 If a healthy diet can slow down the abnormal growth of prostate cancer cells, what about the abnormal growth of normal prostate cells? Benign prostatic hyperplasia, BPH, enlargement of the prostate gland, which surrounds the urethra as it exits the bladder. If the gland gets too enlarged, it can cut down on the normal flow of urine, so you can be left with hesitant flow a weak stream, inadequate emptying of the bladder, so you have to keep getting up at night to drain off as much as you can at a time. It can leave you dribbling, irritated, it can lead to urine retention, so you've got a stagnant pool in there that can get infected, ejaculation problems. In the United States, it affects about 50% of men in their 50s, 80% of men in their 80s. It's an epidemic, 16 million American men. And then it tends to just get worse. Growing larger by the day, a billion dollars a year spent on drugs to treat it, and another billion on supplements. Surgery is up next. Lots of different rotorouter-type techniques with innocent-sounding acronyms like tumped, tuna, or terp, disguising the rather unpleasant reality. The T's stand for transurethral, meaning up the penis, with an instrument that looks like this, a resectoscope. And then you're left with words like microwave thermotherapy and needle ablation. They just tunnel up there and start burning. Sometimes they use lasers to burn out a shaft. And these are the minimally invasive options. The gold standard remains transurethral resection of the prostate, where they just go up there and core it out with a loop of wire. Right effects include post-operative discomfort. You think? There's got to be a better way. It's so common in the Western world that most doctors just assume it's just an inevitable consequence of aging. But let's look around the world. In China, a medical college in Beijing reported that there was not 80% of the population affected, but about 80 cases, period. 84 cases, over a 15-year time span. It used to be considered a rare occurrence in China, but the incidence of both BPH and prostate cancer started rising quickly. And now the incidence of a prostate enlargement in China is similar to that in developed countries. Why? Well, the researchers suggest it's for the same reason for their skyrocketing cancer rates, a shift from their more traditional plant-based diet to one with more animal fat and animal protein. So BPH may be like heart disease, a natural occurrence not of aging, but of eating an unhealthy diet. It may only be standard to get an enlarged prostate and die of a heart attack for those eating the standard American diet. People eating healthy diets may be familiar with TVP, textured vegetable protein used for making a mean veggie chili. Blissfully ignorant that for others the acronym may stand for Transurethral Electrovaporization of the Prostate.