nutrition during the chemotherapy - 1250859

Hi Samy, I'm so sorry your mother is suffering from such a disease. I know it affects the whole family like each of you being hit by a ton of bricks. It sounds like she is being treated to be cured. How wonderful and wish you all the luck and hopes that she will be.

The unfortunate thing about adding supplements that strengthen the immune system is they also strengthen the cancers ability to fight the chemo treatments.

The best thing for your mom will be to eat what she can, try to keep it balanced but find things that she will eat and have plenty of it on hand. I don't know what her dietary schedule includes but my husband was thin to begin with, lost a lot of weight before chemo started. He drank a lot of ensure after he got tiered of my protein shakes, didn't eat many of his favorite foods. I had to find things he'd eat, unfortunately I gain a lot of weight in the process. I found that if I added bacon or bacon grease to the dish he often ate it. He ate a lot of bacon and egg sandwiches. I started adding bacon grease to dishes I usually added ev olive oil to.

Another very important piece to her well being is to keep on top of any nausea that may accompany chemo. There are several meds some of which may be given during chemo infusion. Some are pills and need to be taken at home. It's important to take just as prescribed, some before nausea sets in some after.

I'll look for the pieces written on the subject of supplementation and diet and add them when I find them.

Janine
forum moderator

Here's a basic discussion of nutritional issues in cancer patients:

http://cancergrace.org/cancer-101/2010/09/03/what-is-an-optimal-diet-fo…

I would be very hesitant to follow any strict diet and very dubious of the real efficacy of any supplements or diets in fighting cancer to any meaningful degree. There is no real evidence that supplements or Noni juice or other things that are zealously recommended by people who aren't qualified cancer experts actually help anyone except the people who sell them in a vertical marketing scheme. It's certainly understandable to want to control more in an all too uncontrollable situation, but the evidence simply isn't there, and there absolutely IS a risk that some of these interventions that are actually poorly studied might actually be harmful.

-Dr. West

Dr. West beat me to the punch but I'll keep it.

Here we go. The first one is on nutrition, http://cancergrace.org/cancer-101/2010/09/03/what-is-an-optimal-diet-fo…

Here's a quote from Dr. West on supplements, "That's a big topic, but the general summary is that anti-oxidants such as vitamins A, C, and E can interfere with the mechanism by which radiation and some chemo agents exert their anti-cancer activity, so they can backfire and reduce the efficacy of the established treatment. I am comfortable with my patients taking a multivitamin, which usually doesn't contain extremely high doses of any vitamin component, but I am wary that there may well be unintended negative interactions between higher doses of individual vitamins/supplements and radiation or chemotherapy. In many cases, this hasn't been well studied, so I wouldn't want to cause alarm or overstate that there is clear evidence of a profoundly harmful effect, but the approach that I advocate is that less is more." From this conversation, http://cancergrace.org/forums/index.php?topic=7826.0

As a matter of fact there is soooo much written on the subject of supplementation that I'm just going to link you to my search results on the topic (you may need to log off to access the results depending on you browser), http://cancergrace.org/search-results?q=supplements

I hope this helps,
Janine

I don't know if it's OK to ask a question in this discussion.

Anyway, I was wondering about the negative effect of high quantities of vitamin C while on chemotherapy, if the source of vitamin C are natural fruits? My mother has been eating fruits all her life, and we speak here of natural, locally grown fruits, not the synthetic variety one usually finds in the supermarket.

She is taking a supplement of omega 3 with Q10 because her diet is scarce in fish, but no other supplement except for that.

Dear Samy
There was some research published in Uk which I cannot find in the archive yet which said that fish oil supplements should be avoided during chemo.One of the doctors on the site when I posted looked it up and thought it would be wise to stop taking these supplements during treatment .i will try to find the article
Christine

Vitamin C is an anti-oxidant, and there is some research that indicates that anti-oxidants can counter the anti-cancer effects of chemotherapy. However, I'd be far more concerned about high doses that would be taken as a mega-vitamin supplement, rather than the amounts that would be taken in anything other than a very extreme diet.

-Dr. West

Yes, I found the article with fish oil and chemotherapy, it's all over.

http://ac.els-cdn.com/S1535610811003072/1-s2.0-S1535610811003072-main.p…

Quite strong words: "both fish oil products and the algae extract induced a complete resistance to chemotherapy".

However I found another article which showed that supplements with fish oil in first line therapy for NSCLC increased the effectiveness of chemotherapy:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21328326

I haven't read this one since I don't have access (today).

My mother gets some fish oil with Q10, it's about 300mg of EPA + DHA per day (like eating 100g of salmon 3 times per week). She saw that q10 is mentioned as possibly being useful on the national cancer institute website, although serious studies are lacking.

I'm wondering however, if fish oil really stops chemo as that study suggests, why nobody saw this until now? I mean, there are people in countries like Norway who eat huge amounts of omega 3 daily, it must have been observed until now that cisplatin is useless if you eat fish?

Probably because it's a wildly overstated conclusion based on no clinical research. Research suggesting that a new treatment is miraculous based on cell lines is something we consistently say is just early work that needs to be tested in many more ways before we can draw meaningful conclusions, and I'd say the same thing about work suggesting that something makes chemotherapy useless based on cell lines. This research is very, very artificial compared to real cancer in real people, and no conclusions can be drawn from it to extrapolate into results in humans.

-Dr. West

Everything you have said has gone against so many articles that Dr. Oz has provided. Why is this?

So what exactly can we eat and not eat and why? And what is the proof other than pointing to another article?

http://www.webmd.com/ovarian-cancer/features/chemo-ovarian-cancer-side-…

http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/sea-bass-mediterranean-sauce

http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/5-foods-starve-cancer?ffb_xd_fragment

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100504124740.htm

http://www.medhelp.org/posts/Ovarian-Cancer/Does-sugar-affect-ovarian-c…

http://phys.org/news81619324.html

Dr. Oz has come under a lot of fire for abandoning actual evidence and promoting things based on generating ratings after making sensationalist claims. You're implying "Dr. Oz says it, so it must be true." Check out this New Yorker article questioning whether Dr. Oz may be doing more harm than good:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/02/04/130204fa_fact_specter

I'm not making any claims about what any one person should or shouldn't eat. I'm just saying that when there isn't sufficient evidence to say that there is a best food, best diet, or supplement that has a consistent, significant impact on improving cancer outcomes. The links you provided don't show that cancer patients do significantly better based on a diet. The honest answer is somewhere between "there isn't any food that has a significant impact" and "we don't know". There are occasional studies that show some population-based risk, including in some of the links you provided, but there are also MANY studies that don't support a united conclusion, and there is NO good evidence in any reasonable sized study that demonstrates that changing diet significantly alters cancer outcomes in an individual cancer patient.

Dr. Oz is motivated to provide over-simplified answers to complex questions, telling people what they want to hear, and he becomes more famous and wealthy by doing so. I have no motivation to provide the answers that are more realistic but aren't what people want to hear.

By all means, do what you feel is right, and nobody here is suggesting otherwise. But please don't suggest that we're trying to keep some big truth from people.

-Dr. West