Top 7 Foods to Eat During Chemotherapy for Breast Cancer: A Comprehensive Guide

Hello, in this video I'm going to be talking about vitamin D and its role in breast cancer and your health during and after breast cancer treatment. Before I go on, I'd love to invite you to subscribe to our channel and don't forget to go to Yerba.com to learn about your treatment options and what might be offered to you through your breast cancer course of treatment. Vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin that's important in several functions in a normal healthy body. Vitamin D plays a role in the immune system, in bone health. Vitamin D also plays a role in regulating the levels of calcium and phosphorus in your body. This is the one supplement that actually has a foundation for recommendation and that's because the other sources of vitamin D can be harder to find and in people who live in climates with less sunshine, the primary source of vitamin D is through the skin and if it's cloudy all the time where you live, you're very likely to have low levels of vitamin D. So vitamin D is interesting. We actually use the sun rays to take the pro vitamin and convert that to vitamin D. When you're very young, 10 minutes of exposure to the sun without any sunscreen, you make tons of vitamin D in your body. As you get older, after about the age of 20 or 30, your body's not very efficient at converting using sunlight to create its own vitamin D and so dietary sources and supplements become more important. As you know, bone health is a main concern, a major concern to many people with breast cancer and their medical teams. So making sure you have good bones and that you have adequate vitamin D in your body is really beneficial. The dietary sources, well there are some sources like green vegetables like broccoli but it's not very well absorbed. The primary source of vitamin D in the diet is oily fish. So that's salmon, swordfish, sardines, tuna, not white fish, but that more oily fish, which has other benefits. But if you are in an area where getting fresh fish is difficult or you don't eat fish, you're vegetarian or vegan or you're allergic, it's going to be hard for you to get it in your diet. So you will see that dairy products are supplemented with vitamin D. There are juices supplemented with vitamin D and there are other foods that have vitamin D added to it. That's not a dietary source of vitamin D. That's not naturally occurring in milk or naturally occurring in orange juice. It's been added. So when we talk about supplements and we talk about foods rich in vitamin D, except for fish, they are really rich in vitamin D because supplements have been added. It's I think important to know because everything else on our YouTube channel says don't take supplements, but vitamin D is really the only exception. Unless you have an absorption problem or if you have an immune condition that makes you unable to absorb vitamin B12, we really like to see new micronutrients coming to us in our diet. So milk, milk products, yogurt, orange juices, other things will have vitamin D in them or you can take supplements that you get over the counter. You can also be prescribed vitamin D replacement in a higher dose and then you don't need to take it every day. Rather you can take it once a week, but that would be in somebody who's at high risk for vitamin D deficiency and that's when your doctor might prescribe that for you or your other members of your healthcare team. In terms of breast cancer outcome in vitamin D, there's been a lot of work done and for a while we were so excited because it looked like vitamin D deficiency could explain different rates of breast cancer in different groups of people and unfortunately it looks as though adding vitamin D or being high in vitamin D early in life does not appear to be protective from breast cancer. It can protect you very likely from bone thinning or osteoporosis, especially when given earlier on in your life or when you have high vitamin D levels that you make in the sun. But as of this point, all the studies we've done looking at does vitamin D help with side effects from treatment, does vitamin D decrease breast cancer recurrence, those don't seem to be borne out. So how should you know if you should be on vitamin D? Well one way is if you have a blood test and you're found to be vitamin D deficient. A blood test can reveal vitamin D deficiency, but actually evidence-based medicine supports just giving people daily vitamin D supplementation if they're at high risk of vitamin D deficiency. So it's possible you'll have a blood test done, but you can also just take vitamin D if you live in northern climates or far away from the equator, then you probably are vitamin D deficient. It's really hard to get toxic on vitamin D, but it is possible if you take mega doses of really anything, it's a bad thing, but vitamin D is fat soluble so we don't urinate it out the same way we do other vitamins. So really just take what's recommended on the bottle and what your medical team recommends. What you may hear is taking a thousand units until you're over 50 and then taking 1,200. This is international units of vitamin D a day. What about vitamin K? A lot of you have put really helpful comments in our other videos about vitamin D, about vitamin K and bone health. There does appear to be a relationship, but we get vitamin K in our diet and this is actually one of the vitamins where we can develop toxicity. So we don't recommend taking extra vitamin K, but rather having leafy greens. Really a lot of vegetables will have vitamin K, cruciferous vegetables like cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts if you like them, and a multivitamin also has vitamin K, but it's really hard to be vitamin K deficient with most diets around the world. So supplementing vitamin K is usually not necessary. If you are on a blood thinner like warfarin, the brand name of which is Coumadin, vitamin K can reduce the effect of this important blood thinner. So you want to be really careful with how much vitamin K you put in your body, including from the diet, and our guess is that you've already heard that from your medical team. I've covered a lot about vitamin D. If I've left any unanswered questions, please put them below in the comments or questions. Let us know your experience with vitamin D. Have you had a blood test? What did it show? How do you get vitamin D in your diet? Ask us questions. While we can't give specific medical advice, we can certainly answer any general questions that you offer. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel and thanks so much for watching.