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Diet and weight management:
Making healthy dietary choices can help you to manage your weight, your heart health, and your prostate health. Often described as the best diet to prevent cardiovascular disease,11 the Mediterranean style diet can cut risk of heart disease by 31%.6
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants .”
A Mediterranean diet is composed mostly of plant-based sources, with plenty of fruits, vegetables and wholegrains, and only small quantities of animal-based foods. By minimising foods from animal sources, the diet is low in saturated fat, and focuses on healthy unsaturated fats, such as those found in olive oil and nuts. Minimising saturated fat is well recognised as the key to a heart-healthy diet,12 but the Mediterranean diet is also thought to lessen cardiovascular risk by reducing inflammation13 and maintaining steadier blood sugar levels.14 For a guide on creating healthy balanced meals that follow these dietary patterns, take a look at Harvard School of Public Health’s Healthy Eating Plate.
Adjusting the amount you eat can help to maintain a healthy weight, which could further reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. For those of us looking to lose weight, the prospect of this can be daunting. If you can relate to this, you’re not alone. Over half of adults in Europe have a body mass index (BMI) that exceeds the healthy range,15 and this is a key contributor to cardiovascular disease.16,17 Maintaining a healthy weight can be even more difficult if you are going through hormone therapy, as it presents an added challenge of decreased metabolism and weight gain as a side effect.
While BMI is used as a gauge of cardiovascular risk in the general population, for men over 65, body fat distribution may be a more reliable indicator.18 Men who carry excess weight around their middle can lower their risk by reducing their waistline. Making healthy choices like our exercise and nutrition recommendations in this article are a great place to start, whether to reduce BMI or to lose weight around your middle. Not only can these lifestyle changes help you to get (or stay) in shape and cut your risk of cardiovascular disease, they can help you to enjoy a better quality of life and could even slow the progression of prostate cancer. If you want help to make changes to your diet, asking your doctor for a referral to a dietician is a good place to start.
Diabetes prevention:
Diabetes is a significant risk factor for heart disease, doubling the risk in comparison with someone without diabetes.19 It’s worth asking your doctor for a diabetes screening, to identify if you have high blood sugar and might be at risk of diabetes. This is even more important if you have undergone ADT, as the treatment can alter your metabolism. Fortunately, lifestyle changes and/or medication are effective ways to manage blood sugar levels.