Cooking for the Cancer Patient

When a friend is going through cancer treatment, we naturally want to help — and for many people, that means whipping up a casserole or some other comfort food.

But for those experiencing nausea, stomach upset or a metallic aftertaste from chemotherapy, some rich or heavy foods may be anything but comforting, say authors of cookbooks created with cancer patients in mind.

Good nutrition is especially important during cancer treatment because people who are nutritionally depleted don’t tolerate treatment well, says Kris Ghosh, a gynecologic oncologist and co-author (with Linda Carson and Elyse Cohen) of Betty Crocker’s Living With Cancer Cookbook: Easy Recipes and Tips Through Treatment and Beyond (Wiley Paperback, $19.99), out last month.

Cookbooks such as Living With Cancer and the American Cancer Society’s What to Eat During Cancer Treatment: 100 Great-Tasting, Family-Friendly Recipes to Help You Cope ($19.95) aim to help patients and caregivers with symptom management. Both categorize recipes by common symptoms: nausea, diarrhea, constipation, mouth soreness and difficulty swallowing, altered sense of taste, unintentional weight loss.

The countless books and news articles about cancer-fighting foods might lead you to think you can ward off this dreaded disease simply by eating better. Alas, it's not that simple. Anytime you see a headline stating "Cure cancer naturally," you should run. Running, in fact, will be more beneficial to your health than whatever that news article is pushing.

Many causes of cancer are environmental, largely from tobacco, excessive sun exposure and workplace hazards such as chemical solvents and fumes. Avoidance is the best prevention strategy here.

Aside from that, if you want the odds on your side, the foods in this list do seem to carry some cancer-protection properties.

Chemotherapy is a cancer treatment that uses drugs to stop the growth of cancer cells, either by killing the cells or by stopping the cells from dividing. Because chemotherapy targets rapidly dividing cells, healthy cells that normally grow and divide rapidly may also be affected by the cancer treatment. These include cells in the mouth and digestive tract. The severity of chemotherapy side effects also differs from person to person: for example, two people may suffer nausea from the same chemotherapy drug but one slightly queasy for four hours, while the other may vomit. Nutrition-related side effects may occur during chemotherapy. Anorexia and an abnormal loss of appetite are common side effects.

Tips: see articles for lots of good tips and suggestions!