How do you counsel cancer patients when they ask if they should avoid sugar?  

“We don’t have evidence to support any specific diet that can either worsen or improve outcomes. I encourage a healthy, well-balanced diet with my top priority being you maintaining your weight during treatment.” Particularly for my head and neck patients, getting in sufficient cal...

I approach this by first seeing if they are losing weight or at risk of weight loss during treatment. We want to focus on weight maintenance in these individuals, which requires ensuring they are getting their total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) in calories. My preference is to recommend they cons...

Patients who received pretreatment nutritional support in RTOG trial 90-03 experienced less weight loss along with decreased grade 3-4 mucositis, than patients that did not receive baseline nutritional support. However, these patients also experienced a statistically significant decrease in locoregi...

It’s a non issue.

Lots of interesting references here—thank you all. I distill my response down to Yes, sugar feeds cancer. It also feeds everything else in your body, and you’ll need fuel to put up with what I’m doing to you.  I recommend the same diet as all your other doctors: more lean...

When patients ask about avoidance of sugar or a low-sugar diet, they may be interested in a ketogenic diet. A ketogenic diet is a very low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet that aims to induce a metabolic state called ketosis, in which the body burns fat instead of glucose for energy. It has been suggeste...

Everyone should try and limit sugar and highly processed foods. I would encourage that regardless. healthy fats/oils and proteins can provide the calories needed and are more calorie dense anyway. Is the occasional bag of gummy bears going to make a difference? Probably not. But the theory that indu...

The vast majority of the time I am asked this question by a patient (but more often a well-meaning, but misinformed family member), it is in reference to a patient about to start or in the midst of radiation treatments. The underlying question, the vast majority of the time, is "Doesn't eating suga...

This question about whether to eliminate sugars seems to come from the misunderstanding/application of the Warburg Effect described in the 1920s.At the time, Warburg and others were finding increased sugar use and processing by cancer cells, including cancer cell shunting of glucose down the pentose...