which foods high in omega-3 fatty acids reduce the risk of aggressive prostate cancer.
“There is a lot of evidence that omega-3 fatty acids protect against heart disease and other diseases by targeting inflammation – and that may be what is going on here,” John S. Witte, PhD explains. He and researchers from the University of California, San Francisco studied 466 men with aggressive prostate cancer; 478 men without the disease.
The subjects filled out questionnaires on foods they ate, and had a genetic analysis performed so that the team could identify variants of the Cox-2 gene, which ups the chance of developing prostate cancer.
What the analysis uncovered was that men who ate little or no fatty fish and also had the Cox-2 variant were 5 times more likely to develop prostate cancer that was advanced.
The men who had eaten lots of omega-3 fatty acids had a reduced risk of disease… even those who had the genetic variant Cox-2.
This amounted to eating one or more servings of fatty fish each week.
“The increase in risk associated with having the Cox-2 variant was essentially reversed in men who ate fish one or more times a week,” says Witte.
In a 2007 study, omega-3 researcher Jorge Chavarro, PhD from Harvard Medical School and colleagues found a 41% reduction in risks of prostate cancer for men who ate more omega-3 rich food than those with lower intake.
The Harvard team also found that men who ate fatty fish before getting a prostate cancer diagnosis, and continued to do so afterward, were less likely to lose their lives to this disease.
Omega-3 has been shown to be particularly protective against the more aggressive prostate cancers.
Continues below…
*Highly Recommended*
Overweight? Shocking Proof that it may not be your fault
99% of the “professional” weight loss techniques are wrong – ending up with you actually putting on weight rather than losing it.
Find out why counting calories is bad for you and can sabotage your dieting efforts.
Discover a new way to effortlessly shed unwanted pounds and drop 9 lbs. every 11 days.
This diet is called the “Idiot Proof Diet” because it’s all worked out for you and there’s no need for calorie counting or label reading.
Click through to find out how you can be slimmer with this innovative new weight loss system
Click through now to discover how to drop 9lbs every 11 days…
Prostate Cancer Risk Cut By Eating Fish High In Omega-3 continued…
Even now, many questions remain.
No one is sure if the effect of the omega-3 in the fish works only on the aggressive form of cancer. Experts are starting to wonder if prostate cancer may be better divided into aggressive forms and more local, benign cancers.
While more work is being done, your best bet if prostate cancer is an issue, or even if it isn’t, is to consider a diet rich in omega-3s, possibly even using omega-3 supplements, to help reduce the risks.
Some of the foods you might consider including in a rich omega-3 diet (besides salmon) are halibut, sardines, shrimp, clams, catfish, cod, albacore, trout and herring as well foods like walnuts, oils like flaxseed and canola and delicious veggies like spinach.
To your good health,
Kirsten Whittaker
Daily Health Bulletin Editor
