Eating for recovery

“Now that you have cancer, what you eat will make no difference to the outcome.”Many people have told me their well-meaning doctors gave them this advice, and it is both common and troubling.

On reflection, the advice makes little sense. Would it really mean you could eat poison and suffer no consequence? Does anyone seriously believe that a poor junk-food diet during chemotherapy would not improve if switched to a good one? And what about recent research showing that what you eat can actually be therapeutic and improve outcomes for people with cancer?

THE KEY DECISIONS
When facing cancer, there are essentially three food choices: change nothing, eat sensibly, or eat therapeutically.


1. Change Nothing
Simply keep eating exactly as you did in the period leading up to your diagnosis.

• Benefits: No stress, no fuss, business as usual, and easy for everyone involved.
• Disadvantages:
  
  • Since the 1970’s and the work of Doll and Peto, we have known that at least one third of all cancers are directly dietary related. Food is the major cause of cancer according to leading authorities. So, if you have a disease why keep doing what is causing it?
  • By doing nothing, you could miss out on the real benefits available.
• How to do it? Convince yourself that food is unimportant, or that what you are already doing is fine.

2. Eat Sensibly
Choose foods known to be good for you and avoid those that are not. This resembles the Wellness (or Maintenance) Diet set out in my book You Can Conquer Cancer (YCCC).

• Benefits:
  • Provides sound nutrition that supports treatment and healing.
  • Avoids dietary factors that could make the situation worse.
  • This approach is relatively easy to follow, and if other family members adopt it too, it will do their long-term health a power of good.
• Disadvantages: Unless you were already eating really well before diagnosis, you and those around you will need to change somewhat; you will have to learn new ways and adapt your habits.
• How to do it?  Follow the Wellness Diet Guidelines in YCCC.

3. Eat Therapeutically
Eating for Recovery goes further, using food as a solution and aiming to increase the chances of survival.

• Benefits:
  
  • Based on 30 years of clinical experience, almost all the people I have worked with who experienced medically unexpected, long-term recoveries say that food was one of the things that helped them most.
  • Taking control of your diet gives a general sense of control, and it might just be very helpful!
  • Changing your diet is not easy, but doing so is like making a huge affirmation that you want to live. This truth and its impact are often overlooked.
  • Done well, this focus on food can provide a common goal and a point of coming together for family and friends. What is needed is clarity of conviction; then enthusiasm, even delight in change, flows easily.
    
• Disadvantages:
  
  • If done badly, with the wrong attitudes, dietary change can cause stress for everyone.
  • Obtaining good professional support is challenging. Most medical courses provide little training in nutrition, so many doctors do not value it. In my experience, many dieticians seem to hold a very conservative view of food's therapeutic potential. Nutritionists and naturopaths are often more accepting and knowledgeable, but many health practitioners focus their “nutritional advice” on supplements and overlook the main event: the food you eat and what you drink.
• How to do it?  Refer back to last week's blog, Food 101, as a starting point to review the decision-making process and be reminded of the choices. You could consider one of the following:

• Follow a specific healing program or therapist's advice.
  For example, the Healing Diet outlined in YCCC and detailed in my CD “Eating for Recovery” is based on 30 years of experience helping people with cancer who took their nutrition seriously. Like me, they studied, experimented and reached conclusions common to many of them. Those conclusions form the Healing Diet and are a good starting point for many recently diagnosed people who choose to be serious about their diet.

• Personalise your Healing Diet.
  This requires a concerted effort, but in my view it provides the best long-term outcomes. The steps are:

1. Begin with an intense period.
   Take your food seriously. Ideally do a detox program, perhaps a monodiet as in YCCC. Eliminate toxins and purify your system. Rebalance your metabolism and heighten your sensitivity to what is good for you. Revisit the blog: Food 101.
    
2. Over time, use your own sensibilities to modify the Healing Diet to match your situation and metabolism. This is a little challenging, as it requires confidence in your ability to work out what is good for you. But remember, life is not static. Everything is constantly changing, so while the main things you eat may remain fairly constant, some details will change. When you have developed the capacity and confidence to respond to your own dietary needs, you have a secret for long-term good health.

WHAT I DID
Before diagnosis: I ate the average Western diet with a lot of meat. Many people, including me, thought I ate pretty well.

After diagnosis: I began to take more interest in what I was eating, but changed little.

After secondaries: I had an “ah! ha!” experience. Food is important; it could help me heal.
I began with about 3 months on the Gerson Diet: no meat except some liver juices (true!), no fish, only occasional cottage cheese, lots of veggies and juices along with specific Gerson supplements (from Dec '75). Fortunately I survived all this too!

While it was great for detoxing, rebalancing the system and increasing my sensitivity, I was unable to obtain organic grains at the time, so I struggled with weight loss. Also, as my disease was well advanced, cachexia, or weight loss related to the cancer itself, was probably a real issue (I will write more on this important issue another time). So I began to modify Gerson by experimenting with a wider range of foods. I stayed off meat and found that hen's eggs and dairy products disagreed with me. I continued to have juices while healing, and towards the end ate fish once every week or two.

Once well: I settled into the Wellness Diet. Now I eat what is best described as vegaquarian: basically (but obviously not strictly) vegetarian/vegan with seafood occasionally (about once a week). This could also be described broadly as a wholefood, plant-based diet. Often I eat a couple of eggs a week and every now and again some cheese or an ice cream (for years while healing I did not, which may have been my greatest discipline).

DOSE-RELATED EFFECT
It may well be that the more attention you give your nutrition, the better the effect.

Prof. Dean Ornish published research showing that men who made modest lifestyle changes, including to their diets, stabilised early prostate cancer. Those who made major changes improved their situation significantly.

With Multiple Sclerosis, Swank's long-term research showed the same effect even more dramatically. In his study, people who improved their diets to quite a large extent often got little benefit. It was only when they were more thorough that their MS stabilised, and when really thorough, actually reversed, as we have documented at the Foundation's MS program.

Again, based on my years of experience, I believe that obtaining cancer-related, therapeutic benefits from nutrition may require a really good diet, not just a pretty good one. And while it may well be true that when you are well, what you eat mostly is important (what you eat occasionally does not matter so much in this situation), when you are Eating for Recovery, what you eat all the time is likely to be important. So eating therapeutically may well require being consistently thorough and sticking to what is good for you.

How sad it is that research in this field is so neglected. I have seen so many people do remarkable things when they combine good nutrition with the right state of mind and regular, intense meditation.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
All of this is an essentialised summary intended as an indication of what is possible while giving some inspiration and direction. Remember to get professional advice if you are making major changes.

As always, let me know your experiences, questions and feedback below by clicking on the word "Comments".

RESOURCES:
1. My book 'You Can Conquer Cancer' has three chapters on food, eating therapeutically and maintaining a healthy diet.

2. My CDs:
Eating Well, Being Well: all the main points about food, the Wellness Diet.
Eating for Recovery:  building on the first CD, the specifics of the anti-cancer diet, the Healing Diet.

3. Gerson's book 'A Cancer Therapy'. While I do not recommend this at home because it is so hard to do, the book is full of explanations and recommendations that more recent research continues to support. For example, Gerson said in the '40s that flaxseed oil was the only oil to use, and not to heat it.

4. Programs and counselling: The Gawler Foundation; www.gawler.org

NEXT WEEK'S BLOG:
What was Prof Dan Siegel, Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and world authority on the brain, the mind and relationships, doing literally “Out on a Limb” up a tree in a Melbourne park? All will be revealed as I tell you about the meeting Ruth and I had with him this week, and about his fascinating and extremely important research and experience.