Professor Nelson explains that there's something about diets of people who get prostate cancer that are a little different from the diets of people that don't.

William Nelson, M.D., Ph.D. is a researcher at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins. His research focuses on the molecular causes involved in the development of prostate cancer. This has led to the discoveries that inflammation, diet, and gene "silencing" have roles in prostate cancer development. “There's something about diets of folks who get prostate cancer that are a little different from the diets of folks that don't. And it is in every way, a bad diet if you will, a stereotypical Western diet – too much dietary fat, particularly too much animal fat, probably even too much animal fat from red meat and not enough fruits and vegetables, antioxidants, micro-nutrients, and the like. People eat a pound, a pound and a half, two pounds of food a day. And it is one of the most complicated chemical mixtures that you can even ponder. There's all kinds of things in food. There are things that we know of in food related to the way food is processed which can clearly cause cancers. One we worked on a little bit is a compound that appears in meats – chicken, steak, hamburgers and cheeseburgers and whatnot. Depending on how it's prepared or how it's cooked. If they're grilled or cooked to a very high temperature, there's a reaction between high- energy phosphate- containing energy molecules in flesh foods like phosphocreatine and amino acids like phenylalanine and others. Just the heat will drive this reaction to create a variety of carcinogens that are called heterocyclic amines. Red meats can form another set of carcinogens as well. If you watch a hamburger on the grill, you'll notice that the fat tends to melt when you grill it and as it melts, it drips out and becomes charred and you make these polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon type compounds. You could say, wait a minute, heterocyclic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, what are these things? Well you make the same things when you light a tobacco leaf on fire. In one case, you smoke them, which we know is not good for you. In the other case, we ingest them, which we suspect is not good for you.”

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