Why Does Cancer Therapy Make Food Taste Terrible?
Lemon drops will help your taste buds. The best Lemon Fruit Hard Sour Candy, packed in a bag. A hard, sour candy with an extra shot of lemon in the center. Besides being a great tasting hard candy, pharmaceutical companies, doctor offices, and most importantly chemotherapy patients have found that when “Lemon Sours” are given to patients receiving chemotherapy treatment, patients see a reduction in the dryness of the throat region and relief from the soreness.
WILL chemotherapy attack food preservatives forcing these chemicals to attack taste buds while the brain associates nausea with eating.
People who go through chemotherapy say one of the most frustrating side effects is that even their favorite foods taste awful. Pasta tastes like cardboard and meat tastes metallic. Patients have no desire to eat and end up getting fewer calories and less nutrition when they need it most—to battle the cancer as well as the ravages of the therapy.
Why does chemotherapy ruin food’s appeal? Does radiation therapy, often involved, make matters worse? Scientific American asked Beverly Cowart, director of clinical research at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, to explain the mechanisms as well as strategies patients can use to make food more desirable.
[Twelve nutrition tips for chemotherapy patients.]
Chemotherapy is supposed to work by killing cancer cells. How might that affect taste?
Cancer cells proliferate rapidly, and most chemotherapies target rapidly growing cells. Taste cells turn over rapidly, too; stem cells in the base of a taste bud regularly replenish the taste cells. So the chemicals attack the taste cells as well. They either attach to a cell or enter it, then destroy it. As many cells die, taste disappears.
What about bad tastes, such as metallic or bitter sensations, instead of a lack of taste?
Like most medications the chemicals enter the bloodstream and they get into saliva that way. The saliva brings them to the taste cells and the cells send messages of “metallic” or “bitter” to neurons that lead to the brain. It’s strange to think of it this way but we can “taste” things in the bloodstream. For example, researchers in Japan injected saccharin into people’s bloodstreams and the people quickly tasted it.
Patients often complain of nausea. That also makes food less appetizing.
Right. Your body is programmed to tie nausea to something you ate. If you eat a specific food and get sick, you will find it hard to eat that food again. Cancer patients who feel nauseous become conditioned to avoid all kinds of foods they may be eating.
What about radiation?
If radiation is being used near the mouth area, such as for oral cancer, it can have an effect. Radiation elsewhere in the body does not. In these cases, even though the radiation is highly targeted, it’s still impossible to avoid hitting salivary glands. The glands get knocked out, and the patient gets chronic dry mouth. For us to taste something, it has to go into solution so it can enter a taste bud’s taste pore; saliva is there to dissolve food into solution. Without saliva, it is hard to taste anything.
Does chemotherapy also affect smell, which is central to taste?
The smell system’s receptors also interact with chemicals in the bloodstream, but the cells turn over more slowly than taste cells, so the chemicals might not attack them as much. They regenerate from stem cells, too, but that takes longer and it’s more complicated, because smell cells are actually the ends of neurons, signaling the brain directly. When they regrow they have to mature and they also have to connect to the brain. Overall, smell cells get involved but they seem to be less affected than taste cells.
What are common, good tactics patients can use to help make food more appealing?
Because nausea makes you associate sickness with specific foods, don’t eat the things you regularly eat before a chemotherapy treatment. Eat so-called scapegoat foods—unusual or unusually flavored foods you wouldn’t be likely to eat otherwise. You may end up hating them, but it won’t matter for your other meals.
If the problem is diminished taste, rely on liquid nutrients to create solution that penetrates the taste pores—especially if you have dry mouth.
In general, eat slowly and chew a lot, to give food more of a chance to enter the few healthy taste buds that are there. Sour flavors tend to come through more readily, so things like lemon can be used to enhance flavor. To enhance smell, jack up the volatile compounds—herbal ingredients and liquid spices.
Does taste return to patients after treatment is done?
With chemotherapy, once the drugs clear from the body the taste system usually returns over time. Recovery from radiation can take longer, even a few months, but there can also be some permanent damage to the salivary glands. Patients sometimes use artificial salivas to help themselves.
Natasha Grindley, 37, was diagnosed with stomach cancer in July 2014
- She was told she had 2 weeks to live and began chemotherapy immediately
- Alongside chemo she changed her lifestyle, swapping junk food for juices
- Is alive more than 18 months later and credits survival on her healthy diet
A mother-of-two told she had just two weeks to live claims swapping fatty foods for fresh juices is helping her to fight cancer.
Natasha Grindley, 37, from Liverpool, was given the devastating news she would not live out the month in July 2014, after doctors discovered she had stomach cancer.
She began a course of chemotherapy at Clatterbridge Private Clinic in the Wirral, Merseyside, immediately.
Within weeks her cancer had reduced in size, a change she credits to her lifestyle changes.
However, experts warn there is no evidence a healthy diet, exercise and alternative therapies will cure cancer alone- chemotherapy is needed too.
Mrs Grindley said: ‘I was utterly devastated when doctors told me I had two weeks to live.
‘It all happened quite quickly and they put a camera down and I could see that it was my stomach and had spread to my lymph nodes, my neck and all of my abdomen really.
‘It was a very, very dark time for a while and me and my husband started reading constantly to find alternative therapies.
‘They didn’t know that it was stomach cancer at the time and I don’t think that they could have told me because I would have been too heartbroken to hear it.’
The clean-eating change was triggered by a friendship with author Deliciously Ella, whom Mrs Grindley still asks for nutritional advice.
Since then, Mrs Grindley, married to bricklayer Ian, 33, and mother to Gabriella, six, and Liam, five, has launched her own Facebook page, Heal for Real, having racked up almost 19,000 likes.
The page features her own health tips and recipes which she is hoping to collate into a book, as well as motivational quotes and pictures.
Her dedication has also seen her complete a diploma in nutrition as she continues to defy doctors’ predictions more than 18 months on from the initial heartbreaking news.
She said: ‘When I started changing my diet, I looked better than I had done for years, even though I was obviously very ill.
‘I was going through, still am, undergoing chemotherapy treatment every three weeks but people were saying to me “you don’t look ill” and I put it down to the changes I made in my diet.
‘Reading about alternative therapies and finding new nutritious food became my obsession.
‘And, when I started cutting out the likes of meats and alcohol, things started picking up about six months later.
She continued: ‘I used the foods to power up my immune system and that helps me because my blood is then ready for chemo.
‘I noticed that every time I made a change to my diet, I saw a positive difference in how I felt.’
CAN A HEALTHY DIET, EXERCISE AND ALTERNATIVE THERAPIES CURE CANCER?
However, he added treatment is the patient’s own choice and doctors must respect that.
He told MailOnline: ‘The patient is always in the driving seat; their treatment is up to them.
‘There’s no evidence that diet alone will help without the chemotherapy.
For some people juicing doesn’t work because some bodies are more toxic than others. When juicing it’s important to use binders (Chlorella, Clays, cilantro, charcoal, fiber. I’ve also heard good things about zeolite and Cholestyramine or do coffee enemas.) I would like to Thank Jalena Turner for this side note. 🙂
