BPH Prostate enlarged

"Eat more fruit and vegetables" is advice so worn out that it has stopped meaning anything. It is worth explaining what the colours are actually doing, because the reasoning is more interesting than the slogan. Colour is a chemical signal The colour of a plant is produced by the compounds it makes to protect itself — from sunlight, from insects, from oxidation. Those compounds are the reason a red pepper is red, and they are largely what we are after when we eat it. Because different pigments do different jobs, variety of colour is a decent proxy for variety of compound. That is the whole basis of the "eat the rainbow" advice, and it is a better rule of thumb than counting portions of the same green salad. Red — tomatoes, watermelon, pink grapefruit. Lycopene, the carotenoid most often studied in relation to the prostate. It is fat-soluble and is absorbed better from cooked tomatoes with a little oil than from raw ones. Tomato sauce beats salad here, which ...

Men who smoke tend to hear about their lungs and their heart. The conversation rarely reaches the part of the body many of them would be most motivated by. It is a circulation problem first An erection is a plumbing event before it is anything else: blood has to arrive quickly and stay. That depends on arteries widening on demand, which depends on a healthy lining inside the vessel producing nitric oxide. Smoking damages exactly that lining. The result is the same process that narrows the arteries of the heart, happening in vessels roughly a tenth the diameter. That size difference is the reason erectile difficulty often shows up years before any cardiac symptom — the small pipes silt up first. This is worth restating plainly, because it is the part men miss: erectile difficulty in a smoker is frequently an early warning about the arteries in general , not an isolated bedroom problem. It deserves a conversation with a doctor for reasons that have nothing to do with sex. What...

Ask a room of men with urinary symptoms what they have been told to give up, and coffee comes up every time. It is worth separating what is well established from what is merely repeated. The part that is not in doubt Caffeine is a diuretic and a bladder irritant. Those are two separate effects and both matter. As a diuretic , it increases the volume of urine your kidneys produce. More urine in the bladder means the bladder fills faster and you go sooner. As an irritant , it appears to make the bladder muscle more inclined to contract before it is full. That is the mechanism behind urgency — the sudden, hard-to-defer need that men with an enlarged prostate find more disruptive than the frequency itself. Put together, this is why cutting caffeine is standard advice in the conservative management of lower urinary tract symptoms, before anything else is tried. It does not shrink anything. It reduces how hard your bladder is being pushed. The timing matters more than the total ...

Most men reach fifty knowing the prostate exists and very little else about it. That is a shame, because the mechanics of what goes wrong are simple enough to explain in a couple of minutes, and knowing them makes the symptoms far less frightening. Where it sits, and why that matters The prostate is a gland about the size of a walnut, sitting just below the bladder. Its job is to produce part of the fluid that carries sperm. The detail that explains almost everything else is this: the urethra, the tube that carries urine out of the bladder, runs straight through the middle of it . No other gland in the body is arranged this way. It means that when the prostate grows, it grows around a pipe — and the pipe is the one you use every time you go to the bathroom. The two growth periods The prostate grows twice in a man's life. The first is at puberty, when it roughly doubles in size and then settles. The second begins around the age of twenty-five and continues, slowly, for the re...

Vitamin D is unusual among nutrients: the body makes most of it rather than eating it, and the making depends on something as variable as how much sun reaches your skin. That is why deficiency is so common, even in sunny countries — and why a lot of men have never had it measured. What it actually is Despite the name, vitamin D behaves less like a vitamin and more like a hormone. Receptors for it are found throughout the body, including in prostate tissue, which is why it turns up in research well beyond bone health. Its established role is in calcium absorption, bone maintenance, muscle function and normal immune function. That much is not in dispute and appears on the authorised list of health claims in the European Union. Why so many people are short of it Latitude and season. Above roughly 37 degrees north — which includes most of Europe — the winter sun sits too low for the skin to make meaningful amounts of vitamin D at all, whatever the weather looks li...

Men worry about the prostate and men worry about their waistline, and they tend to treat the two as separate problems. A growing body of research suggests they are not. The measurement that matters is not weight Bathroom scales and body mass index both miss the point here. Two men of identical weight can carry that weight very differently: one around the hips and legs, the other packed inside the abdomen, around the organs. It is the second kind — visceral fat — that shows up repeatedly in research on prostate health. Waist circumference captures it far better than BMI does. A common threshold used in European guidance for men is 94 cm , with a second, higher-risk level around 102 cm. Measure at the level of the navel, standing, after breathing out normally — not pulling in. What the association looks like Studies of men with benign prostatic hyperplasia have tended to find that those carrying more abdominal fat report worse lower urinary tract symptoms: more nig...

Few numbers worry men as much as a PSA result, and few are as widely misread. A raised figure is not a diagnosis, and a normal one is not a guarantee. Here is what the test actually measures, and what the two numbers on the report mean. What PSA is PSA stands for prostate specific antigen. It is a protein made by the prostate, and its job has nothing to do with disease: it thins the semen so sperm can move. Small amounts leak into the bloodstream, and that is what the test picks up. The important word is prostate specific — not cancer specific . PSA tells you the prostate is producing more protein than usual. It does not tell you why. Why the number goes up Plenty of ordinary things raise PSA, and most of them are not cancer: Benign enlargement. A bigger prostate simply has more tissue making PSA. This is the most common reason for a raised reading in men over 50. Inflammation or infection. Prostatitis can push the number up sharply, sometimes into ranges that look...