Sugar, Sugar

Thus begins the healthy eating phase in my life. It all started last month when I overheard Tamara my infusion nurse lecturing the man receiving chemo next to me on the importance of staying hydrated. “But I hate water,” he lamented, “Can I drink Gatorade instead?” Then Tamara quickly said, “Gatorade has sugar. Sugar causes cancer!” Um, excuse me? Did she just say sugar causes cancer?

Then this week I had two more run-ins with sugar and cancer. The first one came in reading a blog by a woman in Craig named Brynn who was diagnosed with Lymphoma about the same time my diagnoses came in. (Side-note: I feel as though I have a strange connection with Brynn. Though I’m not sure if we’ve met, I’m friends with her sister, and her brother was my favorite teacher in high school. I’ve been meaning to contact her and now that it’s in print, I really should since we’re going through some of the same things.) Anyway, Brynn wrote in her blog that she was eliminating sugar from her diet because of the cancer connection. Then today, I ran into my co-worker Abby and she told me she had all sorts of handouts for me on diets while undergoing cancer treatment. She told me to eliminate, you guessed it, sugar!

Finally I gave it the tried and true test- -Google. If you type “sugar causes” into the Google search bar, the first suggestion is “sugar causes acne” but the second is “sugar causes cancer.” The amount of literature is amazing. Mostly it says sugar feeds cancer.

I have always considered myself a healthy eater. We don’t buy beef and only eat game in our house. We eat fish and we get an organic veggie and fruit box every other week. I dislike the taste of processed foods and rarely have them in the house. Sugar is something I don’t consider a necessity. I can’t stomach sweets for breakfast thus eliminating things like sugary cereals, pancakes and French toast. The mere sight of maple syrup in the morning turns my stomach, which happens a lot since I live with a Vermonter. I’ll only order dessert in restaurants if they have crème brule. I don’t like chocolate, never really have. I make cookies maybe three times a year (my girls are going to hate me.) In the evening when I need a snack, I reach for salty foods instead. Okay, so this won’t be hard, right? We’ll see…

My friend Stephanie is a dietician and I’d love to hear what she says about this. She thinks high fructose corn syrup is the devil, but hasn’t said much to me about sugar. Unfortunately, Stephanie is traveling in Africa and Europe with her husband so I’m not able to use her as my personal resource when it comes to things like this. Stephanie always tells me everything is okay in moderation, though I think this time, I’m going to error on the side of caution and just cut it out completely. I hadn’t been diagnosed before Stephanie left on her trip, and she told me if I ended up getting diagnosed with cancer, she’d kill me. She also told me to eat an apple a day (a cancer fighter), which I honestly tried, but they are too sweet for me so I stopped forcing them down after day four.

I head out for Seattle tomorrow morning for chemo and will be there until Saturday. I was planning a trip to Piroshky, Piroshky to get my standard Vatrushka roll (sweetened cream cheese and raspberries) but I guess I’m going to have to get the sauerkraut, cabbage, carrot and onion roll which is equally as good. This also means Addison, Lena and Jan are going to be responsible for finishing off the cookies I made last weekend (it was one of the three times a year.)

Okay, off to e-mail Brynn and catch up on all my other un-answered e-mails. I’ve gotten really bad about responding lately, I’m sorry.