[The following assumes there is a causal relationship...] As a reader of Mark's Daily Apple and a follower of a Paleo diet, this study surprised me. Yes, the

[The following assumes there is a causal relationship...] As a reader of Mark's Daily Apple and a follower of a Paleo diet, this study surprised me. Yes, the study can be argued against, but I have a more fundamental issue: "optimizing" your diet may be impossible. The needs of the human body and the composition of nutrients/macro-nutrients in food are both wildly varying and neither was "designed", so it's possible that strategies which keep you in great health in young/middle-age will produce ill-health later on. There's little evolutionary pressure exerted by grandparents on grandkids and prostate cancer is usually a very slow growing, late stage disease, so it shouldn't be inconceivable that a young/middle-age favoring diet harms late-stagers. That said, prostate cancer (which my father had) has a very high survival rate, so I'd happily trade a litany of conditions potentially caused by a "non-good" diet for prostate cancer caused by a "good" diet.