I assume the goal here is feeling better during recovery, and that nobody is entertaining claims that these dietary shifts will help fight cancer itself.
Such naivete, in one so intelligent!
More constructively, my attitude is basically, all we have in this world is time, and cooking wastes it.
For me, eating meats and fat leaves me with a huge desire to eat sugary stuff. And eliminating whole categories of food from my diet for a week or two reminds me of the allergist I saw when I was a kid. He was convinced that I had a hidden food allergy and to test for it, I had to eat nothing but boiled beef for a week and then slowly add back foods. Now that I'm grown, I'd go slash his tires if I'd remember his name or if my mom's Alzheimer's would let up enough for her to remember it.
I did have a much lower set of craving for sugar once I stopped drinking diet soda.
I like cooking.
I hate woo-woo medicine and I want nobody to ever ssuggest any dietary changes to me ever again. But I also believe (I guess) that other people's bodies are different and each one may react in its own indiosyncratic way to the food input it receives.
(Basically I am all for experimenting with your own diet but if you start telling other people to try it I will punch you in the stomach block you on facebook and talk shit behind your back at parties.)
I did have a much lower set of craving for sugar once I stopped drinking diet soda.
Really? Damn. I love diet sodas so much, and I keep going back and forth on the evidence against them.
1: I meant nobody HERE, you close-reader. That by posing an ATM in the first place, J, Robot was not entertaining that kind of notion.
I'm not stupid enough to criticize cancer survivors, but the my-new-dieting-technique-is-unstoppable thing can be another strut under the theory that cancer is a new god, to be appeased, sacrificed for and propitiated, right? Something The Disinfected Gluten-Free Empowering Bough something Tom Wolfe something Frazer something.
"Close reader" is an insult I'm proud to have had hurled at me.
gluten, dairy, added sugars, meat
My initial reaction is that all these things need to be addressed separately in their own rights. Suppose you think that cutting out wheat is pure woo, that doesn't necessarily mean that cutting out dairy is too. Serious work has been done recently on the effect of gluten on people without coeliac disease. The team that did it initially found a small effect; then, as I understand it, the same team or many of them went back to their numbers and published another paper saying they were wrong, and that there was no effect. I'm not a reviewer for Nature, so I'm not going to comment. Someone close to me cut out wheat, but not all gluten producing grains for a while and said she felt much better for it. Maybe she did- did she control for placebo effect? Could she even do that?
Cutting out dairy seems reasonable. Lactase persistence is a recent mutation; it's far from universal, even in populations where it's widespread, like Europeans and African pastoralists. Again, I don't know how it works, but it's not toxic, just not digestible. Are there degrees of non-digestion? Who knows?
Craving for meat and sugars are, I think genuinely back on the veldt stuff. Both are part of a natural diet, but in nothing like the quantities the modal westerner gets through them. I shouldn't think cutting them out completely would do any harm, but if it's easier to just cut down, we all probably should. I like Michael Pollan's slogan: "Eat food, mostly vegetables."
Giving up wheat and dairy is a good idea for a lot of people. Some people are untroubled by both of those, but many people find giving them up makes them feel markedly better. Give it a couple of weeks, see how it goes; you don't have to marry your restrictive diet.
10: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants"
The tricky part is figuring out what Michael Pollan considers to be food.
I have low medical-woo tolerance though high woo-for-fun tolerance but some of this diet stuff makes a little bit of sense to me insofar as a lot of conditions have autoimmune/inflammatory aspects (inflammation such a current and yet such a medieval medical concept!) and sure I guess certain foods could trigger immune responses in some people that we don't fully get. Also soy legit fucks me up for estrogen reasons not autimmune reasons. I guess "don't eat garbage" is not new advice, just garbage is an ever-shifting category that should not include gluten.
Also omg everyone should take magnesium it is truly the chillest mineral.
Anyway with that I think I have to wrap up my commenting experiment at least for a while. Trying to limit the kids' screentime and don't really have a leg to stand on. Except the leg of adulthood but, you know.
So, what did they serve that had huckleberries in it?
Ok ok I'll REALLY quit commenting when over magnesium evangelism. Really good for muscle stuff including soreness after exercise, and also for mood esp anxiety both to the point that I have to take it at night because it feels like an actual if weak muscle relaxant but YMMV. Also for headaches.
