Getting a little sunshine may be one way for men to cut their risk of prostate cancer. A large study presented at a cancer conference Thursday found that men with higher levels vitamin D in their blood were half as likely to develop aggressive forms of the disease than those with lower amounts. Doctors are not ready to recommend the “sunshine vitamin” without more study, but many see little harm in getting the 15 minutes a day that the body needs to make enough of this nutrient. “When you were little and your mother said, `Go outside and play,’ it wasn’t just to get you out of her hair,” but may have been instinctive advice about something good for health, said Dr. Eric Klein, a prostate cancer specialist from the Cleveland Clinic. He had no role in the research, which involved nearly 15,000 men in the Physicians’ Health Study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School (news - web sites) in Boston. Five years ago, this study found that men who consumed a lot of calcium had modestly higher rates of prostate cancer. The new findings fit with that notion, because too much calcium lowers vitamin D, and are especially believable because researchers got them by measuring blood samples rather than relying on what men said they ate — an imprecision that has hurt past studies of food and cancer risk.
