The Role of Nutrition in Cancer Treatment Tolerance
If you're going through cancer treatment, getting through each cycle can feel like a milestone.
You have the blood test, you wait for the results, and hopefully you get the go-ahead for your next treatment.
But what happens when you don't?
Sometimes cancer treatment needs to be delayed, reduced or even stopped because your body isn't coping well enough to continue safely.
Perhaps your white blood cell or neutrophil count is too low, your platelets may have dropped, or your kidney or liver function may have changed. Suddenly you're being told that the treatment you desperately want to continue can't go ahead as planned.
Understandably, this can be incredibly difficult news to hear. But it also raises an important question:
What can you do to support your body while it's dealing with everything that treatment asks of it?
Why can cancer treatment be delayed?
Your oncology team doesn't just monitor how your cancer is responding to treatment, they also monitor how you are responding to it.
Blood tests are used to check things such as your:
white blood cells and neutrophils
red blood cells and haemoglobin
platelet count
kidney function
liver function
These results help your oncology team decide whether it's safe for your next treatment to go ahead.
Cancer treatments can affect your bone marrow, reducing its ability to produce blood cells. Some treatments can also place additional demands on your liver and kidneys, two organs that play a vital role in processing and removing medicines from your body.
If certain results fall outside the range your oncology team considers to be safe, your treatment may need to be delayed, your dose may be changed, or treatment may need to be stopped to give your body chance to recover.
How does nutrition play a role?
Your nutritional needs depend on what is happening in your body right now.
Blood results are incredibly useful when I'm working with somebody during cancer treatment.
Rather than looking at whether a result has simply been marked "normal" or "abnormal", I look at the bigger picture:
What’s changed?
Are there any patterns?
How does that fit with your diet?
What treatment are you receiving?
What other medications are you taking?
What symptoms and side effects are you experiencing?
What does your health history look like?
This allows me to provide something far more useful than just a generic list of foods that somebody with cancer "should" eat.
I recently worked with a woman in her 70’s living with advanced cancer whose treatment had been stopped because her blood results weren't strong enough for her to continue.
She had been told that if those results improved, treatment could restart.
I reviewed a year's worth of her blood results alongside her diet, health history, medications, symptoms and treatment plan. I also referred her for further blood tests to help pinpoint specific areas that needed support.
Her plan was built around those findings, with diet, lifestyle and targeted supplements personalised to what her body needed for her specific situation.
Her subsequent blood results improved sufficiently for her oncology team to restart her cancer treatment, and importantly they continued to strengthen despite her treatment restarting.
This is what personalised cancer nutrition looks like.
While it might be a helpful starting point, there’s no point handing everybody diagnosed with cancer the same list of "anti-cancer foods". We need to be looking at you.
Your diagnosis, your treatment, your health history, your blood results, your symptoms, your diet, your medication, your priorities.
You don't have to wait until treatment has been stopped
This is the most important thing I want you to take away from this article: You don't have to wait until something goes wrong before getting the right nutritional support.
If you've recently started treatment, or you're about to, then proactively supporting and protecting your nutritional status gives you an opportunity to look at what your body needs before problems arise.
That might mean looking at whether you're getting enough of particular nutrients, how well you're maintaining your weight and muscle mass, how you're managing treatment side effects, or whether changes in your blood results highlight an area that requires closer attention.
If your treatment has already been delayed, where do you start?
First, find out why.
Ask your oncology team which result or set of results led to the delay and whether there is anything in particular they are monitoring for improvement before treatment can be restarted.
If you have access to your previous blood results, these can also be useful - looking at how your results have changed over time can provide patterns that give even more information than looking at the latest test alone.
From a nutrition perspective, I’d then want to understand the wider picture: your diagnosis, health history, treatment plan, symptoms and any side effects you’re experiencing, what you're currently eating, whether your intake has changed since treatment began, what other medications you're taking and what your blood results are showing.
From there we work out what to prioritise, and design a personalised plan that looks at diet, lifestyle and targeted supplements that are safe and appropriate for what your body needs.
Helping your body cope with treatment
When your body is being asked to cope with chemotherapy, targeted therapy, immunotherapy or other cancer treatments, nutrition isn't an insignificant detail or something that's just ‘nice-to-have’. It's an area where you can actively support your health during a time when so much can feel outside your control.
And you don't need to wait until your body is struggling before you start.
Whether you're preparing to begin treatment, already part-way through it, or you've reached a point where your blood results are affecting whether treatment can continue, there may be areas of your nutrition that are worth looking at more closely.
You can't control every aspect of how your body will respond to cancer treatment. But you can make sure you're giving it the nutritional support it needs while it's being asked to do an extraordinarily demanding job.
And sometimes, knowing where to focus your efforts can make the whole process feel a little less overwhelming.
Has your cancer treatment been delayed because of your blood results, or are you concerned about supporting your body through treatment?
I provide personalised 1:1 cancer nutrition support alongside your medical care. We'll look at your treatment, blood results, diet, medication and symptoms together and identify where nutritional support could be most useful for you.
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