Typically, when a newly diagnosed cancer patient asks their conventional oncologist what they should eat to help support their health during treatments, the response is: “It doesn’t matter, eat what you want; just don’t lose weight”.

Let’s be clear: WHAT YOU EAT MATTERS!

Weight loss, known as cachexia in cancer patients needs to be understood to break this non-sense approach of saying “eat what you want as long as you don’t lose weight” statement. The worst thing you can ever give a patient with severe cachexia is Boost, Ensure or other meal replacement drinks. When you look at the first ingredients of all of those… they are highly synthetic, highly toxic, four different types of sugars… gluten and all types of things that kick up the inflammatory process, and why is this so important to understand? Cachexia (uncontrolled weight loss) is an inflammatory, cytokine-driven process. It’s very much driven by sugar.

Insulin resistance is a hallmark of cachexia, the “wasting from within”. Consuming a high-carbohydrate diet that includes sugar will only worsen cachexia. Drinking Boost, Ensure, eating large bowls of ice cream, desserts, and the likes only throw gas on the fire. A study in the September 2014 issue of the journal Cancer and Metabolism concluded that cachexia is partly due to “metabolic alterations in tumor cells”, which can be reverted by a ketogenic diet, causing reduced tumor growth and inhibition of muscle and body weight loss. Yes, a diet consisting of 20g of net carbohydrates per day can reverse cachexia!!!!

What you eat and don’t eat matters if you experience severe weight loss. The type of calories matter! There are very specific blood markers that show the state of inflammation and cachexia and addressing these markers with therapeutic nutrition is extremely important to ensure recovery. Not all cancer patients experiencing weight loss have cachexia and a proper assessment by a Certified Nutritionist in the field of cancer will offer guidelines specific for your individual case. This needs to be repeated. Weight loss does not always mean you have cachexia.

Metabolic nutrition and therapeutic supplementation are crucial for recovery, healing gut permeability during/after treatments causing digestive issues (acid reflux, bloat, severe constipation, diarrhea), protecting cardiovascular damages, improve cognitive health (chemo brain) and neurological function, reduce debilitating neuropathy, and rebuild the immune system. How can eating ice cream, cookies, doughnuts, and fried foods help reduce the damage? It doesn’t!!