• 10almonds
  • Posts
  • Prostate Health: What You Should Know

Prostate Health: What You Should Know

Plus: 7 steps to beat sugar addiction

Author

The 10almonds Team
October 12, 2023

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

Loading Screen Tip: when did you last stretch? Take a moment to give your body some attention, especially your spine.

One almond
⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

  • Prostate cancer affects 12% of men overall, and 60% of men aged 60+, with that percentage climbing each year thereafter.

    • Prostate cancer can look like BPH in the early stages (and/or, BPH can turn cancerous) so it’s important to not shrug off BPH symptoms.

  • How much water have you drunk so far, today? Today’s sponsor, Hint Water, are offering 10almonds subscribers 45% off and free shipping, on their already very reasonably-priced flavored waters and vitamin waters

    • They are, by the way, free from sugar and artificial sweeteners, so these are different from ones you’ve probably tried before

Read on to learn about these things and more…

One almond
👀 WATCH AND LEARN

How to Break Sugar Addiction: 7 Steps to Help You Stop Eating Sugar (5:43)

The steps listed:

  1. Realize what's going on

  2. Understand the levels of addiction

  3. Detox, and ride out the bodily objections

  4. Read labels—and know what they mean

  5. Balance blood sugar levels

  6. Heal your gut

  7. Remember when sugar is not just sugar (fruit is fine; honey, agave, etc still need to be counted)

Prefer text? The video-makers also added some source articles. Many were about artificial sweeteners, but here are two important ones about sugar:

😯 MAIN FEATURE

Prostate Health: What You Should Know

We’re aware that very many of our readers are women, who do not have a prostate.

However, dear reader: if you do have one, and/or love someone who has one, this is a good thing to know about.

The prostate gland is a (hopefully) walnut-sized gland (it actually looks a bit like a walnut too), that usually sits just under the bladder.

*The scale is not great in these diagrams, but they’ll get the job done. Besides, everyone is different on the inside, anyway. Not in a “special unique snowflake” way, but in a “you’d be surprised how much people’s insides move around” way.

Fun fact: did you ever feel like your intestines are squirming? That’s because they are.

You can’t feel it most of the time due to the paucity of that kind of nervous sensation down there, but the peristaltic motion that they use to move food along them on the inside, also causes them push against the rest of your guts, on the outside of them. This is the exact same way that many snakes move about.

If someone has to perform an operation in that region, sometimes it will be necessary to hang the intestines on a special rack, to keep them in one place for the surgery.

What can go wrong?

There are two very common things that can go wrong with the prostate:

  1. Benign Prostate Hyperplasia (BPH), otherwise known as an enlarged prostate

  2. Prostate cancer

For most men, the prostate gland continues to grow with age, which is how the former comes about so frequently.

For everyone, due to the nature of the mathematics involved in cellular mutation and replication, we will eventually get cancer if something else doesn’t kill us first.

  • Prostate cancer affects 12% of men overall, and 60% of men aged 60+, with that percentage climbing each year thereafter.

  • Prostate cancer can look like BPH in the early stages (and/or, an enlarged prostate can turn cancerous) so it’s important to not shrug off the symptoms of BPH.

How can BPH be avoided/managed?

There are prescription medications that can help reduce the size of the prostate, including testosterone blockers (such as spironolactone and bicalutamide) and 5α-reductase inhibitors, such as finasteride. Each have their pros and cons:

  • Testosterone-blockers are the heavy-hitters, and work very well… but have more potential adverse side effects (your body is used to running on testosterone, after all)

  • 5α-reductase inhibitors aren’t as powerful, but they block the conversion of free testosterone to dihydrogen testosterone (DHT), and it’s primarily DHT that causes the problems. By blocking the conversion of T to DHT, you may actually end up with higher serum testosterone levels, but fewer ill-effects. Exact results will vary depending on your personal physiology, and what else you are taking, though.

There are also supplements that can help, including saw palmetto and pumpkin seed oil. Here’s a good paper that covers both:

We have recommended saw palmetto before for a variety of uses, including against BPH:

You might want to avoid certain medications that can worsen BPH symptoms (but not actually the size of the prostate itself). They include:

  • Antihistamines

  • Decongestants

  • Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs)

  • Tricyclic antidepressants (most modern antidepressants aren’t this kind; ask your pharmacist/doctor if unsure)

You also might want to reduce/skip:

  • Alcohol

  • Caffeine

In all the above cases, it’s because of how they affect the bladder, not the prostate, but given their neighborliness, each thing affects the other.

What if it’s cancer? How do I know and what do I do?

However, there’s a newer, much more accurate test, called the Prostate Screening Episwitch (PSE) test, which is 94% accurate, so you might consider asking your healthcare provider whether that’s an option:

As for where to go from there, we’re out of space for today, but we previously reviewed a very good book about this, Dr. Patrick Walsh's Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer, and we highly recommend it—it could easily be a literal lifesaver.

One almond
❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

No sugar, no sweeteners, just hydration bursting with fruit flavors

Hydration is a critical and often-neglected part of good health, so this is one where convenience really pays and keeps your body and brain nourished.

Hint Water specialize in flavored water infused with fruit essences. By using purified water and natural fruit essences, Hint Water provides surprisingly accurate fruit flavors—not the “sickly sweet with a strange aftertaste” flavored waters you might otherwise know.

Best of all, they offer 8 delicious flavors to choose from, and have a “Hint+vitamin” range too.

Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

One almond
🌍 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

A Planet of Viruses – by Carl Zimmer

We've reviewed numerous books on the immune system before, and this one's mostly not about that.

Instead, this one focuses on the viruses themselves, and the part they play in our world, for good and for ill. Popular awareness tends to focus on the ill, of course.

But, there's a lot that viruses do for us too, including:

  • Weak/harmless viruses that keep our immune systems on their toes and ready

  • Bacteriophage viruses that kill and consume pathogens that, left unchecked, would do the same to us

  • Endogenous retroviruses that have become symbiotic with the human organism, without which our species would quickly go extinct

He also talks about biological warfare, and how we cannot bury our heads in the sand by avoiding research on those grounds, because someone will always do it anyway, so (as the motto of the immune system itself might say), best to be prepared.

The author is a science journalist, by the way, and has no PhD, but does have a flock of Fellowships and assorted scientific awards and honors, so he appears to be doing good work so far as the scientific community is concerned.

Bottom line: if you'd like to know more about viruses than "they're very small and can cause harm", then this book will open a whole new world.

What did you think of today's newsletter?

We always love to hear from you, whether you leave us a comment or even just a click in the poll if you're speeding by!

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Wishing you and yours the best of health today and every day,

The 10almonds Team