Cancer patient’s life has to rely on various nutrients of food. The main problem of cancer patient is nutritional disturbance, so improving patient’s nutrition is an important measure for anticancer treatment. Reasonable diet allocated to cancer patient can enhance body’s immunity and help a lot to patient’s treatment.
When arrange cancer patient’s diet, one should notice that:
1. Supply protein foods which are easy to digest and absorb, such as milk, eggs, fish, bean product, etc. for example, milk and eggs can emend the protein disorder after radiotherapy.
2. Intake proper amount of carbohydrate to supplement the heat. High dose of radiotherapy may destroy body’s glycometabolism resulted in glycogen decreased dramatically, lactic acid in blood increased with no longer use and insulin insufficiency aggravated. Consequently, it’s better foe patient to supplement glucose. E.g., honey, rice, flour, potato and so on are the sugar-rich food that can supplement heat.
3. Eat more anticancer foods, such as turtle, mushroom, black fungus, garlic, seaweeds, mustard and royal jelly and so on.
4. Vitamin A and C can prevent cancerization and proliferation of cells and increase the stability of epithelial cells. Additionally, vitamin C can prevent some general symptoms of radiation injury and raise the leukocytes levels; vitamin E can promote cell division and delay cell aging; vitamin B1 can promote patient’s appetite, relieve symptoms caused by radiation therapy. Hence, it’s helpful to eat more foods containing vitamins as mentioned above, for example, fresh vegetable, fruits, sesame oil, legume and some pluck, etc.
5. Diet should be diversification of color, smell, taste and shape, which can promote patient’s appetites; when cooks food, it can use steaming, boiling and stewing methods. Avoid taking hard-digested foods and alcohol.
6. Patient with difficulty in mastication, swallow, digestion, absorption caused by surgery in tumors of various parts of body and special nutritional deficiencies should take different foods and supplement the lacking element accordingly. If necessary, diet of compound necessary nutritional elements should be adopted to enhance patient’s immunity.
*Surgery, in addition to the appropriate chemotherapy and radiotherapy, are effective in treating early cancer, but certain patients in late stage of cancer may not be tolerate surgery well as they can be relatively weak. A combination of carefully planned minimally invasive therapy, chemotherapy or radiotherapy can effectively reduce the side effects and discomfort of treatment and may help patient get better efficacy.