‘What is the best healthy diet for a cancer patient’ one of the major concern of every person who unfortunately has cancer especially with growing global news such as ‘a change in diet cured cancer of a patient ’. Consequently, Nepal Cancer hospital and Research Center located at Harisiddhi, Kathmandu has inaugurated new diet system focusing on cancer patient. Many people are skeptical about the hospital’s foods and there is no reason why they shouldn’t be as we can observe the food quality of hospital’s cafeteria isn’t satisfactory.

Cancer patients’ immune power, energy and overall treatment effectiveness depends on the foods they intake so, they should be more careful on what, how much and when they are consuming foods. Cancer and cancer treatments impede body’s ability to tolerate certain foods and nutrients. Eating right foods before, during and after treatment helps to maintain body weight and body’s store of nutrients, enhance strength and energy, tolerate treatment related side effects, lower risk of infection, enhance the immunity power and recover faster. After surgery, chemotherapy or radiation therapy extra proteins are needed to heal tissues and help fight infection.  Chemotherapy is a critical part of cancer treatment and a large reason behind survival after cancer. However, doctors have also concluded that it is a powerful medication with significant side effects and often getting the balance right on which patients to treat aggressively can be hard. Therefore, they required sanitized and healthy amount of nutrition, vitamins and proteins. Recognizing all these things, Cancer Hospital has customized new cafeteria consulting every food with nutritionist and doctors.

The opening of the cafeteria with a healthy diet foods exhibition was held on 6 October 2016 at Cancer Hospital includes variety of healthy foods. It showcases the whole day meal of 16 hundred calories, 60 gram proteins and 45 gram fats for cancer patient as well as for normal people. This whole day meal plan includes breakfast(milk and biscuit), lunch (rice, pulses, vegetables, meat, pickle and salad), mid day fruits (an apple), tiffin (noodles, vegetables, egg), refreshment (lassi), and finally, dinner(rotis, pulses, vegetables).According to Kabita Maharjan, nutritionist at Cancer Hospital, “traditionally people used to think it’s healthy to eat 3 times a day but this whole eating system has changed with new concept that normal people should eat 8 times a day”. The exhibition includes different types of cereals and high protein foods such as pulses and legumes, carbohydrate and energy such as fruits, unsaturated fat (sunflower, olive oil) as well as saturated fat (ghee, butter), foods for neutropenic, micronutrient rich soup such as legumes veg. soup, pumpkin soup, legumes chicken veg. soup and multigrain soup, micronutrient rich juice such as carotenoid juice, green juice and leaf tea which helps to enhance the immune system of patients. According to nutritionist, at times we should supply different herbs to patients because usually they get bored with the same taste of plain foods. Thus, day by day they will intake less amount of foods therefore, to bring different texture in the same plain foods, we can use herbs. As a final point, the exhibition shows those foods which patients should use moderately such as meats and sweets, and those foods which patients should completely avoid such as tobacco, fungal foods and alcohol.