Eating Well during Cancer Treatment: What does the cancer dietitian say?
By Laurie Hatch
You heard the doctor correctly; there will be side effects with cancer treatment. As soon as you heard these words, you or someone in your family asked the question, how am I going to eat and what am I going to eat to stay well during treatment?
Depending on the type of chemotherapy and the targeted area treated with radiation, side effects with treatment vary widely. Taste changes, poor appetite, diarrhea, constipation, mouth sores, difficulty swallowing, and nausea are common, but most people do not get all these side effects. An impact that each of these side effects have in common is how the amounts of food that a survivor eats will decrease. A change in taste makes some foods taste metallic or salty, and so food intake diminishes. Swallowing problems make it painful and difficult to swallow, so favorite foods, even a chocolate milkshake, are pushed aside. Troubles with the gut, such as diarrhea or constipation decrease a desire to eat due to unpleasantness or an uncomfortable feeling of fullness. While this decrease may only last a day or two for some people, for others side effects linger for weeks, even months. Over time, you lose weight, become weaker, and fatigued. With too much lost weight and ongoing fatigue, you may miss treatments.
Doctors, nurses, and technicians do their best to make you comfortable during treatment, but there is only so much they can do to help you to eat enough to keep your strength up. A cancer dietitian will tell you that paying closer attention to two things helps prevent drastic weight loss with treatment: Fluids and soft moist high protein foods.
Drinking enough water or juices prevents dehydration which can become an emergency when you are receiving chemotherapy and radiation. While the recommendation is 8 cups of water each day, most people getting treatment fall short of this amount, so dehydration is common. By filling a water or juice pitcher each morning with the recommended 8 cups of water and an appointing a family member or friend to remind you, there is a greater likelihood of reaching this goal. Soups, yogurt, gelatin, milk, and decaffeinated tea or coffee are suitable substitutes for hydration especially if other side effects, like taste changes, make water or juice taste “off.”
Remarkably, the energy it takes to eat a meal or snack is sometimes overwhelming. Eating smaller amounts of the following foods more often, like every 2-3 hours, will help you eat more. Soft moist high protein foods are easy to chew and swallow, contain protein which aids in keeping your muscles from shrinking, and provide you with other important nutrients, such as carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals. These foods are well-tolerated across a range of treatment side effects.
Examples of Soft Moist High Protein foods:
Scrambled Eggs
French Toast
Chicken Salad
Beef Stew
Chicken Pot Pie
Shepherd’s Pie
Cheesecake Chunks
Creamy Hot Cereals
Pudding With Bananas
Potato Soup Pork And Beans
Laurie Hatch is a registered dietitian who has worked in cancer care for two decades. She is also the owner of Food Is Medicine RD. As both a cancer dietitian and a cancer survivor, she has written a textbook and journal, In the Pink: A Breast Cancer Survivor’s Guide to a Healthier Life, which will be released this year. She lives with her husband in Denver, CO. You can find her on Facebook, @lauriehatch(foodismedicinerd) and Instagram @foodismedicinerd_cancer.