It’s one of those weird anatomical-arboreal coincidences: The human prostate is about the size and shape of a walnut. But what if it really were a walnut? For one thing, you’d never get prostate cancer. Which sounds great, until you realize that you could get “walnut curculio” or “walnut-husk maggot” instead. Better to deal with the devil you know.

And what a devil it is. Last year, 221,000 men (one of them Robert De Niro) were diagnosed with prostate cancer; that’s more than lung, colon, and brain cancers combined. And nearly 29,000 men died of it last year. These are grim statistics, but there’s reason to be optimistic.

To read the entire article, visit https://www.menshealth.com/mhlists/prevent_prostate_cancer/.