Neither sector devoured perfectly, however the most cancers survivors frequently had less safe preferences in comparison to the other people around you inside the reasearch, scientists document among the note Cancer. Breast cancer survivors seemed to adhere the best to dietary suggestions, while lung cancer survivors seemed the least likely to follow the dietary guidelines.
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“It is troubling”, says Danielle Cook, an holistic nutritionist and the author of “Happily Hungry: Smart Recipes for Kids with Cancer”. The investigators compared their dietary intake and quality with more than 3,000 randomly selected individuals without a history of cancer, matched in terms of age, sex, and ethnicity.
A study in the USA has found that many cancer survivors maintain poor diets and food choices after making their recoveries – worse than the diets of people who have never had cancer, in fact – highlighting the need for dietary intervention in what researchers say is a vulnerable population within the community.
Researchers also examined how much people ate refined grains, salt and empty calories. Zhang and colleagues estimated diet quality by calculating scores on the Healthy Eating Index-2010 (HEI-2010), which measures adherence to the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
Cook, whose own son beat cancer as a child, is especially concerned about teen and young adult cancer survivors.
“Cancer survivors are usually motivated to improve their health, so I think it is remarkable that they are still burdened by a sub-optimal diet”, she said.
The researchers found that the mean HEI-2010 total score was 47.2 and 48.3 in the cancer survivor and noncancer groups, respectively. Even a small change can have a significant impact on this section of population. The researchers suggest that oncology care providers should place a greater emphasis on the benefits of a healthy diet, helping cancer survivors improve their diet for the benefit of their health. Smokers and those with a lower level of education tended to have a worse diet. The researchers then assigned each person’s diet a score, with a score of 100 for diets that contained all the recommended servings of foods without the non-nutritious foods.
For the four major cancer types in the United States (breast, prostate, lung, and colon and rectal), breast cancer survivors had the best diet quality whereas lung cancer survivors had the worst diet quality.
Survivors who were current smokers had significantly worse diet quality than non-smokers or former smokers.
She also noted that cancer treatments can cause people to have specific food cravings, or change the way food tastes.
There’s little research telling cancer survivors what they should eat, said Freedland.
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In the meantime, Zhang hopes her study will help healthcare professionals make sure that nutrition is part of the conversation, not just for those who have been diagnosed with cancer but for those who have kicked it.
