Book shows how to gain survivor’s edge in The Cancer Fighting Kitchen

Cancer fighting dynamo fights appetite loss and chemo symptoms

Chef Rebecca Katz is a kinetic dynamo made of one part temptress to three parts artist, with a pinch of alchemist and a dash of poetics, whose creative medium is food and whose clients are faced with life threatening cancer. Katz is a nationally acclaimed author who delivers fresh hope for cancer patients striving to thrive during treatment and recovery by taking control of their illness through proper nutrition. Her latest cookbook based on updated research, The Cancer Fighting Kitchen, hits shelves August 28.

Rebecca Katz, author of The Cancer Fighting Kitchen

Into the middle of the cancer storm, Katz plunges wielding food reborn as functional art and as viable medicine. She aims to create food so gorgeous, so flirty, so bursting with color and flavor that even cancer patients in the throws of nausea and weakness can’t resist a taste. “I deal with people going through cancer treatment whose taste buds are operating at 20%,” said Katz, “and it doesn’t matter how nutritious the food is, if it doesn’t taste amazing, they aren’t going to eat it. People are often amazed by how delicious ‘healthy’ whole foods can be.”

Fighting cancer through nutrition

Rice Paper Moo Shoo Vegetable

The Cancer Fighting Kitchen is a book for its time as doctors increasingly recognize the importance of nutrition in the treatment of cancer. New science suggests that combating cancer is about more than battling rogue cells. It’s the environment in which those cells live that plays a critical role as well. Like a healthy fish tank, the balance of water and salinity and chemicals in the tank are critical to the health of the life living inside the tank walls – so you, as well, are reliant on your own body ecology. A healthy environment for your cells through quality nutrition and lifestyle can be the thing that gives you ‘the survivor’s edge’ to reduce cancer treatment side effects and to possibly limit tumor growth.

“Taking hold of your nutrition,” said Katz, “also returns a sense of control to a person. When you’re faced with something like cancer, it’s almost like someone slaps you across the face, and you’re looking for a way you can gain control over that disease, and cooking and what you put into your body is a kind of way you can have some portion of control over something bigger than you.”

Mini meals become like mini life rafts

The cookbook offers attractive 'any time' foods to support mini meals

Katz recommends small meals with high nutritional value. “(With cancer) you’re at a point where food and your connection with food has been severed,” said Katz, “so if you put a large plate of food in front of somebody who doesn’t have an appetite, it’s maybe one bite and then they just push it away. Whereas if you think about nourishing your body with small meals full of wonderful ingredients, then eating becomes like a little intravenous drip that runs throughout the day. Maybe you’re eating small bites every hour, and you’re keeping yourself hydrated with tonics or broth. These small meals are like anytime food, like little mini life rafts that keep you afloat.

If you’re feeling nauseous – pregnant women in the first trimester deal with this too, they say “I feel so nauseous, I can’t eat anything” or “I don’t want to drink anything” – well, keeping yourself hydrated and keeping yourself nourished are actually the things that can keep the nausea at bay and maintain blood sugar, which is important to cancer therapy.”

The nutrition tools you need to get through cancer treatment

Sweet bites recipes support your connection with food at a time when appetite fails

“The Cancer Fighting Kitchen,” said Katz, “is all about giving people tools that deal specifically with how food can get you through cancer treatment and includes a lot more science than the last book, One Bite at a Time.”

Enhancements include:

- The Cancer Fighting Toolkit, a guide that helps readers address specific issues relating to taste changes and treatment side effects, such as ginger for nausea

- The Culinary Pharmacy, a guide that outlines the “unparalleled concentration of cancer-fighting compounds in herbs and spices along with specific foods

- 150 more recipes than One Bite at a Time

- More specific, tactical strategies “for striving and thriving during treatment”

- Interesting and understandable descriptions of the science behind the recipes

Chapters headings include:

- Nourishing soups and broths (subtle strategies to keep you eating)

- Vital vegetables (fresh, loving, visually stimulating)

- Protein building foods (to maintain and rebuild)

- Anytime foods (need one say more)

- Tonics and elixirs (a dazzling array of healing beverages)

- Dollops of Yum (extra tasty “food adornments” to boost appetite)

- Sweet bites (comfort foods and sweets that support health)

Spices and herbs make foods both yumlicious and healthlicious

Teas, tonics, herbs and spices soothe nausea, stabilize blood sugar and boost immune response

Katz muses over the twist of fate that the spices and herbs she uses to make food taste delightful also contain potent cancer fighting compounds. For example, “cinnamon,” said Katz, “helps to regulate blood sugar while it also adds incredible depth and flavor to what it is that we’re eating. If we’re roasting some sweet potatoes, and we add a little cinnamon and some allspice with a touch of red chili pepper flakes with a little sea salt, well we’ve done a lot of things there. We’re regulating NF-kB, which is kind of like a little master switch that turns cancer cells on and off. We’ve lowered blood sugar with our cinnamon and we’ve reduced inflammation and all of that from just a few spices in our spice cabinet.”

