This one is about a study allegedly linking vitamin use with prostate cancer. The study will be published Wednesday, but already USA Today is all over it.

But wait… Get past the sensationalist headlines, and you see a different picture.

Here’s the deal. Sooner or later, men are going to get prostate cancer. Live long enough, and you get it. Some get it sooner than others.

In the past, studies were done to see if vitamins would somehow aid the body’s ability in fighting cancer. Well… It doesn’t work that way. You see those rapidly proliferating, nondifferentiated cells like those vitamins just as much as the “normal” ones do. So feed the cancer, and guess what happens? Duh! It grows!

So the news stories are coming out saying there is a link between vitamin use and cancer. This is not news. It is 3 decade old news. WE ALREADY KNOW that if you feed cancer cells they grow faster. A common tactic to treat estrogen-sensitive breast cancer cells is to deny them their estrogen. But you don’t really want to be inhibiting estrogen in normal women, do you? Of course not. Same with prostate cancer. Higher testosterone levels may make the cancer grow faster. Want to neuter us all so we’ll never get it? Be my guest!

Meanwhile… Read many, many layers deep in the articles, and the truth comes out. The vitamins don’t really affect the incidence of new cancers. It’s only about what happens once you already have it.

The study as written up in the junk science press doesn’t say anything about the types of multivitamins that the 300K high risk men were taking. It could have been anything fron one-a-days to Grandma’s Organic Brew. IF however the vitamins had contained lycopene (known to reduce the incidence of prostate cancer), then the results could have been different.

The moral of the story? Read your junk science articles carefully. Consider the source. Who gains by paying attention to the study? Who loses? And get past the fear-eliciting headlines and to the source data. What do they say? How carefully was the study done? Was it randomized, or an epidemiologic study? Does the experimental design make sense?

Everything in moderation, and with a bit of common sense.

- Bill

Some consider it a virtue; some consider it vice.There’s this whole “liberal guilt” think that goes on that frankly sickens me. In the recent first 2008 Democratic debates, some (Edwards in particular) were falling all over themselves to “apologize” for their vote pertaining to the war in Iraq. Somehow they were supposed to have known that the intelligence was bad, right? And if you don’t now apologize, you aren’t a true Democrat, right? Frankly my view of Hillary went way up when she stuck by her guns and said she made the best decision with the available information. Of all the people debating, she appeared to be one of the few with “a set.” Go figure…

Calling Topos,

Hope everyone is thinking about the upcoming SummerFest for 2007. The dates are July 27-29th and the place is the Mass Maritime Academy in Buzzards Bay, MA. (Everytime I see the picture on the left, I remember all the good times and good friends these “Fests” represent to me!)

• Sign up early yourself.
• Get your dojo to support the event. Get your friends to join you and encourage them to get their friends involved. Consider renting a bus to take your dojo’s group to Bourne this year.
• If you have something of value that you wish to teach in a one hour seminar, contact me ASAP with a brief description of your seminar
• Get the kids in your dojo to sign-up for Jr. Fest on Saturday. A full day of excitement and martial arts.
• Don’t wait. Please…. do it now!

A good friend and Uechi-ryu teacher called me recently, asking advice regarding a gifted student he had, who was “breezing” through the Uechi curriculum in record time. The teacher’s question involved rules regarding speeded-up promotions and how to teach this individual, who could memorize a kata every couple days.

Wow, as teachers, we should all have such problems.

I thought about this for awhile, as in my nearly 50 years of teaching, I too was blessed with a couple of students who had what Bobby Campbell used to describe as “Stealing” eyes. (what was seen, could be repeated) Since Bob was one of those remarkable students, I was always challenged to keep his interest in working out, while focusing his attention on areas of training that were quite unorthodox for a fighting system like Uechi-ryu, where the kata were few and relatively easy to memorize.

Gifted students like Bobby, became the target for coaches in better known sports such as basketball and football. It was hard to focus his attention on an activity where achievement was recognized by a thin colored belt rather than the adoration of cheer leaders and a supercharged crowd of fans.

The challenge to retain students, whether gifted or garden variety klutzes, who after a year or two, become gifted, remains the same. The teacher must present the martial art material with goals that are different than what Western sports and activities normally attempt to achieve.