Mindful eating

The book

6 steps

Balance

Mindful eating plate

Eating well and appropriately are essential eating adjuvant therapies to cancer treatments. Eating well and appropriately does not mean eating super functional food, food for detoxifications or food to enhance our immune system. Eating therapy is essentially eating mindfully and nutritiously. It also means eating moderately.

Eating is much more than just satisfying hunger, it entails high emotional quotions as with cravings. Cancer treatments creates side effects affecting eating, like loss of appetite, taste, and the ability to swollow, nausea and much more.

If the cancer patient is obsese and has diabetes, he should eat less and should loose some weight to stabilise fat in the body. If the cancer patient rejects food due to side effects, then the patient is vulnerable to cachexia; a dangerous condition when cancer cells will eat normal cells to survive. That is why cancer is sometimes referred as a “wasting disease”

Susan Albers, PSY.D’s latest book Eat.Q. avocates the power of emotional intelligence to address our problems in eating. This is not another health or weight loss book.  Susan Albers is an experienced psychologist specialising in mindful eating, mindfulness and emotional intelligence. The author recognises the emotional elements that are affecting us when we eat. This book provides the solution to emotional eating, stress related eating and plain old over-eating. Her EAT formula is definitely a fresh approach to mindful eating. EAT is an acronym for Embracing your feelings, Accepting your emotions, and Turning to new, positive alternatives to eating.

The book is however heavy reading to digest and understand it’s tools for success. Whilst the book is essentially to help obese people to reduce weight, it is also a good book for cancer patients to avoid cachexia. Just use the same concepts in handling the eating process with emotional  intelligence.

This is a good book to have and to guide us through in eating well and mindfully.

Take care

Allen Lai

Dr Glenn Begley on TED Talks

Graphical progression of the cancer cells

Dr Glenn Begley gave an interesting talk In Medical TED Talk in 2011. The topic of his talk is “The complex Biology of cancer (or why We haven’t cured it yet). Although some of the details are slightly dated now, the gist of what he explained remains relevant. Yes there has been marked progresses in immunotherapies, tergeted therapies, vacines and nuclear medicines.

Dr Begley’s salient points are:

Cancer is not one diesease.

Cancer cells begins with one single cell.

Tumorigenesis is a multi-step process originating from a single cell.

Cancer develops fairly slowly over many years.

Detection of cancer is more often detected at the very late stage of its development.

Primary cancers seldom kills. Metastases kill.

Adjuvant therapies are the most significant advance in cancer treatments.

The graph above shows that cancer growth rate is higher in the initial development. The exponential phase is at 10 base 3 (20 doubling times) and the remission/relapse milestone is defined at the 10 base 6 when the tumour is detectable. (30 doubling times)

Visit the utube video below for his full talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpALjMJEb50

Dr C. Glenn Begley is Chief Scientific Officer at TetraLogic Pharmaceuticals, Malvern, PA. He serves on the Board of Directors of the UK-based Oxford BioTherapeutics, and is on the Scientific Advisory Boards for several biotech companies. From 2002-2012, he was Vice-President and Global Head of Hematology/Oncology Research at Amgen, responsible for building, directing and integrating the research program at Amgen’s 5 research sites. He has over 20 years of clinical experience in medical oncology and hematology. His research has focused on transnational clinical trials and regulation of hematopoietic cells. He has published over 200 scientific papers is Board Certified in Australia as a Medical Oncologist and Hematologist and has a PhD in cellular and molecular biology. He has numerous awards and honors including election to the Association of American Physicians.

Take care all

Allen Lai

On the cancer frontier

Read about Paul A. Marks MD’s trial and tribulations as he goes through the era of the war against cancer in the US. Dr Marks led the Memorial Sloan-Kettering cancer Center (MSKCC) for nineteen years and had been an advisor on the US national cancer policy. He is  a prominent figure in the medical research into finding a cure for cancer for over half a century.

Read his joys and frustrations in trying to establish the strategy for the war against cancer since 1971. He had helped in the containment of cancer and briefly now described his account of the transformation in our understanding of cancer and why there is a growing optimism in our ability to stop it.

A good read to understand the fundermental changes and milestones in the successes in cancer research achieved thus far. 

Take care 

Allen Lai