Nutrition and weight management
Our nutritionists are doctoral-level specialists in how to use food as medicine in the fight against cancer.
A nutritionist is not a dietician. Dieticians can play a very important role in the lives of patients who need the approach of counting calories, formula feeds, or isolating and delivering macronutrients. We rely on our dietician colleagues to do this specialized work. These valuable team members usually work in a hospital setting.
Our team is staffed by natural medicine doctors who work exclusively in cancer care and have chosen to sub specialize in oncology nutrition. Their job is to design a data-driven, individualized, nutrition program to FIGHT your type of cancer, lower the risk of recurrence, and slow progression.
IS What We Eat Important?
Food is powerful and fundamental to our existence; it has the power to help our bodies heal and rebuild or to work against us to CREATE disease and break us down.
Healthy and Clean Nourishment is a necessary PARTNER to good medicine and good healthcare. The Food we put on our Forks becomes the NUTRIENT that courses through our bloodstream feeding every single cell in our bodies and every organ that we have. We ARE truly (made of) what we eat.
Is There a Cancer Fighting Diet:
There are so many diets, resources, books, podcasts that purport to be THE one and only last word in cancer-fighting diets.
There is no such thing as A Cancer Fighting Diet.
This is because to a large extent, cancer behaves differently in each person and nutrition needs to be individualized to truly be effective in fighting disease and keeping our patients well.
There is a widespread theory in the complementary cancer community that sugar feeds cancer. This is not the case. Sugar feeds everything and it is the most usable food for the body.
A dedicated oncology nutritionist can help you to Target your nutrition so that you optimize caloric energy for your normal cells and make it LESS available to cancer cells.
And it’s not always true that restriction of certain food groups is appropriate. A vegan diet is not the best choice for someone with a glioblastoma; conversely, a high fat, caloric dense diet may also not be appropriate for someone with a glioblastoma. It depends on:
Where you are in treatment.
What is your current relationship with food
Are you struggling with disordered eating, food aversion, taste changes, nausea, vomiting or abdominal pain.
What is your current gut function
Are you preparing for surgery
Do you have previous markers for metabolic issues
Do you have risk, including drug treatment for heart disease.
And so on….
What do We Do?
We use bloodwork, diagnostic tests and other biomarkers, a detailed behavioral history including when you eat, how you eat, sleep and stress to map our your metabolic picture and to understand your relationship to food.
We help you to use what you eat to FIGHT your type of cancer, lower the risk of recurrence, and slow progression and IMPROVE tolerance to drug treatment.
How Do We Do It?
For some fighting this disease weight gain is critical. Our oncology nutritionists adapt their strategies to these patients to give them the best chance of success and stop the risks associated with unintentional weight loss. Also during chemotherapy, weight is very important and weight maintenance improves tolerance. So often this is a good time to work on cleaning up environmental exposures but focusing on DENSE, High nutrient, High calorie foods. On the other hand there is some data that tolerance of the first 3 days following chemotherapy can be improved with specific kinds of time-limited, supervised fasting.
In survivorship WHAT we eat may matter more than any other time. However, giving someone a diet plan does nothing if they don’t have the support to make those changes in their life effectively. Our oncology nutritionists are also trained in HEALTH BEHAVIORAL COUNSELING and they gently, powerfully, coach you in how to transform your relationship with food to make evidenced based changes that make cancer less likely to recur. Weight management involves changing eating habits; changing these patterns is an inside job. Our relationship with food has existed since we were only cells in our mother’s womb. Changing it means eating in a way that also deals with your emotions & habits around eating.
We work with people to look not only at what to eat, but also to help them shift the way they look at food. We work on supporting a healthy relationship with food so that optimal nutrition is sustainable and natural.
Cancer is like fighting a war. It is our job to help the warrior fight their BEST fight with the support of food and natural therapies.
Just like a warrior prepares for battle, we help guide you and your family members with food.
Food to fight cancer
Food to strengthen you
Food to keep energy and weight up.
We show you how to use what is in your kitchen and the drug store to stay as well as possible.
What About Leading Edge Strategies in Survivorship?
In survivorship, creating the right nutrition plan designed for you can help reduce risk for diabetes, heart disease, and risk of cancer or cancer recurrence
Weight management, in particular reducing abdominal weight can be important. For most people is not a one size fit all. It is individualized and involves dealing with hormonal imbalances caused by stress, thyroid, effects from treatment, etc. This is especially true for women and men on hormone blockers, and it can be very challenging if this is at a time of life where our metabolism may have changed.
We have developed an algorithm that combines health behavioral counseling, micro changes in diet and regular coaching that has a high success rate in achieving weight loss in this challenging population.