Lower Your PSA, Perform Better in Bed
Healthy prostate, powerful erections. Here are seven foods and supplements that make everything in your pants happier.
Sooner or later, your prostate gets your attention. It may start to swell up in your 40s, causing you to make multiple nighttime bathroom trips. Then, your doctor will start nagging you about getting a PSA test to begin cancer monitoring.
However, the PSA test is problematic. One study concluded that you're 120-240 times more likely to be misdiagnosed as having prostate cancer from a positive PSA test. And you're 40-80 times more likely to get unnecessary surgery or radiation than you are to have your life saved by it (1). Overtreatment has caused many men to suffer from erectile dysfunction and incontinence (2).
These false positives, if they occur, are much more likely to happen when you're older. Even so, it's a good idea to take preemptive care of the organ when you're still young. Already past the age of 40? It's time to use some sensible, prostate-supporting strategies.
Most of the following foods and supplements also strengthen erections, so if prostate health isn't a concern right now, at least adopt a couple of them to keep everything "down there" working optimally.
Prostate and Erection-Supporting Foods & Supps
Here are several foods you should be eating regularly, all of which help freeze or lower PSA levels, along with some supplement choices:
1. Tomatoes and Pomegranate
Tomatoes contain lycopene, a polyphenol with powerful antioxidant properties. But lycopene has some other potent mechanisms through which it may lower prostate cancer risk.
Lycopene is more absorbable through cooked tomatoes and tomato products like pastes and sauces. Eating them with a little fat, like olive oil, further helps absorption. But even raw tomatoes seem to help, and the dark red variety contains the most lycopene. Try adding some sort of tomato product to your diet at least five times a week.
There's also evidence that shows pomegranate slows the rise of PSA levels. Pomegranate contains large amounts of punicalagin compounds. Punicalagin has a broad spectrum of effects, including promoting prostate health and acting as a natural Viagra. Punicalagin metabolites elevate nitric oxide (NO), which relaxes the smooth muscle fibers of the penile arteries, allowing more blood to flow into the organ. You can try drinking six ounces of 100% pure juice a day, but a lot of the good stuff in pomegranates is bound up in the pith and rind.
If revolving your diet around tomatoes and super-tart pomegranate juice isn't appealing, supplement with P-Well Prostate Support (Buy at Amazon). P-Well contains 30 mg of lycopene and 180 mg of punicalagin from pomegranate whole fruit extract.
2. Curcumin
There have been over 2,000 studies where this polyphenol was found to be a potent warrior against cancers, including prostate cancer. Curcumin also increases the amount of nitric oxide in the blood, allowing more blood to flow into the penis when the arousal fairy strikes.
Unfortunately, the body doesn't absorb curcumin very well. Simply ingesting it as a main constituent of turmeric or curry powder, regardless of the amount eaten, isn't going to have much of an effect. As such, you need to take Micellar Curcumin (Buy at Amazon), the kind you absorb. This formula contains solid lipid curcumin particles that produce 95 times more free curcumin in the bloodstream than standardized curcumin with piperine (Gota VS et al, 2010).
3. Broccoli and Carrots
Sulforaphane is a compound found in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli. Studies show that it inhibits a particular enzyme in prostate cancer cells (4).
Chow down on some carrots, too. Epidemiologists found a stunning correlation between eating carrots and the rate of prostate cancer (3). They found that the more often men ate carrots, the less likely they were to get prostate cancer. For every 10 grams of carrots consumed each day, men reduced their risk of developing prostate cancer by 5%.
That means that if men had at least 50 grams of carrots a day, their chances of developing prostate cancer could be cut in half. The researchers think it has something to do with the large number of cancer-fighting carotenoids (including lycopene) found in carrots.
Sadly, doubling the amount of carrots eaten only goes so far. Increasing your carrot intake to 100 grams doesn't drop the chances of getting prostate cancer to zero, so don't suddenly think you figured out a way to cheat death.
Anyhow, the average carrot weighs about 72 grams, and a cup of chopped carrots weighs around 122 grams, so eating 50 grams a day is pretty easy.
4. Pycnogenol
Pycnogenol (maritime pine bark extract) is another polyphenol shown to shrink prostates just as well as the prescription drug finasteride. In one study, scientists found that rats that had their prostates artificially ballooned up through testosterone injections and then received pycnogenol experienced the following:
"…the oral administration of pycnogenol in rat model of BPH (benign prostate hyperplasia) significantly decreased the weight of the prostate and prostatic hyperplasia, which resulted from lower DHT concentrations in the serum and prostate. Our findings thus strongly suggested that pycnogenol may be a useful agent for the treatment of BPH." (5)
The doses they used were large, but so was the amount of testosterone the rats were given. Still, two daily dosages of 200 mg. should work as prostate insurance in humans. Fixing or curing an already-enlarged prostate might take heftier doses, though. However, much smaller doses (40 mg.) have been shown to treat erectile function. You can get pycnogenol here (Buy at Amazon).
References
- Horgan J. "Why I Won't Get a PSA Test for Prostate Cancer." Scientific American, June 14, 2017.
- Ablin R, MD. "The Great Prostate Mistake." The New York Times, March 9th, 2010.
- Xu X et al. "Dietary carrot consumption and the risk of prostate cancer." Nur J Nutr. 2014 Dec;53(8):1615-23.
- Watson GW et al. "H3K9me3 attenuates sulforaphane-induced apoptotic signaling in PC3 prostate cancer cells." Oncogenesis. 2014;3:e131.
- Je-Won K et al. "Inhibitory effects of Pycnogenol®, a pine bark extract, in a rat model of testosterone propionate-induced benign prostatic hyperplasia." Lab Anim Res. 2018 Sep;34(3):111-117.
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