Last month I attended the Breast Care Nurses Conference in Melbourne. While it was somewhat overshadowed by the horrific bushfires which had happened just that weekend, there was great camaraderie and excellent presentations.

One of the sessions, titled Dieting, Body Weight and Health in Menopausal Women was especially interesting. The credentials of the presenter Professor Kerin O’Dea and the fact that she doesn’t go anywhere without a pedometer were impressive enough to encourage me to choose this session.

Many women with breast cancer struggle with weight gain due to treatment and treatment-induced menopause so she offered important information for breast care nurses.

Kerin explained that as women age we generally become less active with reducing lean body mass (muscle and bone), proportionately more fat mass and have lower energy requirements. Getting the balance (intake and expenditure) right is the key. Women need to minimise the risk of bone and muscle loss with good diet - adequate calcium and Vitamin D, and aerobic resistance exercise.

She spoke of the big challenge in effective weight loss as firstly achieving weight loss then really importantly maintaining a reduced weight.  Kerin’s advice is don’t ‘go on a diet’ rather ‘change the way you eat’ with an emphasis on plant foods.

For more specific information on what to eat, she summarised a study from the New England Journal of Medicine 2008, which compared the low-fat diet, the low carbohydrate diet and the Mediterranean diet. The best of these for palatability and sustained weight loss was the Mediterranean diet. This is a diet of 5% saturated fat and lots of bulk,  rich in a wide variety of plant foods - green leafy vegetable and wild greens, herbs, nuts and pulses.  Small amounts of red meat and regular fish and seafood are other features. Fresh fruit accompanies every meal. The beauty of this eating style is that it is enjoyable for most people. For example it is much easier to eat raw vegetables and salads with oil.

Kerin cautioned against high-calorie drinks. Fruit juice while protrayed as healthy, contains lots more sugar than fresh fruit where sugar is diluted by the water and fibre content.

Building exercise into daily life is another key message. We should aim for a minimum of 30 minutes daily though recent studies show that much more may be needed. 

Kerin advocates the ‘retro gymnasium’ ie following our grandmother’s lifestyle - no convenience appliances, no escalators and lifts but lots of regular physical activity as part of everyday life. An example of this for us is active commuting eg cycling or walking to work.

All of this fits in well with the recent information for cancer survivors from The American Institute for Cancer Research www.aicr.org (see ‘cancer survivors’ section).

Julie, Cancer Information Nurse

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