Breast Cancer and Nutrition: The Case for Food is Medicine

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and in honor of many of our clients who live with this illness we hope to provide some information on how food can aide before, during and after treatment. UT News (University of Texas at Austin) released an article about how small changes in a person’s diet can increase the chances of surviving breast cancer. Considering about 12 percent of women in the United States will suffer from breast cancer, it is important that we explore every possibility available to prevent the disease from becoming fatal.

Diet is often overlooked by both patients and doctors when it comes to cancer. This isn’t surprising considering this is a very complicated disease. As the article urges, however, we must put a larger emphasis on diet to ensure the best health outcomes for breast cancer patients. When patients are eating healthy diets they are able to build up their immune system and better withstand the often painful and harsh cancer treatments. A healthy diet will also prevent malnutrition which often affects cancer patients as they go through chemotherapy, radiation and other various forms of treatment.

We are so thrilled to announce that God’s Love We Deliver has teamed up with researchers at the New York University School of Medicine Perlmutter Cancer Center to prove that the quality of life of patients with advanced-stage cancer can be improved by personal delivery of nutritious, medically tailored meals. “Essentially, it’s a trial to assess whether food can, almost literally, be medicine,” says lead researcher Dr. Omar Ishaq, in a recent article. Here at God’s Love, we could not be more excited to engage in a study, especially during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, that has the potential to improve the quality of life for not only the patients involved in this study, but could have a huge impact on cancer treatment more broadly.

Here at God’s Love We Deliver, we make eating a healthy diet easy for our breast cancer clients, and all of our clients. Our clients receive nutrition education from our Registered Dietitian Nutritionists (RDNs), over the phone, in the comfort of their home. Our RDNs then create a medically-tailored meal plan that fits with their individual diagnoses. Meals are then delivered right to their home. Here at God’s Love, we believe that Food is Medicine and team up with a coalition of similar organizations that operate based on this belief. Our motivation to do what we do every day is for each of our clients who suffer from debilitating diseases such as breast cancer. This study, as well as others like it that demonstrate how food can act as medicine makes our efforts worth fighting for.