Following a special diet or eating certain foods will not make cancer go away. Yet many dietary "cures" are promoted in North America today and they are often accepted at face value. Little attention is paid to how they may rob the body of necessary nutrients or that they may be based on false, illogical concepts. The popular macrobiotic diet, for example, is based on a fanciful and completely faulty concept of how the human body works.
The special diets are usually "practitioner-specific." This means that each promoter offers a different approach to cancer therapy through a different type of diet. Oriental herbal remedies recently joined various diets as popular cancer treatments or cures.
None is known to be helpful. Many result in nutritional deficiencies, a situation cancer patients should avoid at all costs. Moderation is still the best approach to diet for all medical problems. Taking excessive amounts of vitamins, minerals or "health food" substitutes may do more harm than good.
