Saturday Quack - Special Diets for Cancer Patients

It’s a temptation to encourage cancer patients to take diets fortified with vitamins and antioxidants, in the hope that this will give the victim an edge in the battle. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence to support this. UK researchers have analyzed published reports of controlled studies of nutritional interventions in patients with cancer. In fact, only 25 of the 60 reports were found to have an adequate design, i.e. they was well-controlled and the patients were randomly assigned to the different ‘treatments’.

There was little evidence that showed the interventions had any effect on the outcome - either beneficial or harmful. In particular, antioxidant supplements and retinol were found to show no effect on the death rate from any cause. One author of the study says that “encouraging a healthy diet is important because many patients with cancer . . . will live a long time and may die of other diseases related to diet”. But one shouldn’t encourage patients to spend money on dietary supplements of very dubious value. One can also go further, and urge patients to steer clear of all forms of cancer quackery.