Posts Tagged ‘Prostate’

Testosterone, Steak and Eggs

Monday, June 15th, 2009

One strong arm does not a man make...

One strong arm does not a man make...

Testosterone is one misunderstood molecule. It has such great influence over the human body that it has gained a reputation, a mystique. Society associates testosterone with Arnold Schwarzenegger (circa 1980s), with strength, virility, aggression, violence, square jaws and six-pack abs. We also tend to blame it for certain male tendencies and traits in our society, as well as certain medical disorders, although there is little scientific basis for this reasoning.

Testosterone is the major sex steroid hormone in men, and its effects are wide-ranging and powerful. It will make a boy into a man, for one thing. It sparks the development of facial and pubic hair, Adam’s apples, deeper voices, bigger muscles, broader chests. In the adult male, testosterone is necessary for sexual desire, erection maintenance, and sperm production. It also affects other body functions not directly related to sex–important ones–such as maintaining a normal blood count, bone strength, muscle mass and mood.

Testosterone might explain the perpetual sexual desire of a sixteen year-old whose previously unannointed body is now seeing it for the first time, but it does not explain away acts of violence. One popular belief is that excessive testosterone can make one uncontrollably aggressive. However, men actually tend to feel moodier and more anxious with lower testosterone levels, and there are reports that testosterone treatment can disperse these negative feelings. Also, studies show that there is a higher correlation between acts of violence and a past history of violence, than between violence and testosterone levels.

It is also untrue that high testosterone levels cause male pattern baldness and prostate cancer. Baldness is not a sign of virility, and is not associated with high testosterone levels. It is associated with genetics, specifically from the mother’s side of the family (male pattern, crown centered baldness) or the father’s side (overall baldness). Prostate cancer, meanwhile, appears to be associated with low levels of testosterone, and not high ones. So, basically, despite being the cause of hairiness, sweatiness, smelliness, and horniness, testosterone is very good for men.

Does it deserve the bad rap it gets? Taken appropriately, as replacement for naturally low levels, testosterone is not dangerous, nor is it illegal. If taken as a supplement, things are different. Anabolic steroids are synthetically produced variants of natural testosterone. Some common street or slang names for anabolic steroids include arnolds, gym candy, pumpers, roids, stackers, weight trainers, and juice. There are about 100 different types of anabolic steroids circulating nowadays and you will get over 1 million hits on Google by entering “buy steroids,” if you’re interested. When anabolics are taken as a supplement to boost normal testosterone levels, they can lead to some interesting side effects: shooting blanks instead of having a normal sperm count, getting tender breasts when you really don’t want them, and acne like when you were fourteen. Here’s where the bad rap enters the picture. And with steroid abuse, all bets are off regarding the healthy benefits that normal testosterone balance has on cholesterol balance, liver and heart health, blood pressure and mood. So be just like the power hitter Jim Thome, who said: “The strongest thing I put into my body is steak and eggs.”

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Posted in testosterone | 13 Comments »

You Are The Pill That You Eat

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Amber waves of grain, the stuff of our Neolithic ancestors

Amber waves of grain, the stuff of our Neolithic ancestors

At some point as we evolved, well after the Neolithic period, we started thinking that there must be a better way to get nutrients, something faster and more efficient, than through the food we have eaten for tens of thousands of years. Our fantasy of the future was encapsulated with TV shows like The Jetsons and Star Trek, where roast chickens and earl grey tea were produced by the touch of a button. Nowadays, grocery stores offer fruit smoothies, breakfast bars, energy drinks and microwave pizzas, so we can fuel up quickly and efficiently. Why sit down when you can eat while running? We take vitamins with the idea that we can rectify any potential deficiencies and even prevent illness, with the swallow of a pill. How simple, how easy, how efficient.

As a society, we are in love with “nutriceutical” supplements. About half of all adults take a multivitamin everyday and it is estimated that $75 billion worldwide is spent annually on nutriceuticals. And nonvitamin and nonmineral natural product use is so prevalent in the U.S. (40% of Americans) that the National Institutes of Health has even commissioned a new branch devoted entirely to the pursuit of complementary and alternative medicine research. This effort will undoubtedly unleash the true potential of alternative medicine. But let’s drill down on vitamins for a minute. What does the evidence really show? Well, it appears that taking vitamin supplements may not as beneficial as previously thought. Several major studies have now shown that vitamin supplements do little to prevent cancer and heart disease, while other studies report that vitamins and antioxidant supplements may actually increase cancer rates. One study concluded that folic acid supplements actually increased rates of precancerous colon polyps, and another study linked beta-carotene to higher lung cancer rates. Are vitamins then, failing us as supplements?

