Ask the Dietician: What Diet is Right for Me?

Q. My friends tell me that I should follow a macrobiotic diet, but I’ve also heard that it’s good to be a vegan or follow the Zone diet. How do I know what’s right for me?

A: Popular diets are not the correct answer for addressing the needs of breast cancer patients and survivors, according to Robin Benardot, R.D., L.D., an Atlantabased specialist in medical nutrition who has worked at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. However, she says that diet is essential in not just supporting the patient through breast cancer, but for decreasing risk of disease after treatment is complete.

Research has shown that in breast cancer survivors, being overweight or obese raises the risk of cancer recurrence. “The more body fat you have, the more estrogen you produce,” said Benardot. “This is a particularly important issue in diseases that have been linked to estrogen, like breast and ovarian cancer.”

However, breast cancer patients have a difficult time avoiding weight gain for a variety of reasons. Patients who do have healthy habits prior to diagnosis, such as planning meals and exercising regularly, get knocked out of them as their focus of attention shifts to fighting their disease. In addition, radiation therapy and chemotherapy can cause weight gain and leave patients feeling fatigued and unmotivated regarding diet and exercise.

“Once weight gain has occurred, it is difficult to reverse,” Benardot explained. “Not only do you have to incorporate healthy changes into your lifestyle as a breast cancer survivor, but you may continue to battle weight gain as a side effect of therapeutic choices such as tamoxifen.”

For these reasons, Benardot advocates strongly for breast cancer patients to take charge of their weight when they begin treatment. Unfortunately, constraints in the medical system cause financial difficulty for many patients to obtain the services of a nutritionist.

What breast cancer patients need, Benardot said, is a diet that supplies a wide range of nutrients. This shouldn’t come from nutritional supplements because ingesting vitamins and herbs during chemotherapy or radiation treatment can be dangerous.

For an excellent online resource regarding diet and nutrition, Benardot suggests the Web site of the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR), www.aicr.org, with a link to The New American Plate, a science-based approach to meal planning.

The New American Plate provides recommendations regarding both portion and proportions of foods. It also offers a variety of tasty recipes such as chili burgers or Greek style potatoes, and an entire cook book is available for purchase.

Even though you might not feel like it, Benardot believes that exercise during cancer treatment is essential as part of a weight management program.

To keep the issues of diet and exercise from falling by the wayside, a number of support groups are available to breast cancer patients. To find a group near you, contact Y-ME or make an inquiry with your oncologist, cancer treatment center, or search online using the name of your city and “breast cancer support.”

This article was frist printed in Lifeline.

Email This Page: