Using a Vegan Diet

Using a Vegan Diet in Foods and Prostate Cancer Survival - How Foods Fight Cancer

Dean Ornish, founder and director of the Preventive Medicine Research
Institute and clinical professor of medicine at the University of California,
San Francisco, who had already demonstrated the benefits of a low-fat,
vegetarian diet for heart patients (finding that it reversed heart disease in
82 percent of research participants), decided to put a similar program to the
test for prostate cancer.4 The ninety-three volunteers were men with earlystage
cancer who were able to defer treatment, at least for the moment,
because they were keeping a careful watch on their prostate-specific antigen
(PSA, an index of cancer spread) levels, a strategy known as “watchful
waiting.” Typically, PSA levels slowly rise, and eventually treatment (such as
surgery) may be required. Ornish randomly assigned half of the men to follow
their usual habits (the control group), and the remaining half were to
follow a low-fat vegan diet along with moderate aerobic exercise and stress
management. In the experimental vegan group, PSA levels decreased by 4
percent after one year, while PSA levels rose by 6 percent in the control group.
Six of the men in the control group needed treatment during the one-year
study period because their prostate cancer was progressing, whereas no one
in the experimental group needed treatment during the study period.