Nutrition

I think this might be interesting for some people so the ones that do not want to worry about food in take can ignore this post.

I have been as you probably notice reading a lot about what to eat and what not to eat, how to have a balance diet. Dr Chen gave me sometime ago details of a Nutrition consultant in case I needed it and today I decided to meet with her to discuss some of my rules and some of my daily eatings to check if it was ok. My rules have been:

• No meat
• No milk and limited yogurts and cheese
• No white Flour
• No refine sugar
• Brown pasta and rice
• Broccoli or Kale every day on the diet.

A normal daily food for me today is as follows:

Breakfast - Mix of cereal (Cheerios, All bran and Kellogg's) with Rice milk
Mid morning - some kind of fruit
Lunch - Some kind of vegetable puree like cauliflower with onion and potatoes and a Broccoli casserole with egg and milk. (one day will put the recipes).
Mid afternoon - Fruit with Kale chips
Dinner - Brown rice with vegetables
Rice milk before going to bed.

Well, she told me that I am complete off on calcium, fat and protein so she gave me some new rules to include but I still can hold my rules if I want to. Her opinion on meat and diary is different from mine but she does agree that there is a scientific reports that shows that low fat diets do help with Cancer recurrence but she suggest that during Chemo I do not reduce my fat too much so can avoid issues. These are her new rules:

• Eat weekly rainbow of antioxidants vegetables, make sure that each week they are on my diet:
• Red: Strawberries, red pepper, tomatoes
• Orange: Oranges, Squash
• Yellow: Pineapple, banana
• Green: Broccoli, Kale, Leak
• Blue/Purple: Blueberries, plums
• White (she included even if not in the rainbow): Mushroom, cauliflower, garlic
• I can avoid normal milk but need to drink 2 cups of rice milk and a Yogurt per day
• Eggs and dark beans every other day.
• Even if I use olive oil every day, she thinks is not enough fat so she recommends that I need a handful of nuts at mid afternoon and one avocado per day.
• She also recommends Salmon twice a week.
• The rest she is ok the way I am cooking and eating all the food.

To some of the questions I had for her...the answers were interesting:

• Should you eat vegetables raw or cook them?, she agrees that cooking vegetables some vitamins are lost in the water, so you have to puree it together or you drink the water, if not you miss some vitamins from cooking them. So she prefers if you eat things raw as far as chemo treatment allows you to eat raw food.
• My breast cancer is positive on estrogen. What food should I avoid?, mainly soy and she is not too certain on the white flour but she is ok with me to replace it with wheat flour. I was not sure on Flax seed but she confirms that they do not generate estrogen.

Sorry for the long message but I am sure some of my friends will be interested on reading all these details. It was piece of mind to have a 45 min chat with her to make sure I was doing things right, have never been so conscious about what I eat in my life!.

She also mentioned about the fact that when people arrive to the US their risk of breast cancer is higher than if they leave in Europe or Asia. So when I arrived home I recommended Alberto to move back to Europe so the risk of recurrence mainly due to food intake will be lower, his face said it all...basically NO!, just make sure you eat healthy and we will be fine.