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← Return to Eating during cancer care
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Thank you for the information on eating. I’ve been struggling with food not sounding or tasting good and then started chemo last week and was nauseous last two days. Mayo Palliative Care nurse also said, let’s worry about getting high quality food down right now. We’ll worry about variety and balance when you feel better. I needed that pep talk as I’ve been a good balanced diet eater for years and realize that cancer, especially treatment, changed the rules. Right now I’ll do the best I can.
Replies to "Thank you for the information on eating. I’ve been struggling with food not sounding or tasting..."
It is important to keep up with the latest studies as thinking is changing on how to best mitigate nausea while enhancing efficacy of chemotherapy and radiation. I had stage II muscle invasive bladder cancer. I used proven holistics before and concurrent with chemotherapy and not only had no side effects like nausea, but also had enhanced effectiveness of the chemotherapy and am now cancer free.
Interestingly, on a trip to Brazil, I found that most oncologist recommend all their post cancer patients take i gram each of vitamin C and curcumin daily. The USA pushes pharmaceuticals instead, many of which have bad side effects.
Here are current studies:
https://bmccancer.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12885-020-07256-8
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6514995/
Hope this is helpful.
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Hi @nauden. I know it’s aways our goal to eat healthy, well balanced food. Especially when we have cancer/treatments. I think we feel fearful if we make a misstep and eat something on the naughty-list for food!
Your palliative care nurse was spot on in encouraging you to eat high quality food right now. My Mayo dietician had also told me the same thing but added high caloric, (reasonably) healthy foods. 😅
So she had my husband add foods such as Lactaid ice cream to my smoothies along with protein powder. Lorna Doone shortbread cookies, even bacon!! Basically anything I could get in my mouth that I could tolerate, stay down and add weight! So I enjoyed all the naughty foods that I’d avoided for years. That helped to build some meat back on my bones. (I’d lost 40 pounds that I could ill afford)
After I reached a target weight (it was still a struggle) then I returned to my healthy diet and really, there was no harm done. So enjoy what you can get down!
Often when we go through chemo we lose our ability to taste anything and can also lose our taste buds. That’s what happened to me so even favorite foods just felt awful in my mouth. Cardboard and paste were the feelings I remember.
I learned a few tricks such as putting a drip of maple syrup on food (I sound like Buddy in Elf). But maple syrup actually added a ‘flavor’ to the food. It didn’t taste like maple but it did bring some foods to life.
Tru Lemon products worked for flavoring water. There’s no sugar and it comes in Tru Lemon, Tru Lime and Tru Orange. Made by freeze drying then grinding the food into powder. No chemicals. (Grocery store or Amazon)
There are other tricks and wonderful foods in the website I’ll post below. My husband (who did all my cooking during treatment) followed Chef Ryan Callahan’s “Cooking for Chemo”. webpage. He downloaded the digital Cooking for Chemo recipe book.
I’d encourage you to check out some of the recipes.
https://www.cookingforchemo.org/
By the way, welcome to Mayo Connect. You just gained a new supportive family. ☺️
You mentioned just starting chemo…the nausea is the pits. Don’t hesitate to talk to your chemo team to ask for anti-nausea meds!
May I ask what type of cancer decided your body was a good place to take up residence?