Diet and Cancer

Anyone know about the efficacy of special diets in dealing with cancer? Turmeric seems to be some kind of magic ingredient but I am a little sceptical.

Bought this book for my Dad http://www.amazon.co.uk/Anticancer-A-New-Way-Life/dp/0718156846/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335470422&sr=1-1 and there’s a lot of interesting facts about diet and cancer.

first thing i would say is ask your cancer nurses they have seen it all

was diagnosed christmas eve my treatment ends on may 24th on may 25th i will be a recovering cancer patient
i started looking at diets and from the outset decided to eat what my body wanted.. i seem to have got a pasty, pies, milkshake craving..and spicy things due to the metallic taste of everything due to the chemo
also have doubled my daily fruit intake

Diet and cancer are associated. While it is not yet possible to provide quantitative estimates of the overall risks, it has been estimated that 35 percent of cancer deaths may be related to dietary factors.[1] Almost all cancers (80–90%) are caused by environmental factors,[2] and of these, 30–40% of cancers are directly linked to the diet.[3] While many dietary recommendations have been proposed to reduce the risk of cancer, few have significant supporting scientific evidence.[4] The primary dietary factors that increase risk are obesity and alcohol consumption; with a diet low in fruits and vegetables and high in red meat being implicated but not confirmed.[5][6] Consumption of coffee is associated with a reduced risk of liver cancer.[7] Studies have linked consumption of red or processed meat to an increased risk of breast cancer, colon cancer, and pancreatic cancer, a phenomenon which could be due to the presence of carcinogens in foods cooked at high temperatures.[8][9] Thus dietary recommendation for cancer prevention typically include: “mainly vegetables, fruit, whole grain and fish and a reduced intake of red meat, animal fat and refined sugar

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_and_cancer

Yes, I know it’s wiki, but it would seem a decent starting point.

showerman – having just had a wee scare myself, might I offer my best wishes on a speedy recovery!

crikey – I think the OP was really looking for a diet that helped once cancer was contracted, not a means of reducing the likelihood of it occurring.

Oh, sorry, I was assuming that it was a general enquiry rather than a specific one, my mistake. 😳

high alkaline diet ?

maybe worth a bit of research.

Kev

Turmeric seems to be some kind of magic ingredient but I am a little sceptical.

I read about this a while back. IIRC the science behind it is there’s a chemical in turmeric which ‘might’ help, but you’d have to consume pounds of the stuff to make any difference. I think it’s another Daily Mail slow news day special.

“A Low Carbohydrate, High Protein Diet Slows Tumor Growth and Prevents Cancer Initiation”

http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/71/13/4484.full

Consult your oncologist though.

The curcumin in turmeric is an anti-inflammatory, I don’t recall reading anything about it being anti-cancer.

Good link bwaarp, thanks. I’ll get told off if I mention iDiet again tho 😉 And yes it’s about helping recovery from cancer rather than preventing it.

Eh, they just found out red meats can cause cancer so I wouldn’t go barking up that tree quite yet molgrips.

Diet seems to be more complicated than trying to find a single cure for flu.

But yeah consult your oncologist, hope it works out for you/whoever this is about.

I’ll get told off if I mention iDiet again tho

Grrrr!

No, I’ve decided it’s me being a knob, so carry on! 🙂

Good job I’m not on a high red meat diet then eh?

Yup

My personal feeling is that if one didn’t have cancer the best diet is , nuts + beans, wholewheat grains, fruits, fish and poultry. In order of descending quantity. Basically apart from the whole grains roughly what monkeys eat.

Never going to be able to feed the planet on a purely hunter gatherer diet though, so grains are a must.

My personal feeling is that if one didn’t have cancer the best diet is , nuts + beans, wholewheat grains, fruits, fish and poultry. In order of descending quantity. Basically apart from the whole grains roughly what monkeys eat.

‘Tis true!

Well of course they don’t eat fish, they eat other monkeys or birds (maybe).

Fish is a good and healthier alternative to red meats and cannibalism.

What no bacon?

my dad bought a book about diet for cancer patients and did his own bit of research, basically it all seemed to boil down to cutting sugars out his diet as cancer uses it as a fuel or something.

Although there’s some interesting research out there about tumour-inhibiting diets, the key thing as a former patient is, once diagnosed, picking a diet which supports you best during treatment, rather than one which theoretically works in isolation, particularly in a mouse model.

Your body’s needs during radiotherapy, chemotherapy or both may well be different, and the treatment can screw with your appetite and sense of taste, particularly when steroids or nausea are part of the mix. If you fancy a particular food on a bad day, you shouldn’t be worrying about whether it’s a tumour inhibitor. Better to just get something down you.

I spent much of my chemo cycles drinking large quantities of diet coke because it alleviated nausea. Probably not on the recommended theoretical diet sheet. The steroids meant I craved carbs and felt ravenously hungry most of the time, so it was all I could do to only put a stone on over 6 months.