No one discounts the necessity of vitamins for our body’s function. Indeed, many diseases are associated with a deficiency in one or another vitamin. But we do place rather high expectations on vitamins. It’s rather narrow-minded of us to tout only a few particular nutrients in food and assign them letters of the alphabet, when many others may be just as essential to our primitive bodies, yet are unfamiliar to us intellectually. Vitamins do not exist in a void, but are part of a complex mixture of substances called food that is the real stuff of life. If anything, the fact that vitamins are getting an F in cancer prevention suggests that the way that they are absorbed in a pill is not the same as the way we extract them from whole foods that we eat.

My patients frequently ask me what supplements they should take to enhance their sexual health or fertility. The truth is that because sexual health is so thoroughly intertwined with overall health, I emphasize a whole-body approach. I don’t recommend a specific course of supplements, but antioxidants may have some value. If they wish to take a supplement, they may, but the important thing is that they get all nutrients necessary for their bodies to function optimally. The real solution to this is a well-balanced diet low in fat and sugar, emphasizing whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. That said, I do realize how resistant many people can be to changing their diet. If a patient feels they must take a supplement to compensate for poor eating habits, I steer them towards whole food supplements that contain a larger and more complex spectrum of nutrients than that found in traditional multivitamins. In all honesty however, I firmly believe in carrots from the earth and apples from trees, just like our Neolithic ancestors did.

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The Prostate: All You Ever Wanted to Know

Monday, June 1st, 2009

One famous fountain: the mannequin pis in Belgium

One famous fountain: the mannequin pis in Belgium

As a man ages, he is more likely to look at travel experiences as a series of restroom stops. He might begin navigating his way to the grocery store, the gas station or to a friend’s house for poker based on whether or not there’s a restroom conveniently located nearby. This may sound like the end of the world, but it’s not. It may be the end of long road trips. It is also the start of the realization that, similar to needing reading glasses, he is not immortal but actually a simple human being.

The prostate is a gland the size of a walnut at the base of the penis. It wraps around the urethra (the tube that urine comes from). A prostate is essential for normal male fertility, as it is responsible for making fluid that protects and nourishes sperm. Everything is shipshape until a man gets older, when two problems can arise. One is benign prostatic hypertrophy (BPH), which is a fancy way of saying enlargement of the prostate. This occurs in about half of all men in their sixties. For reasons still unclear, the prostate continues to grow as a man gets older. It is usually symptomatic – men have urinary urgency, dribbling, weak stream and may have to get up at night to urinate. The other problem is prostate cancer. Most commonly, cancer has no symptoms.

BPH is not preventable, but prostate cancer may be. Following a heart-healthy, low-fat, low carbohydrate diet is key to the prevention strategy, as are exercise, weight management and stress reduction. Concentrate on fruits and vegetables, which are high in antioxidants that protect the cells of your body from becoming cancerous. Soy and green tea may also protect the prostate. Sugar intake should also be limited, as it often ends up stored in your body as fat, and obesity is linked to prostate cancer.

That said it may surprise you to know that prostate cancer doesn’t always kill. Cancer is no one’s friend, but prostate cancer is not as deadly as lung cancer, colon cancer or breast cancer. It is much more slow-growing than these other cancers, doubling in size every 2-3 years instead of every 4-6 months. As such, a man is eight to ten times more likely to die of heart disease than prostate cancer. Even more interesting, some believe that prostate cancer is really a disease of age in men, as the likelihood of having small amounts of cancer in the prostate goes up with age. That means that about 80% of 90 year old men will have prostate cancer, and may never know it. They will likely die of unrelated causes. It also means that there are many prostate cancers occurring in men that are “clinically insignificant,” a rare term in cancer medicine. So, many prostate “cancers” actually don’t act as such.

Although diseases of the prostate are rarely lethal, they can affect your quality of life…and your road trips. Men over forty should start to have the prostate checked regularly, although most men would rather spend quality time with the dentist’s drill than go in for that exam. Blood tests for a substance called PSA, can also help detect cancer. The symptoms of prostatic enlargement can treated with pills; if these don’t work, various, safe but indescribable procedures can remove the symptom-causing prostatic tissue. Some of the FDA approved pills to treat BPH also prevent prostate cancer. Now that’s a pill that men might want to swallow. So, for all kinds of reasons, don’t ignore the prostate. Try to attend to it before it disrupts the flow of your daily life.

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Posted in Prostate, sexual health | 1 Comment »