Healthful Lifestyle Teaches Prostate Genes to Behave

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Ornish, who is also president of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, Calif., is the first to say that the study is merely a pilot that begs for follow-up work. This includes monitoring gene function and PSA levels, which fell only minimally, for longer than three months, and studying gene alterations in tumor cells, not just healthy ones. Most important is what happens in the long term to these men with slow-growing, indolent prostate cancers. To know if their disease arrests or even regresses because of what they eat and how they live will require a controlled clinical trial of similar men with similar tumors that will extend many years into the future.

In the meantime, there just may be enough here to make everyone recognize the common sense of such healthful habits. Even among these 30 men, lifestyle changes made weight and waist size drop, lowered bad cholesterol and blood pressure, and improved mood and psychological functioning, all in three months. This alone should be a huge motivator to eat better, exercise more, and find more joy in everyday life.

The added observation that such grand behavior might make for better-behaving genes is an important message to everyone at any age. While no one is born with a perfect set of genes, the study strongly suggests that genes do not have to be your fate.