Changing one aspect of everyday diet could improve a patient with prostate cancer's chances of survival, a new study has suggested. Experts at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health examined the association between dietary fat intake and mortality among patients with nonmetastatic prostate cancer—a specific clinical stage relating to the cancer.
They found that replacing animal and saturated fats, which includes red meat, butter and full-fat dairy, with plant-based and unsaturated alternatives, like olive oil and nuts, was associated with a notably lower risk of mortality among prostate cancer patients. Around 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their lifetime, according to the American Cancer Society, and there are around 333,000 new cases of the disease in the U.S. every year. It is the second-leading cause of cancer death in American men, behind lung cancer, and around 1 in 44 men will die of prostate cancer.
The study was published in the journal JAMA Network Open on September 2. The findings "support what we have known that dietary fats seem to play a role in the development and progression of prostate cancer," Dr. Leonard Gomella, a professor of prostate cancer at Jefferson Medical College, told Newsweek.
"I find these findings encouraging because they suggest that practical dietary changes may improve long-term health for men with nonmetastatic prostate cancer," Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan, director of the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology, told Newsweek. He added that "the key distinction is that the association was with overall survival; the study did not demonstrate fewer deaths from prostate cancer itself." Almost 5,000 patients with nonmetastatic prostate cancer were involved in the study.
Their mean age at the time of their diagnosis was around 69.5 years, and the median follow-up time was 12.8 years. During follow-up, more than 3,000 patients passed away—around 400 from prostate cancer, around 500 due to other cancers and around 800 from cardiovascular disease. They also found that higher saturated fat intake after cancer diagnosis was positively associated with all-cause mortality.
Even small adjustments in diet had notable impacts: replacing 5 percent of calories from carbohydrates with saturated fat or animal fat was associated with a higher risk for all-cause mortality for the prostate cancer patients, while replacing 5 percent of calories from saturated fat with monounsaturated fat or plant-based fat was associated with a lower risk. Specifically, the researchers found that replacing 5 percent of calories from carbohydrates with saturated fats was associated with a 15 percent increase in overall deaths. Their findings were similar to those in the Physicians’ Health Study, which included almost 1,000 patients with nonmetastatic prostate cancer.
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