Straight Talk about Selenium and Your Health
by David J. Waters, PhD, DVM, Director, Murphy Cancer Foundation

There are 20,000 men out there whose lives could be radically changed this year. I’m talking about the choice between being diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer this year and never developing that cancer at all. The plan of evasive action is a simple one — you’ve got to get your selenium status ship-shape. And all it takes is measuring your selenium level. A simple clip of your toenails provides a reliable picture of just how much of the cancer-fighting nutrient you have been getting from your diet and supplements over the last three months. With this knowledge, you can adjust your selenium intake into the optimal range for lowering your prostate cancer risk.

Why get tested? If when it came to cancer protection and selenium more was always better, there would be no need to measure your selenium level. Our advice would be: Go right ahead and supplement all you want. But our research and the work of others has delivered a solid blow to this kind of thinking. We made an important discovery — there is a U-shaped dose response between selenium intake and genetic damage in the prostate. This means too much selenium may be as bad for you as too little. You want to be in the middle. For this reason, we don’t recommend taking selenium supplements until you first find out where you are exactly on the curve. And the staff at the Murphy Cancer Foundation is here to provide the nutritional guidance to get you where you need to be.

The SeleniumHealth® toenail test takes away the guesswork. Your physician doesn’t “guess” your cholesterol level. He measures it with a blood test and if it is out of whack, he personalizes a strategy of diet and medication to bring your cholesterol to within the desired range. If this seems smart for your heart, then why not personalize your prostate protection?

Prostate cancer is a process that takes 20-30 years to develop so it’s not too early for men in their 30s and 40s to be thinking about selenium and their own personalized prostate protection. SeleniumHealth® is a test for men of all ages because effective prevention begins now. This year alone, we estimate up to 20,000 men in the United States will develop the aggressive form of prostate cancer because their selenium levels are too low. Among these men, the sobering statistic is that approximately 1/3 will succumb to their cancers despite state-of-the-art care, exercising all available treatment options. Now, with SeleniumHealth®, it doesn’t have to be you.