Who do you want to teach your kids about the world's hypocrisy, Stabs? You, or some random stranger?
a lot of conditions have autoimmune/inflammatory aspects
And it is really hard to say where cause and effect for those inflammatory aspects. Even with a decade of follow up.
I love diet sodas so much
Me too. If they turn out to be bad for you, then I'm just out of luck.
Anyway, my theory on diary is that if my ancestors went through all the trouble to evolve the ability to digest lactose as adults, I'm going to eat cheese and butter. If it were bad for me, how did that batch of genes spread so far and so fast.
did she control for placebo effect?
The placebo effect gets a lot of unjustified bad press.
how did that batch of genes spread so far and so fast.
Lipids have a low melting point.
The placebo effect gets a lot of unjustified bad press.
Does it? I'm all in favour of it personally.
Though not from nearly so dire a motivation, I'm trying to change my diet. I've realized just how low my protein consumption is. I always figured it was on the low side because I'm a vegetarian and not dutiful about it, but I'm probably getting half as much as I should. (I might literally be dead without dairy. LITERALLY.)
So now I'm piling on the protein. I'm not trying to cut carbs (hush, RT) or make any other changes, just adding protein which, let me tell you, is a pain in the ass.
Especially for people who eat out a lot, it's easy to eat a diet rich in sugar (added to basically all prepared food in the US) and white flour. Cutting out wheat completely is a big change, often an imposition. Much more realizable IMO is switching to whole wheat wherever possible and making wheat a complement rather than the main part of a meal.
J if you are a kitchen beginner, consider finding super-easy to prepare food that you actually like. Fried potatoes or corn tortillas, peppers/tomatoes, and scrambled eggs takes under 15 min from stepping into kitchen to eating. Falafel? Salmon with capers and white wine is easy. A rice cookers and good rice produce rice that has good texture and taste reliably.
If the issue is lactose, many dairy foods that have been digested by bacteria have much much less lactose than milk or cream-- hard cheeses, strained yogurt.
I used to share an office with a vegetarian who couldn't get enough protein and finally a doctor told her to eat chicken or expect to continue to have problems (she had lots of them). She started eating chicken and felt better, but really guilty.
24: Do you like peanut butter? I think that's my main source of protein.
Protein *is* your ass. Literally.
I've noticed that I have more energy in direct proportion to the amount of vegetables* I eat. I'm pretty sure there is a ceiling to this effect, but I've never run into it.
* not counting potatoes.
I've found that certain foods give me lots of energy but I can't harness the energy for anything useful, because it all just explodes out of my butt.
26. Yeah, that happens with certain types of anaemia. I had a colleague in the same position only she'd gone the whole way and could scarf a 10oz steak in the time it would take you to check that it's cooked right. She said, animals are animals, and she didn't want to eat them, but if it was them or her....
She started eating chicken and felt better, but really guilty.
My sister's first GF grew up on a farm outside of Columbus OH. She was a vegetarian mostly because she liked the farm animals, except chickens. She ate chicken because she hated those stupid birds.
J if you are a kitchen beginner, consider finding super-easy to prepare food that you actually like.
One useful thing is to figure out which convenience foods are actually convenient ingredients, not heavily processed junk. Frex, shredded frozen potatoes (like for hash browns) are more or less just that, with few if any added crap. So yeah, throw those in a skillet with fat, let it crisp, then fry an egg alongside. Toss in some small tomatoes until they blister, and you've got a round meal, even better if you serve it on a bed of greens. Basically none of that requires prep.
Similarly, IQF (individual quick-frozen) seafood lives in your freezer until you need it, thaws quickly (esp. tilapia & shrimp) and cook up in no time. Tilapia, crisped nicely in olive oil + butter, is easy to top with practically any sauce or salsa, homemade or bought.
But by sticking to things that cook simply and quickly, you can build up your skills (like knowing when to flip fish, or how long it takes to blister tomatoes) in small steps with very low disaster risk.
15: Not much, but I bought some huckleberry syrup and caramel corn for my husband. And I had huckleberry ice cream and the 50,000 Silver Dollar.
Your assumption is wrong -- it is bog-standard advice for people diagnosed with cancer to be told by other people that they need to 'clean up': cut out sugar, detox, shop in farmer's markets, etc. Americans associated eating with virtue, and virtue with health, as if the microscopic amounts of chemicals ingested on industrial carrots are going to make a difference when you've been diagnosed with an acute stage of a serious illness.
assume the goal here is feeling better during recovery, and that nobody is entertaining claims that these dietary shifts will help fight cancer itself.
Obviously nobody is meant to refer to the vast ignorant masses of non-Unfoggetarians.
Right, the people who don't even have an ekranoplan.
On diet, cutting out wheat/carbs, added/obviously sugary things like dessert (can't avoid sugar in an American diet where you eat out without it being an insane PITA) and starches like potatoes will definitely make you lose weight or stop gaining it (whether this is due to anti-inflammatory something or just inevitable calorie cut back or appetite suppression or something else, who knows, but unless you're trying to do research for posterity, who really cares).
Whether losing weight is something that you want or care about in your situation is a different story. It's not the be-all end-all of anything, but it can help.
Sometimes I think I should get tested for any wheat/gluten issues (I have IBS, so it's not out of the realm of possibility), and then I think it just wouldn't be worth it. I like not having to be picky. I like beer. Maybe a little suffering is worth it.
I'm contemplating trying the Ketogenic diet at the moment (very low carbs, some protein, high fat) not sure if I would be able to sustain (I really like beer), but the science appears to align with a lot of current thinking and people seem to have really good results. Apparently there's something called the "Leto flu" to go through for a few weeks as your body adjusts to using fat as its primary fuel source, fear of which may be what's holding me back.
(whether this is due to anti-inflammatory something or just inevitable calorie cut back or appetite suppression or something else, who knows, but unless you're trying to do research for posterity, who really cares)
Posterity? Did it ever occur to you if it is something inflammatory, then you can probably medicate for it and make more money than having people emote vaguely while standing in front of a green screen?
35 -- What a horribly deficient program. First they cut out the imaginary-friend-drops-by-with-a-growler-of-local-brew event, then they don't even feed you our cancer curing wonder food.
(I'd thought it was getting late for hucks, but there were pounds and pounds of them at the farmers market on Saturday, and then yesterday we found some patches while biking in the mountains -- small but intensely sweet.)
Disclaimer: hucks may not actually cure cancer.
http://healthybenefits.info/huckleberry/
Huckleberry Hound didn't really seem like he was in very good health.
J. Robot, I keep saying the same thing but I can't stop myself. If your experience parallels mine, you'll keep feeling better for a couple more years. (Actually, that took a hit about 10 months out, when I suddenly realized how much that had all sucked and I felt renewed grief for five or six months.) If you eat real well, you'll likely feel better, but you're going to consistently feel better anyway now that they aren't poisoning you.
I also came to the conclusion that willpower was irrelevant to my eating anyway. During cancer-3rd-pregnancy, no amount of willpower could have made me eat a purity/virtue diet. After cancer-3rd-pregnancy, I returned to my usual veggie-heavy diet (now with meat!) because that's what I wanted anyway.
On a few occasions I have gone without wheat for long enough to detect a slight positive effect (less puffy), but for me that slight positive effect is totally not worth giving up bread and pasta.
I am actually kinda wavering on aromatherapy, primarily on the grounds that even just the "smells good" part is worth it. Before the terrible things, I was a generally placid person. After the terrible things, I was grieving and simultaneously low-energy and twitchy as fuck. I went to the softy-soft restorative yoga and it included the aromatherapy. An additional nice thing to focus on? I'll take it. Can't hurt, helps set a little intention, maybe it is calming my twitchy self down.
That's the point of a lot of the "woo," right? Pleasant things that really do help soothe you and take you out of your head. The only harm comes when people create overly literal systems built on goofy theories about how this stuff works. But as long as you can just take it for the help it can bring you, there's a lot of useful stuff to be found in that world.
Maybe, to pick out the useful stuff, you need carefully calibrated critical thinking - just critical enough to pick out the useful stuff from the sheer BS, but not so critical that you pass up useful stuff because there's a BS theory associated with it.
If the problem is "living with the reminder that illness and death are inevitable and largely distributed by chance being constantly twitchy and sad" then being soothed is a real treatment.
I think being soothed is as close as it gets to a real treatment for what you have struckthrough as well. Lord knows there's no other one I've found.
I follow the MIND diet moderately (which is to say, yeah, I do believe in some diets having legitimate benefits), although it was basically how I eat anyway, so it's easy enough.
I think the theoretical basis linking chronic, longterm inflammation to cancer is pretty solid (and agree with atudies showing this), but I'm not sure about the links between diet and inflammation in a general population. I think we suck at assessing intermediate levels of inflammation and don't have a good idea yet of what is a normal range (or what are normal fluctuations). So, I think the eliminating-foods-from-your-diet-to-cancer leap is not well established in the majority of cases.
I suspect the folks who say they feel better following a certain diet are mostly feeling better about having something they can control (to which I'm extremely sympathetic). I mean, this is kind of awful, but most people with cancer don't feel "bad" in early stages, so is it a useful barometer? Also, once you have cancer, you kind of want inflammation and a strong immune response (which doesn't happen because cancer cells aren't really distinguishable from healthy ones by the immune system. That's what a lot of cutting edge therapies try to do -- induce a strong immune response. There's also the question of what you ingest vs what is actually absorbed. There's only so much (for example) vitamin C you can get through diet. Excess leaves as urine. So, hard to say whether eating 3X as much of a food gives you a stronger effect than 1X.
Short version: there are lots of reasons to eat healthful food, but avoiding wheat forever probably won't do much vis-à-vis cancer for most people. However, feeling good by whatever works is important, so trying on woo diets, if it makes you happy or feel good, is a perfectly fine thing to do and no one should judge you (unless your woo diet is legitimately dangerous).
Another easy thing to cook is pasta. It's pretty quick and relatively forgiving. I make a basic sauce by sauteeing garlic and maybe onion in olive oil, and when the onion is soft adding canned tomatoes plus dried oregano, basil, and thyme. You can add any veggies or meat you have (I like mushrooms, kale, eggplant, spinach, or zucchini), but it's okay too with just garlic and onion. If you have wine or wine vinegar or tomato paste it adds a bit of flavor, and some people neutralize the acid with a small bit of sugar. Sometimes I add a tablespoon of butter at the end to make it a little richer. There's low carb black bean pasta, whole wheat pasta, and gluten free pasta if you want to cut down on carbs.
You don't put oregano in that sauce, you monster.
I mean, if you're going to use black bean pasta or something, go ahead. You can't save it regardless.
I forgot to add that you shouldn't really prepare this sauce for Italians. Also, grate lots of parmesan cheese on it before eating.
If you have children in your house I think it is worth paying some mind to the kind of eating habits you model, including whether you are modelling anxiety or other less than desirable relationships with food in general or specific foods.
But I may have a particularly impressionable kid as years ago some adult at the school said something negative about ice cream and he's avoided it since. This is a drag considering he needs max calorie dense foods to fuel all that dancing. Luckily he didn't get any shitty memo re cream so it's cream cream cream butter butter butter.
And fir buttercup's long-suffering bf: http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/08/this-is-how-to-make-a-flattop-look-feminine.html
except ignore the femme angle.
Oh, J, I missed the suggestions for food part of the question until I saw Buttercup's pasta suggestion. What do you like to eat? Are you wanting to try gluten-free, paleo, Whole30, low-FODMAP, vegetarian, anything? Do you hate anything? Will you eat leftovers?
For food, I really like covering up chicken in flour and pan frying it in butter and olive oil. Very easy and sufficiently greasy to sustain life.
Also, a fresh whole wheat baguette and a stick of butter. That's a pretty easy dinner that tastes great.
55. OK, onion gets sauteed until transparent with an arbol chili or red ppper if youve woken up away from your pwn kitchen, and when it's almost done add the garlic. NO SUGAR EVER, you probably need to add vinegar actually, and definitely wine. Wine vinegar is watery, pointless, just use real vinegar and separately real wine. Chicken stock or a bouillon cube. Make sure the canned tomatoes are just tomatoes, nothing else.
Eggplant is good in this, sautee it separately, for longer than you think-- that is, start the eggplant BEFORE you make the rest of the sauce and serve as rounds, separately from the rest of the sauce, which by the way also needs some bay leaf. Get the oregano from a tienda, not the supermarket, fresher and a tastier strain. Eat less pasta and more sauce and eggplant if you want to cut dpown on carbs, those degraded carsboard-tasting noodle-shaped abominations.
You are welcome.
63. Holy shit. OK, mole is unsweetened cocoa, bullion, and 1 ancho and 2 dried guajillo chilies, chicken broth to thin it. No more time than the quoted "recipe"
Paprikash is sour cream, onion, and good paprika.
Different strokes for different folks and everything, but Were you listening to the Captain and Tenille while you "cooked" that?
Actually, pan fried with jerk is OK-- grilled is a lot better, but jerk in a pan is tolerable.
Respectfully, food humor might not be your strong suit.
Or a pouch. I think it used to come in cans but I kept calling the store and asking if they had "mole in a can".
If it makes you feel better, I season the flour and the chicken. Salt, pepper, paprika.
Not having a humor strong suit is Moby's strong suit.
OK, I hear that Seals and Crofts are underappreciated, and that Yes had some great late albums.
You're thinking of the jars of Dona Maria Mole maybe. They add crackers to dilute the taste also sugar. 66 is the way to go, maybe start also with a little onion in the pan and sprinkle some sesame seeds on top.
ISTM that the rule when talking about cooking ought to be that if the process has more than 3 steps, or the dish for that 4 ingredients, use of the words "simple" or "easy" is strongly discouraged.
heebie, totally with you on sugar. For me I think it's a pregnancy/postpartum change, but right now eating carbs makes me hungrier for more carbs, and I'm hungry all the time right now. Could follow up a pizza with another pizza. Cutting carbs helps a little, but then I'm very low energy.
pot, egg, water, salt, papper. Too much, or is that OK?
Your bullshit 15-minute Mole recipe is 50x more bland white guy from the 70s bullshit than anything else. Why not have a hard shell taco bowl with Donald Trump.
I thought lw was being over-the-top snotty with the cooking tips, and then I saw 66.1 and realized s/he is pulling our leg. That's not mole. It doesn't even sound like food.
78. Dude, you know full well that 90125 came out in 1983. Trevor Horn didn't even think of that horn splat until 1981. Man, I bet there's a great story behind that immortal sound....
59: My Italian ex-girlfriend would go apeshit if you pulled something like that. "I want only for to eat my salad." Christ, it's a pasta sauce with cheese on it, non fai la vendetta.
This is all very helpful. I think my best response right now will be to make some small changes each week (e.g., more fruits and veggies, less junk), add in some light daily exercise, and see where it gets me, mood and weight-wise.
For the record, prepacked mole is perfectly fine. Get some cooked chicken, cheese, and tortillas and you can make enchiladas.
Not the brand with the picture of the white guy on the label.
J, my food advice is always to go to Ellyn Satter. I've been a total disaster for years and dinner has gone to hell during this summer's move and other chaos, but I'm aiming to use this guide to gradually get things back under control. Her book on feeding a family is also for single people and couples and has great information and good super easy recipes.
J., we've been eating a mostly gluten-free diet at home since my husband was dx'd with celiac about six years ago (christ, has it been that long?). My advice for going gluten-free? Get a rice cooker and experiment with other cuisines. Thai, Chinese, Indian are not so hard to cook at home (and cheap!) and the food is mega delicious. Meals we really like and eat over and over:
1. Thai curry with shrimp or chicken (buy the Thai Kitchen red curry paste from the grocery store, use about 4x as much as it tells you, sautee with onion, red and green pepper, carrot, and can of coconut milk) with white or short-grain brown rice. Can also do the green curry paste (good but not as good), or a blend of the red and green (most delicious option). It's gluten-free, hearty, and delicious. Makes amazing leftovers that you can't wait to eat the next day.
2. Indian vegetable curry with white or short-grain brown rice (can't find the recipe i bastardized this from). Saute 2 big sliced onions, lots of ginger and garlic (I buy the paste in jars). When softened and combined add lots of spices (1-2 tsp each coriander, garam masala, cumin, cinnamon, 1/2 tsp cayenne. Saute for a minute or two until fragrant. Then add lots of veggies--I use cauliflower, yellow squash, red and/or green bell pepper, carrot. Then 28 oz can diced tomatoes. One can chickpeas. Lots of salt. Cook until vegetables are soft and salt and cayenne to desired spiciness. Also nice with a dollop of yogurt on top for serving. Also makes great leftovers.
I recommend south carolina low-country food. red rice, perloo, shrimp and grits, sweet potato pone--gluten-free biscuits can be adequate. gluten-free brownies are top notch, and there is an excellent one bowl gf banana bread recipe that's great. bob's red mill gf pie crust mix is actively good, retaining flaky crispness even after spending overnight slumping into liquidy fruit pie filling. or else asian food, as suggested.
I've always been to afraid to order a pone when I've been somewhere I could try it.