In This Corner of Austria, 80-Year-Old Farmers Sleep Through the Night. Their Secret Is Older Than the Pill and the Knife.
Before the trip, my doctor laid it out for me like a diner with two items on the menu.
Option one was a pill to open things up. He mentioned dizziness when you stand up at night, and some changes in the bedroom he described very carefully.
Option two was a procedure. He used the word “minimally.” I heard the word “knife.”
I’m 71. I was getting up two or three times a night, and I planned every outing around a restroom. I told him I would think about it.
Then my wife Linda and I took the river cruise we had been saving for since 2019. I did not expect a pumpkin farmer to hand me option three.
The night at the farm.
The cruise offered an overnight trip into Styria, the green southeast corner of Austria, near the Slovenian border. Rolling hills, vineyards, and pumpkin fields everywhere you look.
The bus ride from the river took two hours. I took the seat by the door and drank nothing all morning. Old habit.
We stayed at a family farm that rents out three rooms. The farmer is Sepp. He is 79, still works his field every day, and speaks almost no English. His daughter-in-law Maria translated.
That night I got up at 12:40, again at 2:30, and again a little after five. The third time, I stood at the window for a while.
In the gray light, Sepp was already walking down the rows with a wooden crate. He had gone to bed when we did.
At breakfast I asked Maria, as politely as I could, whether her father-in-law ever gets up at night.
She asked him. He laughed and said something short.
“He says, only if the cow calls.”
Green oil on everything.
Breakfast explained a lot, once I knew what I was looking at.
Scrambled eggs with a dark green oil drizzled over the top. Potato salad shining with it. Dark bread for dipping. And, I am not making this up, a bowl of vanilla ice cream with a swirl of the same oil and a few green seeds.
It is pumpkin seed oil. In Styria it sits on every table, the way ketchup sits on ours.
Their pumpkins aren’t like ours, either. Sometime in the late 1800s, a pumpkin in this region grew seeds with no hard shell, just a dark green seed in a thin skin. The farmers kept planting it.
Sepp says it takes around thirty pumpkins to press one liter of oil. The name “Styrian pumpkin seed oil” is protected in Europe now, the way Champagne is.
When I asked about the oil and the nights, Maria laughed. “Oh, that’s for the water,” she said.
“For the water” is how the older people there talk about the bladder. The men take a spoon of the oil, or chew a handful of the seeds. The grandmothers make sure they do.
“My grandmother was from near Graz. She kept a jar of pumpkin seeds on the windowsill and gave my grandfather a spoonful every night. I thought it was an old superstition, until I was 68 and getting up twice a night myself.”
Barbara K. · 70 · Harrisburg, PA
★★★★★
The pharmacist in the village.
The next morning the bus stopped in a small market town. Linda needed cough drops, so we went into the pharmacy. It looked older than my country.
On the counter, right next to the cough drops, were little paper bags of pumpkin seeds and boxes of pumpkin seed capsules.
The pharmacist, Frau Leitner, spoke good English. I told her about Sepp, and about my two options back home.
She asked what the problem actually was. Getting up at night? A sudden urge you can’t put off? A slow stream?
I said all three, depending on the day.
“Then you have two problems, not one,” she said. “A pipe, and an alarm.”
The pipe and the alarm.
The first problem is the pipe. After 60, the prostate grows in almost every man. It squeezes the tube the bladder empties through. That is the slow stream, and the feeling of never quite finishing.
The second problem is the alarm. The bladder is a muscle, and with age it gets jumpy. It squeezes before it is full, and calls it an emergency when it isn’t one.
In one study of 1,418 men examined for urinary trouble, about six in ten had exactly that jumpy bladder. Women get the alarm too. No prostate required.
That is why Linda was up at night almost as often as I was. She had just never mentioned it.
“Your pill opens the pipe,” Frau Leitner said. “The operation cuts the pipe wider. Neither one talks to the alarm.”
