KC Craichy talks with Dr. Leonard Smith about how to improve your prostate health. What should you do if your doctor says your blood levels are higher than normal?

Audio Transcription

KC: Welcome to Living Fuel TV. I’m KC Craichy with special guest, Leonard Smith. Leonard?

Leonard: KC?

KC: Great to have you.

Leonard: It’s great to be here.

KC: Imagine you’ve just gotten your blood test results back from your doctor, and your PSA was ten. Your doctor tells you there’s potentially prostate cancer as an issue. What do you do? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Leonard, this situation happens more often than not. People get their test, they get a high score on their PSA . . .

Leonard: Right.

KC: … and they really think that this is the end, because they’ve heard all the, you know, men are going to get prostate cancer.

Leonard: Right.

KC: It’s going to be deadly, they’ve got to rush out and do a biopsy. Let’s talk about this a little.

Leonard: Well, I think you’re right about that. The media really blows things up and scares people, maybe beyond where they need to be. But on the other hand, you don’t want to ignore it, either. So I would say, if you got that, the first thing to do probably would see a physician and, at least, consider getting an ultrasound, maybe a rectal exam, see if there’s something that they could feel. And you can also measure what’s called the free PSA, which gives an indication as to whether this PSA could be related to cancer, it could be inflammation, swelling. There are a lot of things that can cause it. We know that now. So those are things to start with, and I think in the future, we’re going to really see – and the future is already here, in some sense, in terms of collecting data. It’s not available immediately, but there are urine tests that measure certain protein fractions in the urine that are even better than PSA for determining what’s going on with the prostate.

KC: And that’s not quite available yet, right?

Leonard: No. As far as I know, not, no.

KC: Recently, we both looked at a study a little while ago that talked about, PSA is really not predictive of whether it’s a lethal prostate cancer or not.

Leonard: Right. In and of itself, it isn’t. And then, you’ve got to look at the variability between people that show up with something like that. I’ve had patients before that actually were diagnosed with prostate cancer who had theirs go from ten, one patient in particular went from ten up to 70. And he switched his diet radically and his stress, and went more on a plant-based diet, better hydration, sleeping better, more psycho-emotional- spiritual connection, and it came all the way back into the low teens, and then even down under ten, where it had started. So I think there’s a lot you can do about it, and I don’t think you need to have a knee-jerk reaction to immediately look at radical surgery or even radical biopsy. And when I say “radical biopsy,” they frequently will stick anywhere from 5 to 20 times in the prostate, and that isn’t without problems, too. I’ve seen people, because you’re going through the rectum into the prostate, to get the biopsy, you’re introducing …

KC: Infection.

Leonard: … bacteria. Yeah. I had a patient end up in the intensive care unit for four days after multiple trans-rectal prostate biopsies. So I’d say if you start out with a high number, go ahead and, at least, get an ultrasound. Get connected with somebody, see what your options are, start learning more about what your options are, and then really work on diet, detoxification, all the good things you talk about in your whole Living Fuel program.

KC: We have a lot of people that are talking about benign prostate enlargement…

Leonard: Mm-hmm.

KC: … that’s causing them difficulty in urination.

Leonard: Right.

KC: So we’re really talking about the same issue here, to some extent.

Leonard: Yes. Well, they say, and it probably is true, if men live long enough, they would get some prostate swelling, and that’s sort of hormonally related. I actually think it’s majorly hormonally related, because with age, men tend to, actually their estrogen goes up, their testosterone goes down, their conversion of regular testosterone to dihydrotestosterone – which is a more potent androgen, same one that causes you to lose your hair. All those things cause the prostate to swell and actually grow thicker. And that’s called BPH, or benign prostate hypertrophy.

KC: Interestingly, when someone gets older, their inflammatory cytokines rise as their body fat rises.

Leonard: Right.

KC: Because people gain weight over time…

Leonard: Exactly.

KC: And then that body fat actually becomes the largest endocrine organ in the body, creating Interleukin-6, TNF-alpha and aromatase which, as we know, converts the testosterone to estrogen.

Leonard: Into estrogen. Yeah, so.

KC: So it exacerbates the problem.

Leonard: Exactly.

KC: So getting your testosterone levels optimized, getting your body fat levels optimized, eating anti-inflammatory nutrients and dealing with the major big four, the oxidation, inflammation, glycation, and as we recently are talking about, angiogenesis.

Leonard: Correct. And angiogenesis, really, is basically a response of the body, again, to something that’s out of balance or inflamed to some level. And the beauty is, all of the wonderful vegetables and fruits and things we have actually are anti-angiogenetic, and we can go back to probably the first physician, on some level, would be Genesis 1:29, “And God gave man the fruit-bearing trees, the seed-bearing plants of the earth, and they shall be his meat.” I had a dear friend who was more versed than I am in the Bible, he said, “Yes, but after the flood, they could eat some meat if it were clean.”

KC: Clean meat. [laughs] There’s a new one.

Leonard: I think that now we’re really saying a lot there. Here we are, thousands of years later, going back to where we started, looking at this. And I really do believe that that really is the recipe for health, is – what do you say, 80 or 90%? But I think 80 to 90% of our diet should be plant-based. Yeah.

KC: We’re going to talk about that in the next segment, because this is a tremendously important subject. Thank you, Dr. Smith.

Leonard: You’re welcome.

KC: And we sure hope that this is helpful to you. God bless you, and have a great day.