 A cancer diagnosis is seen as a teachable moment in medicine where we can try to get people to eat healthier. But research suggests that male cancer patients in particular may be reluctant to introduce dietary modification. This has been attributed to dietary changes often being viewed as mimicking feminine eating behaviors, such as emphasizing an increase in foods and vegetables. Although healthy eating might enhance long-term survival, few men with prostate cancer make dietary changes to advance their well-being. Many of the cancer survival trials, for example, require adherence to strict plant-based diets, and though researchers try providing extensive nutrition education and counseling programs, dietary adherence was still a challenge. The way Dean Ornish was apparently able to reverse the progression of prostate cancer with a plant-based diet home-delivering prepared meals to their door, figuring men are so lazy they'll just eat whatever is put in front of them. After all, male culture tends to encourage men to go for convenience food, meat, and beer. Take Men's Health magazine, for example. Included in their list of things men should never apologize for, liking McDonald's, not offering a vegetarian alternative, and laughing at people who eat trail mix. Featured articles with titles like Vegetables are for Girls, and sections like Men and Meat, there's only one kind of flesh we like better, and even then, she'd better know how to grill. To appeal to male sensibilities, doctors are advised to use body as machine metaphors, framing men's health in terms of mechanical objects, such as cars requiring tuning. But if men are so concerned about their masculinity and manhood, maybe we should instead share a bit about what prostate cancer treatment entails. The prostate is situated at the base of the penis, and so when you core it out with a radical prostatectomy, you lose about an inch off your penis if it gets erect at all. Only 16% of men undergoing the procedure will regain their pre-surgery level of erectile functioning. Patients are typically quoted at erectile dysfunction rates, around 60% or 70%, but studies have generally considered erectile function recovery as just the ability to maintain erection hard enough for penetration, about 50% of the time. So getting it up occasionally is considered recovery. But when a surgeon tells a patient he will recover function, the patient probably assumes that means the kind of function they had prior to surgery, and that only happened 16% of the time, and only 4% of the time in men over 60. Only 1 in 25 get their baseline sexual function back. And it's not just erections, but other problems like OAP, orgasm-associated pain, even years later, and urinary incontinence during foreplay, stimulation, or orgasm. The vast majority of couples overestimate how much function they're going to recover. Couples reported feeling loss and grief. Having cancer is bad enough without the additional losses. You'd think that would be enough to motivate men to improve their diets. But almost a fourth of men, newly diagnosed with prostate cancer, state that they would prefer to have their lives cut short rather than living with a diet that prohibits beef and pork. More men would rather be impotent than improve their diet. It appears pleasures of the flesh may sometimes even trump pleasures of the flesh.