That is why so many men who take the pill, or have the procedure, are still up at night. One man I read about afterwards had the procedure, and wrote that he still got up four times a night, and that was the problem he was trying to fix.
“Here,” Frau Leitner said, tapping the bag of seeds, “this is what people try first. It works on the alarm.”
“My stream was fine. It was the sudden ‘go now’ that wrecked my nights and my golf game. Nobody ever told me the bladder could be the problem and not the prostate.”
Gary N. · 68 · Tucson, AZ
★★★★★
See the softgel I brought home instead →
Older than both.
Back on the boat, I did what I always do. I looked it up. I didn’t want to come home with a souvenir that was only folklore.
Germany’s Commission E, the expert panel that reviewed herbal remedies for the German government, listed pumpkin seed for an “irritable bladder” and early prostate trouble in 1985.
In 2012, the European Medicines Agency, Europe’s version of our FDA, recognized its traditional use for an overactive bladder and for an enlarged prostate.
The biggest study ever run on pumpkin seed came out of Germany. 1,431 men, followed for a full year. Pumpkin seed beat the placebo.
In Japan, researchers gave pumpkin seed oil to 45 men and women with an overactive bladder. After twelve weeks, their symptom scores had dropped. The study was small and had no placebo group, but it fit everything Frau Leitner told me.
| The way | What it works on | What it asks of you |
|---|---|---|
| The pill | Opens the pipe | Every day, for good. Dizziness standing up, bedroom changes for some men. |
| The procedure | Cuts the pipe wider | Recovery time. For some men, the same nights afterwards. |
| The Styrian way | Calms the alarm | One softgel with supper. The prostate side gets help too. |
The pill came along in my lifetime. The procedure has been around since before I was born. Styrian farmers were pressing that green oil long before either one.
That is the third way. Not instead of your doctor. Before the knife, and alongside anything you already take.
Why nobody back home told me.
It’s a salad oil. Nobody can patent a pumpkin seed, so nobody spends millions telling American doctors about it.
Insurance pays for the pill and the procedure. Nobody pays for a farmer’s habit.
And the pumpkin seed oil you’d find in an American store is usually either roasted for salad dressing, or a thin, cheap capsule nobody would bother to study.
Frau Leitner had one more piece of advice. “The roasted oil is for the salad. For the bladder, look for cold-pressed. Heat damages what you want.”
And for men, she said, take it with saw palmetto, which works on the pipe side. One for the alarm, one for the pipe.
What I take now.
At home, I found exactly what she described, in a softgel. 1,000 mg of cold-pressed pumpkin seed oil and 320 mg of saw palmetto. One a day, with supper.
No spoon of oil at breakfast. No pocketful of seeds. Linda takes the same softgel. For her, the pumpkin seed is the part that matters.
It isn’t magic, and it doesn’t cure anything. It calms the alarm the way it has for Sepp’s family, and the saw palmetto looks after the pipe.
See today’s price on the one we take →
What changed, and when.
“My doctor gave me the same two choices. I wanted to try something first. My son-in-law, who is from Germany, laughed and said everybody there knows about pumpkin seed. Week four I was up once. Week six I drove to Albuquerque without stopping.”
Luis A. · 70 · El Paso, TX
★★★★★
“I don’t leak. I just wake up at two and four like an alarm clock. I was told to drink less and live with it. Three weeks into the softgel, I was up once. By week six, most nights I sleep through, and I’m not dragging through my mornings anymore.”
Denise W. · 63 · Augusta, GA
★★★★★
In the spring I went back to my doctor. I told him about Sepp and showed him the label. He said, “Well, keep doing what you’re doing.”
We left the two options on the menu, for later, if I ever need them.
Try the Styrian way for 90 days →
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Three pouches come as Buy 2, Get 1 Free. Five come as Buy 3, Get 2 Free: two more pouches for the price of one, and five months of nights.
One pouch on its own also doesn’t ship free. Five is the one most people choose, and it’s what I’d tell my brother to buy.
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