What Are Practical Tips for Managing Taste Changes During Cancer Treatment?
Registered dietitian and oncology nutritionist Julie Lanford discusses common taste changes that may occur during cancer treatment and practical strategies and resources for managing taste changes for patients.
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Transcript:
Lisa Hatfield:
Dealing with changes in taste perception can make mealtime challenging. What are ways to make food more enjoyable? As part of the Patient Empowerment Network RESTORE program, we’re diving into practical tips for managing taste and appetite changes. Julie, what are some practical tips for dealing with changes in taste perception that can make food more palatable? And do you have any recommendations for flavor combinations or cooking methods that might help enhance the taste of food for those of us experiencing a metallic or altered taste from our treatment?
Julie Lanford:
Yeah. So there are some different strategies for affecting taste. And different people tend to have different challenges with the taste changes. So like you mentioned, the metallic taste. Some people don’t tolerate really sweet food where they used to. So it all depends on the type of taste change. Some of the common tips that we give people is to sort of clear your palate before you eat by drinking some water with fresh lemon squeezed into it. That tends to somehow sort of reset your taste buds. And then if you notice you don’t like the taste, sweet taste or that sweet tastes off or coffee tastes off, of course, avoiding those foods.
And then doing if sweet is bothering you, you can do things like having more of a sour type of marinade. For people who have to drink the nutrition supplement drinks, they tend to be very sweet. And if you’re not tolerating that taste so well, you can get bitters, drops of bitters, and add those just to help tone that sweetness down a little bit. And then for some people, it’s adding a different flavor to the food. So if something is really bland, and you don’t have much of a taste, the taste receptors aren’t working very well, can you add like an acid, like the lemon juice or tomato sauce? Can you add spices to it that make it a little bit of a stronger flavor so that your muted taste buds can maybe pick it up?
Or if you have mouth sores or things that are making those types like spicy foods not tolerable, how can you make it more like creamy and bland? So it sort of depends on the taste change. There are some great tips from Rebecca Katz, who’s a chef. So I will say, I find that the chefs tend to have a little bit more expertise around the taste change issue, because that their expertise is like tasting of food.
Like as dietitians, our expertise is the nutritional value of food and how you meet your needs, whereas the chefs look at the taste piece. So Rebecca Katz is sort of a specialized chef for oncology. And she has a whole system that works around fat, acid, salt, and sweet in terms of how you can tweak things in order to meet those needs. So that’s if you need more sort of troubleshooting, I think her resources are really helpful. And she’s got great, very fancy foodie-type recipes for cancer patients, which is fun.
The other thing, though, with metallic, I mentioned squeezing lemon into water is avoiding metal silverware sometimes helps as well. So I think all of us have at some point tasted like a fork that you can just taste the metal in your mouth. And for a lot of cancer patients, that’s just magnified.
So using plastic silverware, or there’s some bamboo silverware or things that don’t involve metal can help with that in terms of trying to avoid that. And then red meats tend to have more a stronger metallic flavor. So probably staying away from having your favorite steak at this moment might be another wise thing to do.
Lisa Hatfield:
You heard it here from the expert. Thanks for joining this RESTORE program. I’m your host, Lisa Hatfield.
