Q&A: How to Fight Chemo Fog with Food
When you’re either going through or just getting over the side effects of cancer treatment, food might be the last thing on your mind. Some days you’re too nauseated to care. Other, eating right may simply feel like too much of a burden.
But can nutrition play a part in rebuilding your health after cancer? Can it help fight some of those side effects, including chemo fog?
For advice, Bad Mammaries founder Marissa Lanzito sat down to speak with Gina Sirchio-Lotus, DC, CCN, a certified clinical nutritionist — and a friend who helped Marissa think about how and what to eat during and after cancer treatment. Their conversation is below.
Marissa Lanzito: When you are working with cancer patients — or patients with any other specific needs — how do you go about assessing what they need?
Gina: I do see people with different needs, but they’re all trying to achieve something that’s either healing or health supporting. They’re still all working with the same systems. There’s not a secret recipe for the person running the Iron Man versus recovering from cancer. Instead, there is backing up and asking, “How is your body working? Is there a problem we have to get rid of? Are you depleted in some way?”
When you came in, for example, it wasn’t so much, “We need a special cancer plan.” It was more, “Where are you? What’s going on with your treatment and side effects? What can we do about what’s happening?”
That can start with nutritional panel testing. It can be stool testing to look at your gut function. Functional stool testing takes into account the population of the bacteria in your gut. Is there a yeast overgrowth? Is it just that you have no enzymes to help break things down?
Ultimately, we’re trying to find out, “Where are we starting?” And then, “How do we help you?”
Marissa: I remember when we were coming up with a plan — and during that time I remember experiencing chemo fog so bad that I thought I needed a brain scan. I remember talking to you and saying, “I have to get something out of my body because I just feel like everything is sludge.”
So what can you do for brain fog? Are there changes in diet that can help, or supplements?
Gina: A little caveat on supplements — most of them aren’t FDA approved, which is a plus and a minus. We have more access to more options, but then obviously there’s totally wacko stuff that’s out there. We have to be smart about what we use.
Also, some nutrients that are very good for us when taken with chemo can enhance the chemo in a good way. And other times they can be counterproductive and actually work against the treatment. If you really get into this field and you work with loads of cancer patients and oncologists, a lot of them do allow different supplementation when everyone’s on the same page — based on the treatment and the type of cancer.
But back to chemo fog. There are two big parts to that puzzle. One is that your body was flooded with toxic medication. It is what it is. It’s poison. And the hope is that it’s more poisonous to the cancer than everything else.
In addition to being toxic, treatment is just very depleting — not just for nutrients like vitamin B and vitamin C, but really for how the chemicals in our body work together. If you can’t actually make the chemical equations work, then the body doesn’t work right either. You aren’t actually making energy. You can’t function. You can’t repair cells. During this time when we want you to be healing properly and rapidly and completely, you also just don’t feel well. You don’t feel like yourself.
Functional testing helps us see where you are. What are your vitamin levels? What are your mineral levels? But also, do you have the nutrients that can run the Krebs cycle? Can you make ATP? Can you make energy for yourself?
Marissa: OK, for those of us who need Cliffs Notes, what is the Krebs cycle?
Gina: The Krebs cycle is how our body makes ATP, and that’s the energy currency of our cells. That’s our energy source. When we talk about energy, it’s too easy to fall into the whole, “I have positive energy and I negative energy” idea. It sounds so metaphysical. Woo-woo, right?
But in your body, energy is an actual, measurable thing. Our body takes protein and carbohydrates and fats and, through a series of enzymes and nutrients, breaks them down to ATP. When you’re running really low, you feel tired. You feel sluggish, not just sleepy, but “I can’t lift my leg, and I can’t think a complete thought.” Deep fatigue. So take this physical depletion that is happening in your body, and then you add in the emotional load. There’s just so much going on.
So when we’re looking at nutrient tests — and how to act on them — we’re trying to say, “How do we rebuild you from the inside out?” There’s a lot of cleanup to do. There’s a lot of restoring to do and, you know, detox tea is not gonna cut it.
Marissa: Let’s get specific on nutrition. I know some basics — like eat greens because they’re good for you. But are there specific foods that can help you combat brain fog or improve your brain function?
