Day 39 – Diet

I have been introduced to a dietician by a friend who has been through the same issues that I am now in the midst of. I have been discovering that diet will play a key part in the my recovery and should ultimately be a factor in how all preventative therapies are framed. This as you can imagine is a contentious issue as it is my understanding in the 5+ years of medical training our doctors receive 2 days of diet and nutrition instruction!! More on that at a later date.

I have sent a copy of a couple of weeks of my diet over the last month or so. It shows that I have already embraced change, critical factors being no refined sugar, in fact only sugars from fruit and veg. I have been told that cancer cells will consume sugar at 6 times the rate of other cells! I have given up dairy and alcohol and have started drinking 2-3 green juices per day. Finally we are reviewing what meats I can eat thinking that it is likely that only occasional chicken and spring lamb will make the cut! At this stage I am doing all of this to aid my recovery. My view on the long term adoption of this regime are somewhat different!

We have a Skype call with Julie and she goes through all of the information I have given her. She is very complimentary about the steps I have taken and has some comments on a couple of things. In the plus pool is she doesn’t believe I need to give up dairy as this can have some benefits for colorectal cancers. Also in the plus pool is that grass fed beef, and venison are ok.

I get to the end of the call and haven’t mentioned the big one……and what about alcohol going forward I timidly ask? Blunt as you like comes back the reply …….never…… you should not drink alcohol ever again!

Well my former nutritionalist and I agree to a couple of actions and go off to reflect on what this will mean in the future. After all red wine has a lot of polyphenols in it so it must be good surely.