Could Food Do More in Cancer Care and Prevention?
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What role does food play in cancer care and prevention?
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Final season exclusively on Disney+. 18 plus subscription required. Klaas Olsson's customer service. Important information for all summer fixers. Do you count days so you can... Or... First, tell us. You'll find us on every trip and packing. Welcome to Klaas Olsson.
Klaas Olsson. Hello and welcome to the Food Programme. I'm Sheila Dillon. Cancer and what you eat. Is there a connection? Well, you might say yes, obviously there is. But it wasn't so long ago that that wasn't recognised at all by the medics that treat us when we're struck by the big C. Views on food as cancer prevention, healing or even part of the treatment... are changing now in the NHS, as I've seen as a patient and as a journalist since I first made a programme on the subject 20-odd years ago, long before my own diagnosis. So, have a listen. I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, which is a blood cancer, but it's a bone marrow cancer actually, affecting the way your blood is made, in late 2011.
What do you remember of that? How did that happen? Well, it happened because I was dismissed for months by my GP practice as just being somebody with a bad back. But it was my Pilates teacher who figured out there was something wrong and sent me to a specialist. And there it was. I was, you know, rage frightened, rage frightened. But I had made, fortunately, a program about diet and cancer triggered by two things. My sister being diagnosed some years earlier, my younger sister.
She had breast cancer.
She had breast cancer and the prognosis was not good. She decided to have surgery but no other treatment and she would do this healthy diet, not anything peculiar, and consult a cancer nutritionist and all these years later she's fine and she's never had a recurrence of cancer. But at the time, it seemed she was taking an enormous risk, and we all know that one case doesn't prove anything. At the same time, the World Cancer Research Fund issued, I think it was their first global report about cancer incidence, and it showed that in countries where the population in general ate more whole foods, that they had much lower rates of cancer, and it wasn't a genetic thing. I was producing the food program at the time.
I thought it seems to link to another question. If good diet can keep cancer rates down, what would happen if you encouraged people to eat like that who already had cancer, you know, been treated, were getting better? Could you slow down recurrence? Could you stop recurrence? And so that first program asked that question. But when we rang up the cancer research places in the UK, we were treated as though we were nuts. You know, what a daft question. This conversation in my kitchen as I prepared a good for cancer patients easy lunch came out of producer Natalie Donovan and I talking about the link between having cancer, that's me, and the government's National Cancer Plan for England published earlier this year.
I made my first food program about the links between diet and cancer long before my diagnosis, so this program is a personal update of a story that was marginal 20 odd years ago when that first program aired, and now when it's really not so marginal. England's new cancer plan aims to save 320,000 more lives and ensure three out of four people diagnosed with cancer survive for five years or more by 2035. But unlike the first national plan in 2000, there's not much mention in it of food, diet. Obesity is highlighted, tackling it to be done in two ways, by getting supermarkets to monitor and report on sales of healthy and unhealthy foods, and by making weight loss drugs more available. There's also a commitment to improving hospital food in children's cancer wards.
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