“P.S.,” said Katz, “the bottom line is, it makes the food taste wonderful which means when you’re eating the food you feel more nourished, and if you’re feeling nourished you’re feeling a sense of well being. So, great taste and great nutrition have to sit at the table side by side. You can’t have one without the other.”

Ebullient Katz bubbles over with existentially stimulating words like cornucopia and color palette, joyous and … yes, yumlicious … to celebrate the great things that people undergoing cancer treatment can do for themselves to boost both appetites and immune systems.

“The thing I think that most people don’t know is just how important it is to keep your body well nourished,” said Katz, “because when you have cancer, you want to protect the healthy cells in your body.

If you think of your body as a garden that’s being kind of overrun with weeds and there are these few pockets of healthiness in there, you want to protect that, you want to keep the healthy pockets that are in there, you want to help the healthy parts grow. It’s ironic, that good food is what’s really going to help kill the weeds.”

What can we learn from people with cancer?

Chef Katz lives in beautiful, health conscious Marin County, CA

For Katz, it has been a very humbling experience to work with people who are dealing with cancer, “It puts you very much into the present with that person. It makes me think about life and also about the intention I put into the food and into my writing. I feel grateful I can do this work that I do, especially with food. To help people find what’s going to serve in helping them feel better.”

Why we should all eat like we have cancer?

Katz, who is clearly passionate about food and health and big, appealing flavors suggests at the heart of it, that we can all take a lesson from the diets she’s designed for cancer patients. “All of those beautiful foods, whole grains and vegetables, foods that contain incredible amounts of phytochemicals and phytonutrients and antioxidants,” said Katz, “can be protecting our bodies when we are healthy. Why wouldn’t you want to look at the cornucopia of gorgeous food out there, and know that that food is going to make you feel so much better than the donut you ate at seven o’clock this morning to start your day.”

Become your own prep cook

Soups recipes are nutrient dense, easy to swallow and emotionally comforting; non-cooks find them easy to make and store, and easy to adapt to changing taste buds during cancer treatment .

Cancer gives new meaning to the idea of being well prepared, when you’re sick there has to be food on hand, you have to be prepared, to become a ‘prep cook,’ which means you don’t wait until the last minute to cook. “When you think about it,” said Katz, agreeing when asked if busy moms could benefit from organizational tips in the book, “I bet if I put a stopwatch to a busy mom who had too many things going on during the day and hadn’t prepared; if they had to prepare a healthy meal versus piling everyone in the car, driving to the drive-through or restaurant, ordering, eating and going on the next destination, it would come pretty darn close to simply making a healthy meal. Cooking time is really about people’s perception of what time is. I am a believer that time can really expand in the kitchen, that’s my personal philosophy.”

Recruit a culinary support team

Of course, when sick, enlisting a support team can offer relief and get people through the rough patches, “Well organized, delivering things in small, portion controlled batches. And this can apply to a busy mom or caretaker,” said Katz, “to think you have to cook from scratch every time you cook is a daunting thought, and it’s not necessarily like that. Instead, if you’re making soup, or yum or lentils, then you say, ‘I’m making it in batches; I’m putting it into serving size containers; I’m labeling it.’ And that goes into inventory. Then I have healthy things in my freezer, components of a meal, that’s the thought process. These frozen lifelines become our culinary RX. Enhancing flavor and taste, using the power of herbs and spices, learning how we can adopt different global flavor prints to make food more interesting. “

Take a fresh look at whole foods

Chickpea burger can be made in advance and frozen for small and easy meal

Katz suggested we take a fresh look at whole foods in all of their glory, “if you just walk through the farmers market or even walk past the produce aisle and look at that amazing palette of colors, that’s our protection, our culinary RX that helps us thrive in everyday life. I mean, why wouldn’t you want to do that for yourself?

We can get really involved in the science when we look at a deep blue of a rich, vibrant blueberry; we could sit here and list every chemical and nutrient and antioxidant in that blueberry that all translate into something that’s going to fight for us, help our brains, our hearts, help protect against cancer by linking up the different receptors; the same with broccoli, the same with kale, but at the end of the day, the more varieties of foods that we get in our diets from apple to zucchini are really going to help us.”

When asked about detoxing through foods, Katz agreed, “you can be detoxing all day long by your choice of foods, just drinking a glass of water is detoxifying, so is cilantro pesto; artichoke is a powerful liver detoxifier.

Basically, I’m a proponent of the whole foods approach, and that’s what the Cancer Fighting Kitchen is really all about. The recipes are just based on really great ingredients.”

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