By Leonie Fuge
Southern Downs herbal medicine practitioner Nina Gudkovs is strongly advocating for cancer patients to consider diet as a weapon against cancer and has recently published her first book, Nutritious: Metabolic Fasting for Cancer, as a practical resource to improve cancer treatment outcomes.
With over 60 recipes, Nutritious: Metabolic Fasting for Cancer also provides evidence to support how the plant based ketogenetic diet ingredients can deter cancer growth, even whilst a patient undergoes chemotherapy or radiation.
“I had clients coming to me who had been diagnosed with cancer and I wanted to keep up to date with the research,” said Nina. “When I came across the evidence that shows how beneficial diets can be, I started looking for resources to give to people. But nothing was out there.”
Recognising a gap in resources, Nina began offering PDF pages of information and recipes to her patients. Over time Nina realised a more thorough cancer-fighting diet resource was needed, and has creatively translated the latest research into strategically formulated recipes.
“Oncologists don’t tend to worry so much about what their patients are eating,“ said the author.
With both ketogenic diets and low animal protein diets showing positive outcomes for cancer patients in clinical trials, Nina recognised the potential for cross-pollination of the two. This led Nina to develop a heavily researched plant-based ketogenic diet recipe book to aid people in the war against cancer.
“Ketogenic diets are usually heavily meat based,“ said Nina. “Only having this option didn’t take into account alternative routes to beating cancer.
“I decided to combine both fields of research and make the best of both worlds,” said Nina.
“Diet can play a role to create an environment in the body that makes it hard for cancer to grow,” said Nina. “The recipes in my book offer people dietary support to weaken cancer whilst undergoing therapy.”
Nina also believed the plant-based ketogenic diet was also beneficial for pre-chemo therapy as it may help “knock the legs out of the energy source feeding cancer.“
The research took Nina three years outside of her work as a medical herbalist, and the cancer cookbook provides enough detail for doctors to understand it is evidence based yet still easy enough to read for those not in the healthcare profession.
“Half of the book is a justification and why to use it,” said Nina. “If someone has to change diet quite radically then they will need a good motivation to do that.”
Taking into consideration that people using the recipes may be undergoing cancer treatments and possibly tired and stressed, the only recipes to make the book were plant-based, high in phytonutrients, easy to prepare and most importantly, yummy.
Nutritious: Metabolic Fasting for Cancer is already getting positive reviews from those who are loving the book and have tasted the recipes. The cancer cookbook has also been mentioned at two health symposiums as a worthwhile resource said the author.
Nutritious: Metabolic Fasting for Cancer is available online at nutritiouscookbook.com or from the Centre for Healthy Living in Warwick where Nina practices.
