One of the toughest challenges for me when I was diagnosed with breast cancer was enjoying food. Here I was a well connected professional food and wine consultant with a welcome seat at all the great restaurants in New York City, and food no longer appealed to me. It wasn’t that I stopped liking food. It’s just that while I was undergoing chemotherapy treatment the smells, sight and taste of many foods (and drink) was off putting. I simply either had no appetite or was fearful of become nauseous from eating anything. Constipation from medication was a constant, and that only added to my reluctance to eat in order to avoid that awful bloated feeling.
My cancer diagnosis was a wake up call to change my diet and lifestyle. As delicious and decadent as all my restaurant forays were, I understood the value of a nutritional diet to aid the healing process and made changes that mattered. But for many people facing cancer treatment and for the caregivers who want to help them, finding the right recipes and, more important, sound and reliable nutrition advice can be confusing.
Fortunately, Susan Bratton, founder of Savor Health, and her team of registered dietitians specialize in working with cancer patients to provide solutions through carefully planned and executed meals tailored to a cancer patient’s dietary needs and solid nutrition information. Because when you have cancer, it’s not about diet gimmicks to get well. Many foods interact with medications or are make not be the safest choices for someone with a compromised immune system. You need specialists who understand how different treatments may impact a patient’s ability to taste, chew or digest food and who offer better options. Savor Health’s meals are also convenient because they are delivered to you.
Now, Savor Health not only delivers healthy meals to your home but also provides the recipes and tips for you to make healthy meals at home in the new “Meals To Heal Cookbook” (Da Capo). Susan collaborated with Savor Health’s Jessica Iannotta, MS, RD, CSO, CDN (Trust me! All those initials mean serious expertise!) to develop 150 easy, nutritionally balanced recipes with key notes to indicate how they help some deal with side effects, from mouth sores and difficulty chewing or swallowing to constipation and diarrhea.
Susan Bratton joins me March 21, 4:28pm EST on Fearless Fabulous You! to discuss her new cookbook, why nutrition matters in cancer treatment and what you can do at home to make nutritional meals that taste good, are easy to prepare and for the patient, easy to chew, swallow and digest. Live on https://W4WN.com and on demand anytime at iHeart.com and the free iHeart App. Cut and paste link: https://www.iheart.com/show/209-Fearless-Fabulous-You/
Books by Melanie Young. Available nationwide on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and CureDiva.
