Reliable Sauces

Get ready for the onslaught of stories and advertisements from people you probably shouldn’t trust, subject: prostate cancer.

Joe Biden, we are told, has a particularly nasty case of it, well advanced and not thought to be curable. It is strange that it just popped up at this late stage all of a sudden. It doesn’t usually work that way. It’s growth is typically very slow, to the extent that sometimes physicians advise against treating it at all, because the patient is most likely to die of something else first.

We do, though, live in peculiar and alarming times. There are many who have come to suspect what has been called “turbo cancer” — the sudden appearance of terribly aggressive cancers in those who received mmRNA anti-COVID “vaccines.” Some say, and they claim evidence for it, that the purported vaccines have themselves caused the cancers. Others say that the increase in cancers is due to the medical establishment having during the pandemic put medicine on hold so they would have time to sell the “vaccines,” so that many cancers that would have been discovered in time to effectively treat them weren’t. Others say that there is simply no such thing.

In a time when it is foolish to trust anyone or anything, there’s no way of knowing which of these possibilities is the right answer. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s a combination of those suspected factors. We can’t know, and for whatever reason no one seems to be investigating. Nor it it likely anyone will: the head of the federal department that is supposed to be in charge of such things is a croaking nutjob. He is aided by people who played doctors on television. His boss, during the pandemic, pushed real — crooked, but real — physicians off the stage so that he could offer his typically Trumpian notion that the cure might be sunshine and Clorox. Really.

Biden has had all his COVID vaccines. He has also had COVID, because the vaccine doesn’t seem to be good for anything except the enrichment of pharmaceutical companies. So by the lights of the most fervid turbo cancer believers there’s no question as to why a perfectly functioning former president’s life is suddenly endangered by cancer.

I don’t know the answer and if anyone else does that person is remaining silent.

Let’s talk instead about what we do know, and that’s something men can do to help prevent they getting prostate cancer themselves. Close to 10 percent of men will come down with it, and there are things you can do to avoid being in that group.

At the top of the list is this: eat tomato paste, every day. Have a balanced diet — eat your damn broccoli! — and add tomato paste.

I’ve written about this before. You might think I’m as crazy as everyone mentioned above, but read on and learn that though I might be nuts, this isn’t the way to prove it.

It comes down to this: men who consume two ounces or more of tomato paste — not tomato sauce, fresh tomatoes, or ketchup, tomato paste — are less likely and possibly far less likely to have prostate issues including prostate cancer.

It was originally thought that a beneficial nutrient in tomatoes, lycopene, was the effective ingredient, but studies involving lycopene alone have not shown it to be effective. In fact, one study resulted in a slight increase in prostate cancer among participants who consumed a lycopene supplement alone. It seems that there is some combination of nutrients in tomatoes, especially concentrated in tomato paste, that together do the trick. Or else some other constituent of tomatoes is the effective ingredient and we don’t know what it is.

One study, from eight years ago, involved giving prostate cancer patients a three-week course of tomato products. Here was the conclusion: “Three week nutritional interventions with tomato-products alone or in combination with selenium and n-3 [omega-3] fatty acids lower PSA in patients with non-metastatic prostate cancer. Our observation suggests that the effect may depend on both aggressiveness of the disease and the blood levels of lycopene, selenium and omega-3 fatty acids.” This was during the time when lycopene was still assumed to be the lone effective effective ingredient.

A year earlier a meta study (a combination and analysis of other research), also concentrated on lycopene as expressed in tomatoes, And concluded that “tomato intake may be associated with a reduced risk of prostate cancer.” The effect appeared to be greatest in Asian and Oceanic populations.

Nor is this especially new. In 2006 an analysis concluded that “A majority of prospective and case-control epidemiological studies support the hypothesis that diets rich in tomatoes and tomato products are associated with a reduced risk of prostate cancer.”

These studies involved all tomato products, not just tomato paste, and some were beginning to notice that it wasn’t just lycopene but the combination of other nutrients in tomatoes, too, that might be effective — but that something was reducing not just prostate cancer but prostate problems over all. Prostate problems are very common among men as they age.

“The consumption of tomatoes and tomato products has been associated with a reduced risk of prostate cancer,” began a 2006 report. “We observed a decrease of 10.77% in prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels in patients with benign prostate hyperplasia who were submitted to daily ingestion of tomato paste. . . . Dietary ingestion of 50 g of tomato paste per day for 10 weeks significantly reduced mean plasma PSA levels in patients with benign prostate hyperplasia, probably as a result of the high amount of lycopene in tomato paste.” PSA is “prostate-specific antigen,” and the lower the better.

Tomato paste is the high-powered stuff that comes in the tiny, six-ounce cans. It is thick and filled with flavor. The stuff I get, from Aldi because it’s cheap, contains only tomatoes and a little citric acid, a food preservative that is also generally good for you. Nothing else.

Unlike many substances offered as miracle cures, ground bark of exotic plants and the like, there is no downside to consuming tomato paste. Unless you have an unusual intolerance of tomatoes, the stuff is good for you. It aids your health in general. The other alleged remedies are touted primarily by those who are trying to sell them.

For example, a substance called “saw palmetto” is widely offered as a treatment for the non-cancerous prostate problem known as enlarged prostate, or benign prostatic hyperplasia.

“The best-conducted research shows no benefits from saw palmetto for BPH. During one study, 225 men with moderate to severe BPH were treated with either a placebo or 160 milligrams (mg) of saw palmetto, taken twice daily for a year,” reports Harvard Medical School. “The investigators detected no difference in outcomes, but they also acknowledged that doses tested in the study may have been too low to produce measurable effects.” Some of the people in the study reported small improvements — but 40 percent of those were from the group that received the placebo!

So far, the only thing that you can just go out and buy that can reduce your risk of prostate cancer is tomato products, and the best of these is tomato paste. (Again, beyond a good diet, good fats, and perhaps a small-dose selenium supplement.)

If you want, you can simply eat a couple of big glops of tomato paste each day. I’ve been known to do that, and it’s not as bad as you’d think, but there are better ways to incorporate it in our diets. You can replace ketchup with tomato paste — and discover it actually tastes better. It is an excellent base for salsa — just chop up a small onion, some fresh cilantro leaves, fresh jalapenos if you want it spicy, and some lemon juice. It’s a lot better than the stuff in the jar for way too much money.

Or you can employ tomato paste in making tomato sauce. In fact, because some of the micronutrients in tomatoes are fat-soluble, and research suggests as mentioned above that omega-3 fatty acids are helpful (which they are for many other reasons as well), making your own tomato sauce with tomato paste, olive oil, and whatever other ingredients you choose is a good way to get tomato paste into your system. The point is to consume a cuple ounces of tomato paste every day.

Look it up. Read the links above. Explore the literature.

Just don’t take medical advice from the president or the former president. They do not know what they’re talking about.

While it has never been the best idea to take medical advice from the government, now it is a very poor idea.

We’re on our own, but we’re not without resources.

Such as tomato paste.