Malignant tumor is a consumptive disease, nutrition is an important part of tumor treatment. Scientific and reasonable diet can improve the nutritional status of patients, prevent malnutrition and tumor cachexia, enhance the patient’s physique and improve the quality of life. However, in real life, many tumor patients have fallen into the following common dietary errors.
Myth 1 Drink more soup to supplement nutrition.
In some people’s traditional concept, cooking soup is a kind of [big supplement]. Family members cook soup for patients, such as black chicken soup, ox tail soup, fish soup, sea cucumber soup, pig trotter soup, etc., and instruct patients, [the essence is dissolved in the soup, just drink the soup, and the soup residue can be thrown away].
In fact, this is wrong.
There are very few nutritional ingredients in the soup. Fish and meat ingredients, the soup contains non-protein nitrogen, purine, creatinine, a small amount of free amino acids, a small amount of potassium, sodium, calcium and magnesium plasma, and the nutritional density is low. Therefore, cooking soup is not a good source of nutritional ingredients for human body. Drinking a large amount of soup will affect the intake of other foods. A single diet will lead to malnutrition.
If tumor patients with dysphagia, chewing difficulties, fever, bed rest and the like need to eat liquid food, various food materials, such as grain, eggs, milk, meat, fish, bean products, vegetables and the like, can be prepared into soft rot respectively, broken separately or mixed with a homogenizer (soybean milk machine), made into paste, and boiled into porridge, which is convenient for swallowing and beneficial to digestion and absorption.
Myth 2: The more nutritious you eat, the faster the tumor will grow.
Some malnourished tumor patients are mainly vegetarian and believe that [if you have a tumor, you cannot eat too nutritious food, otherwise the tumor will grow quickly], and even some doctors sometimes require patients to restrict their diet.
In fact, the growth rate of tumor cells has nothing to do with how much nutrition patients eat.
Tumor cells are robbing normal cells of nutrients until the death of a person. Even if the patient is malnourished, cancer cells will still grow. Hunger will only make the patient’s body consume faster and accelerate the deterioration of the disease.
Meat, fish, eggs, milk and bean products are the main sources of high-quality protein and important raw materials for tissue and cell repair. According to the results of research by the American Cancer Society, cancer patients should have at least 20% more calories than usual. At present, there is no evidence that increasing nutrition in the human body will make cancer cells grow faster. On the contrary, many patients will survive for a long time due to good nutritional status and no cachexia.
Patients with good nutritional status are obviously better than patients with poor nutritional status and emaciation in terms of tolerance to treatment and prognosis. There is no scientific basis for saying that cancer cells can [starve to death].
Myth 3 [Hair] Promotes Cancer Cells, Vegetarianism Is Better
The so-called [hair] is a folk saying in ancient China, which refers to foods that can cause recurrence of old diseases or aggravation of new diseases. For example, bean sprouts, leeks, alfalfa, goose meat, chicken, dog meat, beef, seafood and other hair products are recorded. Although many patients want to eat, they are worried about recurrence of tumors and stay at a respectful distance.
The scientific nature of the relationship between [hair] and tumor still needs to be verified.
However, there is still a lack of sufficient evidence as to whether the recurrence of the tumor can be caused. At least so far, there has been no definite case of tumor recurrence caused by eating hair products. Therefore, this information has no scientific basis.
Myth 4 Blind Dependence on Anticancer Food and Health Products
Many tumor patients exchange dietary experiences with each other during treatment and blindly follow other people’s practices, such as blindly supplementing so-called anti-cancer foods and anti-cancer health care products, which are expensive. Are these reliable?
Some nutrients or phytochemicals have anticancer effects, and also play a role in the natural foods contained in them. Supplementary nutrients and some phytochemical preparations are used as anticancer foods and health products, and there is no evidence to prove their anticancer effects at present.
In fact, this supplement method is not conducive to the stability and rehabilitation of the disease itself. Tumor is a process of cell proliferation and apoptosis. It is wrong to ignore normal diet and spend high prices on so-called anti-cancer food.
Myth 5 Cancer Patients Avoid Eating [Spicy] and Other Foods
Avoiding irritant foods such as [spicy] seems to be a dietary requirement for patients with any disease.
But in fact, there is no basis for this: spicy food has become a habit in many parts of the country, but it is not higher than that in other areas in terms of tumor morbidity and mortality. There is no basis for eating spicy food to stimulate tumor growth and accelerate.
Spicy is only one’s taste, and there is no special difference between sweet and sour. Many patients only have appetite after eating spicy food, but after getting tumors, they are required to avoid eating completely because of such misunderstanding.
As a result, the tumor itself and radiotherapy and chemotherapy will cause anorexia, and then change the eating habits of spicy food, often let patients have more no appetite, so there is no benefit to the recovery of patients. Taste bias will increase the appetite of patients, stimulate digestive juice secretion, help to eat, too light meaningless.
Myth 6 As long as you can get a nutrition needle, it doesn’t matter if you don’t eat.
When tumor patients have loss of appetite and insufficient food intake, some patients, their families and even individual doctors think that intravenous nutrition can meet the nutritional needs without eating. This is wrong.
It is a natural state for the human body to eat through the gastrointestinal tract. Food enters the intestinal tract for absorption. If it does not eat for a long time, the intestinal mucosa will atrophy, causing imbalance of intestinal flora, destruction of the barrier function of intestinal mucosa, and thus easy infection.
A large number of studies have confirmed that enteral nutrition support therapy can be given to eating disorders caused by various reasons, and an effective nutrition support treatment channel can be established. As long as the intestinal tract has function, it can be used.
Correctly identify the dietary misunderstanding of tumor patients, guide scientific diet, so that patients can feel good, maintain physical strength and energy, reduce side effects of treatment, reduce infection risk, and recover health faster.