Gina: I would start with some of the things that would be baseline nourishing and good for everybody — like sipping on a cup of bone broth every day. Not chicken broth, but bone broth. You can buy it, but there are lots of recipes online to make it yourself. You can get bones from the butcher or save your leftover chicken carcass from a meal. It can be done cheaply.
It offers immense benefits because bone broth has deep nutrients — the things you need to make energy — and those nutrients are easily absorbed by the body. And it’s especially gentle on the gut. For a lot of folks that have done chemo or radiation, their gut needs gentle food.
That would be step one. The next would be six cups of cooked vegetables every day. That sounds like a lot. It is. But remember that health is a continuum. Not every day is going to be a perfect, check-every-box day. But you want to reach in that direction as much as you can. Also, you really want cooked and not raw for a number of reasons. One is raw is harder to digest. We want things that are easy to digest so you get as many nutrients as possible. We’re gearing the body up for the Krebs cycle I explained earlier, so we’re going to just slowly keep introducing it to nutrients in a gentle way.
You want to eat the rainbow. We always think that that sounds silly, but it’s a great way to tell people to choose different colors of produce because they bring in different nutrients, different sets of antioxidants and different chemical components in a good way. Trying to eat the rainbow over the course of a week is a great tip.
Marissa: So that’s a great way to get started. But what was the gross stuff you gave to me — the glutathione — for?
Gina: We make glutathione in all of our cells, and we make it in loads in the liver, but it does get burned out when it’s cleaning up anything — whether you drink too much alcohol, whether you just have to take a daily medication, or whether you’re having chemo. It’s a powerful detoxification agent and an antioxidant.
Marissa: And it tastes disgusting.
Gina: It really does. But it works. When you’ve been depleted, you really have to restore what’s missing, and you need to restore glutathione to let it do its job, which is letting stuff come through the liver, breaking it down and kicking it out. Otherwise, the things your body doesn’t need just go back into the bloodstream, and you’re gonna feel that in your brain.
Marissa: Are there foods that are naturally high in glutathione?
Gina: We have to build it ourselves. Greens — spinach, collard greens, kale, broccoli, whatever — can help. That’s why broccoli and cruciferous veggies always come up high in lists of anti-cancer foods, because one of the things they have is sulfur. And you need sulfur to make glutathione.
Supplemental glutathione is a sulfur dose, which is why it tastes bad. But this goes back to why the “eat the rainbow” idea is a good thing. You bring it in. And then the body will do what’s next. Supplements are great because they super dose it. They cut right to the chase. So it’s a matter of speed and comfort and ease. That’s what money buys us everywhere.
Marissa: I know I’m beyond fortunate to have you as my friend — and to be able to afford the testing and everything else that has helped me. But what if you can’t afford that? What if you don’t have access to you or to somebody like you?
Gina: It sucks. Everybody needs help, but we can’t all pay for it. I’m pretty much using my Instagram platform now for free advice.
There are definitely some support groups that are better than others. But finding good support groups where people do have a healthy exchange of information, recipe exchanges, a lot of moral support, can help.
And a lot of the nutritional advice we talked about — the bone broth, the six cups of vegetables, eating the rainbow — can be done by anyone. I know shopping well and eating well is also very pricey, but you can get a lot of bulk veggies. Frozen veggies are cheaper and still chock full of nutrients. I know sometimes it feels like the message that comes across is that you can only shop at Whole Foods. I know I’ve given that message in the past. But you can go to Aldi. You can go to the corner market.
Marissa: There’s definitely guilt around eating. I remember texting you at one point, saying, “I’m eating pizza again.” And your response was, “Who cares?” You just wanted me to get something in my body.
Gina: It’s not about food plans. Sometimes it’s about the human aspect, like, how can you get through your day? So I don’t need you to check nutritional boxes.
It just becomes kind of like, if today’s a better day and you’re feeling pretty good, try to have something nutritionally dense. And if tomorrow, you are ragingly nauseated and can’t think straight, don’t worry so much about food. With cancer treatment, you can’t back off treatment so we can do more nutrition. No, it’s secondary.
But we can say, “Hey, here’s the best plan. And when you really feel up to doing this, do this. And if you can’t do anything, but you can eat a donut, eat the donut.”
