 Preliminary, but impressive, results. A flaxseed-supplemented lower-fat diet appeared to decrease cellular proliferation rates in men with pre-cancerous changes in their prostates. However, given the composite nature of the intervention, both a lower-fat diet and flaxseeds, it's unknown whether the effects can be attributed to the flaxseed supplementation of fat-restricted diet, or both factors working together. To figure that out, you'd have to design some study where you split men into four groups, or a control group, a flaxseed-only group, a lower-fat-only group, and then a flaxseed and lower-fat group. And so that's exactly what they did. 161 prostate cancer patients, at least 21 days before their prostate removal surgery, were randomly assigned to one of those four arms. And as the title describes, it was apparently the flaxseeds, but not dietary fat restriction alone that reduced prostate cancer proliferation rates in men pre-surgery. Here are the numbers. Whether they were eating their usual or lower-fat diet, it was the men eating the flaxseed that saw their tumor proliferation rates significantly drop. Though if you look at what they actually ate, the quote-unquote low-fat diet groups never really got down to the target 20% calories from fat. They did drop their fat intake, but you'd hardly call 25-28% calories from fat a low-fat diet. Still, the lower-fat groups were the only ones who saw a significant drop in cholesterol and body weight, so there are certainly benefits. Bottom line, further studies are needed before we can definitively support flaxseed supplementation as a proven complementary therapy for prostate cancer. To date, however, the evidence suggests that flaxseed is a good low-cost source of nutrition and is well-accepted and safe to use, so why not give it a try?