October 9: Things Not to Say - Part 2

Welcome to the second post out of four installments of things not to say to someone with metastatic disease. As I said yesterday, I understand many of these comments are spoken with only the best of intentions, and it's not my goal to shame anyone for saying them. I admitted to saying one of them myself yesterday. It's what's busted with all the pinkwashing.

"Have you tried this special food?"

 I'm not even a year away from my diagnosis, and I'm pretty sure I've already heard it all. Hemp oil cures cancer. Superfoods cure cancer. I just have to eat this or take those pills and I'll be okay. Seriously, I wish it were that easy. There is no particular food or natural ingredient or medication that will cure cancer. I have no doubt that eating thee foods help supplement and support the body during and after treatment and give us an extra boost of nourishment, but a cure? Far from it.


"You need to make your body hostile to cancer by following a special diet."

There's a current theory floating around that cancer thrives in an acidic (low pH) environment, and in order to beat cancer, you need an alkaline (high pH) environment. It's based on lab studies, and while they are not inaccurate, the findings only apply to cells in an isolated lab setting. Altering the body's cells to be less acidic is virtually impossible to accomplish. Furthermore, home-testing kits which measure the pH balance in urine output do not reliably relay information on the body's pH levels. Excess acid or base is excreted and the body maintains its pH balance. If there were actually a known diet that worked, there would be a paper or five published by the likes of MD Anderson or Sloan-Kettering. Finding a treatment like that would be quite the feather in any doctor's cap.


Sugar feeds cancer cells!

This theory took root because of the way PET scans work.  Positron emission tomography (PET) scans use a small amount of radioactive tracer, typically a form of glucose. All tissues in your body absorb some of this tracer, but tissues that are using more energy, such as cancer cells, absorb greater amounts. For this reason, some people have concluded that cancer cells grow faster on sugar. But this isn't true. There's a reason you have to sit very still while the tracer disperses through your body. Any kind of activity will result in higher energy use. All cells use glucose, all cells need glucose. Cancer cells are typically dividing at a faster rate than most of the surrounding cells (which is why chemotherapy works) but cutting all forms of sugar out of your diet is not going to stop the cancer cells from growing and multiplying.

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Part One
Part Three
Part Four