Are There Dietary Restrictions During Breast Cancer Treatment?
Dietician Sally Scroggs answers: Dietary Restrictions for Breast Cancer Therapy?
— -- Question: Are there any dietary restrictions related to my treatment(s) for breast cancer?
Answer: There are no restrictions. There can be some challenges to side effects and often it may be difficult to get your needs. So versus restrictions, there may be some foods that you want to concentrate in adding. Make sure--you may have a little higher demand for calories and a little higher demand for protein for recovery and for repair and keeping your immune system, so that you're less likely to get an infection.
Any restrictions might be not with food itself, but perhaps with supplements. And there is some concern with taking mega-doses, or large doses, of some of the antioxidants, especially with one of the chemo treatments that has a proposed mechanism of having an oxidative process. So you would not want to take an antioxidant, or a large amount of an antioxidant, such as a high amount of vitamin C or a high amount of vitamin E. It may be that you're not able to take in an amount -- supplementation may be required -- so it would need to be looked at individually. But I would have my intake looked at and analyzed before I started taking large doses during treatment, either chemo treatment or radiation treatment.
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