While a healthy balanced diet is a worthwhile aim, there are some days when it will go out of the window, and patients shouldn’t have the extra worry that they are harming their chances of remission by having an extra bit of fat or sugar.

molgrips – Member

Anyone know about the efficacy of special diets in dealing with cancer? Turmeric seems to be some kind of magic ingredient but I am a little sceptical.

Load of bollox.

a phenomenon which could be due to the presence of carcinogens in foods cooked at high temperatures.[8][9] Thus dietary recommendation for cancer

I have found some stuff along these lines wrt to acrylamide.
Which is a very toxic substance attributed with effecting cells at the Chromosome level.

Just my 2p worth.

I read about this a while back. IIRC the science behind it is there’s a chemical in turmeric which ‘might’ help, but you’d have to consume pounds of the stuff to make any difference. I think it’s another Daily Mail slow news day special.

In “Bad Science” the author says that tumeric does indeed have anti-oxidant properties, but that you would need to eat a ridiculous amount for any sort of effective amount.

In addition he points out that the body needs and produces oxidants to fight viruses, etc.

And he also says that watching anti-oxidants do desirable things in lab dishes does not translate to what will happen in humans. In one control group study where they have people anti-oxidant supplements to try to mimic a type of diet that was shown to be effective against cancers, the trial group taking the anti-oxidant pills actually did worse and more people got cancer.

molgrips – Member

Anyone know about the efficacy of special diets in dealing with cancer? Turmeric seems to be some kind of magic ingredient but I am a little sceptical.

Load of bollox.

clearly there is some basis and it is not a load of bollox:

http://cancerhelp.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancer-questions/can-turmeric-prevent-bowel-cancer

My Stepmum went on a week-long retreat to learn about this. There seemed to be a lot of interesting stuff involved.

She died.

YMMV.

Marks Daily Apple did an interesting series of articles on the supposed benefits of IF (Intermittent Fasting) recently. This topic was mentioned. Of course, the mind is a powerful thing and possibly just believing that what you’re doing is helpful might be enough!

As someone working vaguely in this field (Public Health; they don’t let me near any patients but I spend a lot of time going over trial data on cancer treatments: I’m not aware of anything dietary that will help ‘treat’ cancer. As others have said best thing is to just eat as well as you can during treatment to offset the effects of treatment.

Tons of evidence SUGGESTING that certain types of diet MAY reduce your risk of cancer long term, but most of it just boils down to ‘eat a varied, fresh diet containing lots of fruit and veg and little meat’ ie common sense.

clearly there is some basis and it is not a load of bollox:

http://cancerhelp.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancer-questions/can-turmeric-prevent-bowel-cancer

There are a lot of substances which show promising anti-cancer activity in the laboratory when added to cancer cells, or even in mice, but which do not translate into meaningful treatments in humans, usually because the dose you’d have to give to deliver it to the tumour is impractical or dangerous.

Reading that, it’s clear that they are at pains not to dismiss it, because that would be as unscientific as promoting it. But the drift seems to be that delivering a meaningful dose via diet to anything beyond the bowel is unlikely, and the amount of tumeric you’d have to eat to make a difference in the bowel might cause other problems, so should be approached with a great deal of caution.

So yes, ‘It’s bollox’ might be overstating it, but if it were a relative of mine, I’d be very sceptical indeed.

Haven’t read this article yet but it’s “on my list”

Huang HC, Chiu SH and Chang TM. Inhibitory effect of [6]-gingerol on melanogenesis in B16F10 melanoma cells and a possible mechanism of action. Bioscience, Biotechnology & Biochemistry. 75(6):1067-72. 2011.

Tons of evidence SUGGESTING that certain types of diet MAY reduce your risk of cancer long term, but most of it just boils down to ‘eat a varied, fresh diet containing lots of fruit and veg and little meat’ ie common sense.

Your body’s needs during radiotherapy, chemotherapy or both may well be different, and the treatment can screw with your appetite and sense of taste, particularly when steroids or nausea are part of the mix. If you fancy a particular food on a bad day, you shouldn’t be worrying about whether it’s a tumour inhibitor. Better to just get something down you

In my humble opinion. My mother in law worked at a hospital offering advice on diet – mainly to those with food intollerances but also to cancer patients (including her husband who died a few years ago). While a healthy diet is always going to be benfecial you also need to eat. If you are stuggling to eat then sometimes any calories you can take in will be good. I know her husband ate a lot of chocolate as he found he could eat little else after chemo and was loosing weight at an alarming rate. Also ginger in various forms to combat nausea. Mars milkshakes too, purely for the calories.

For those of you who have read the badscience book and blog I’m sure it would also be worth mentioning that you should discount the placebo effect.

it would also be worth mentioning that you should discount the placebo effect.

or shouldn’t, and the ‘care’ effect.

There is so much research and yet so many different cancers. Having had a dalliance with the big c I’ve gone veggie which has suited me as I couldn’t tolerate red meat at all.
Each to their own. During treatment owt you can get to stay down and tastes nice is good for you.

shouldn’t 😳

Prevention via diet – plausible

cure via diet – boolax