A good diet and regular exercise can produce lots of benefits, as we all know—a healthy weight, better cardio-vascular health, less chance of diabetes, better bones, and on and on. And there is recent evidence that eating well may also alter the course of prostate cancer.

In a small pilot study, Dr. Dean Ornish focused on 31 men who had been diagnosed with low-risk prostate cancer and decided to follow a course of “watchful waiting”—no intervention therapies, other than “cleaning up” the way they ate and exercised, and adding some daily stress-reduction techniques. The well-known Ornish is the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute at the University of California at San Francisco, as well as a clinical professor there.

The men in the study rigorously adhered to a diet that included little ...

I’ve written before in this blog about tomatoes and tomato products and their impact on prostate cancer, and the research continues. The Mayo Clinic, which has a well-known prostate cancer program, points out on its web site that studies of large populations have produced mixed reports as to whether eating tomato or tomato-based products reduces the risk of developing prostate cancer. However, there seems to be more evidence that lycopene may slow the progression of prostate cancer, once it has taken root.

And here’s another wrinkle in the tomato-lycopene story. A Tufts University study published in 2004 in the Journal of Nutrition suggests that daily consumption of gazpacho, a cold soup full of tomatoes and other vegetables, may reduce stress.

Although this study focused on vitamin C in gazpacho, researchers noted that other nutrients and antioxidants (and that may include lycopene)