Undergoing chemotherapy treatments to fight cancer may be effective in eradicating the dangerous cells but it can also leave the rest of your body in bad shape. What should you eat or take to recover?
By definition, chemotherapy is chemical therapy, or pouring toxic chemicals into your body in the hopes of killing bad cells so that good cells can survive.
That’s all great when the chemotherapy works and the cancerous cells are eradicated, but how do you help the body recover from the assault?
Dr. Ben Kim advocates following a round of chemotherapy with a diet focused on fresh juices from leafy greens, vegetables, and fruits. If you don’t have access to fresh juices, then consider taking a large daily dose of a super green concentrate powder supplement made from whole foods to get the antioxidants.
He also recommends practicing a mostly vegetarian diet for the month following. A vegetarian diet is easier to digest than one with animal proteins.
To these ideas, I would add a round of intensive probiotic therapy (here’s one I like) to help replace the beneficial flora and fauna in your intestines that were unintended casualties of the chemicals.
A good plant-based digestive enzyme will help break everything down in your stomach enough so that your intestines can actually absorb the available nutrition from the food. Malnutrition can bring on lingering side effects from other therapies and delay recovery.
If you find that the chemotherapy has left you with nausea, bloating, acid reflux, diarrhea, constipation, or other digestive symptoms, you are likely experiencing a loss of oral tolerance due to cellular damage from the chemotherapy. When this happens, your best course is to identify food sensitivities through the Mediator Release Test and work with a Certified LEAP Therapist (CLT) to design a customized anti-inflammatory diet.
