Food & Cancer

By the time I was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma (MM), a cancer of the bone marrow,  in December 2011 I’d made, over some years  three editions of The Food Programme about cancer and diet. The last one on prostate cancer in 2009 had been eye-opening. Geoff Tansey, who I’d known for many years as one of the UK’s serious thinkers and writers about food policy, got in touch to say he’d got prostate cancer, was facing surgery and would the Food Programme like him to keep a diary.  The programme we made around those audio diaries is till worth a listen  [INSERT LINK]  because research on the importance of diet in the prevention, complementary treatment and after-care of the commonest forms of prostate cancer is well- documented.  So well-documented that Professor Margaret Rayman who runs the UK’s only post-graduate course for medics on nutritional medicine at the University of Surrey had just written a book about it:  Healthy Eating for Prostate Care.  Not that that made any difference to the doctors who treated Geoff Tansey.  They didn’t know about the research and were uninterested  in the fact that in the weeks after diagnosis he changed his diet dramatically (he went vegetarian and gave up dairy foods) which brought down his PSA levels equally dramatically (PSA levels in the blood  are used as a rough measure of prostate cancer activity).  Well-documented studies have confirmed that that’s a common reaction in slow-growing prostate cancers.

We interviewed Professor Rayman in 2009  and  again for this week’s Food Programme,  looking at the questions that came up when I was diagnosed and treated for Multiple Myeloma.  Have things changed since we last talked to her?   Well, there are now more studies, more evidence–but medical attitudes, she says,  remain much the same.  And our research confirmed that in most cancer centres in the UK diet is still seen as almost meaningless in cancer treatment and aftercare.

Yet there is good science available on the subject, though not a lot of it is what medics call ‘gold standard’ science.   There are almost no double-blinded, large scale, studies done on human beings because they’re  expensive, very hard to do and there’s no financial incentive:  who’d make serious profit  out of the discovery that mushrooms kill cancer cells?  Most of the research has been done on cancer cells in the laboratory or on animals.   What the best of it  shows is interesting implications in a range of foods.

  One of the best researched foods (in the US and Ireland) is the spice turmeric.  It has a general anti-inflammatory effect and quite specific effects on several forms of cancer, including mine (you get quite proprietorial about your own kind!).  There’s also  good quality research on berries (containing ellagic acid which seems to curb cancer cells’ ability to grow their own blood supply), mushrooms (the polysaccharides), green tea, as well as the cabbage and onion family.   But unless you’re very lucky you won’t get told about any of  it when you enter that parallel universe that is Cancer Treatment.  You’re more likely to be offered as I was at every chemo session a white bread sandwich, a fizzy drink, and  a chocolate bar or packet of biscuits.  Nurses told me that there’s no point in worrying about what I ate.    But “worrying”  is not what I or any other patient wants to do– I and they want to know what will help them get through their treatment in the best way and what, if anything, might keep a recurrence at bay.  They also, mostly, don’t want to feel like a helpless pawn in a big and overwhelming system.

From my experience as a cancer patient  I think many people fear that  they’re being ungrateful for the medical care they’ve had by bringing up issues like this.    I am overwhelming grateful to the team who treated me (still check on me) at Bart’s Hospital in London–they personify the best of the NHS in love, caring and medical brilliance. And they always make me laugh.  But why can’t we build on that — by bringing good nutrition (good food!)  into that world-class care and treatment? 

As my consultant Professor Jamie Cavenagh said  “I think we should take more of a ‘Why not?’ attitude.  Why not advise patients to eat better, add turmeric to their diet, drink more green tea, take exercise?”  It won’t do you any harm and it might well do you a lot of good.

Other interesting sources of information / education: www.nutritank.com