What to Eat During Cancer Treatment: The American Cancer Society's Own Cookbook

What to Eat During Cancer Treatment is a cookbook published under the American Cancer Society's own name, developed with input from registered dietitians and led on the recipe side by food writer and editor Jeanne Besser. That institutional authorship is the book's most distinguishing feature relative to the many other cancer cookbooks on the market, most of which are the project of a single chef, survivor, or caregiver working from personal experience.

The book's premise is close to others in this category: cancer treatment disrupts appetite, taste, digestion, and tolerance for many ordinary foods, and a cookbook built specifically around those disruptions is more useful to a person in treatment than a general healthy-eating cookbook. What ACS adds is a nutrition review process behind the recipes, rather than one person's culinary judgment alone.

It does not read as a medical text, and it is not meant to. It sits in the recipe-and-practical-tips register, with the ACS name functioning as a signal of institutional vetting rather than a claim that the book is itself a clinical document. ACS's own medical and patient-education content lives separately on its main website and in its other publications.

That separation matters for how a reader should weigh the book. It is a consumer product carrying an established nonprofit's name and some dietitian review, which is a meaningful signal, but it is not the same tier of document as ACS's core patient-education material, which goes through a different and more extensive editorial and medical review process aimed specifically at clinical accuracy rather than recipe usability.

Like most books in this genre, recipes are organized around the treatment side effect they are meant to address rather than by traditional cookbook sections alone. Chapters address problems such as nausea, mouth and throat soreness, taste changes, low appetite, and difficulty maintaining weight, with recipes chosen for being easy to prepare, easy to tolerate, and calorie-dense where that is the priority.

Front matter typically covers general strategies for eating during treatment: eating smaller, more frequent meals; keeping easy options on hand for low-energy days; and food safety basics relevant to a person whose immune system may be compromised by treatment. Because the book is developed with dietitian input, its side-effect chapters tend to explain the reasoning behind a recipe choice, not just the recipe itself, more consistently than a purely chef-authored cookbook might.

The book also includes practical shopping and stocking guidance aimed at a caregiver managing a household through an unpredictable treatment schedule: what shelf-stable and freezer staples make sense to have on hand for a day when cooking from scratch is not realistic, and how to build a short list of go-to dishes that can be prepared quickly on low-energy days.

There is no diagnosis-specific content; a reader looking for guidance tailored to a particular cancer type or treatment regimen will not find it organized that way here. The book's organizing unit throughout is the symptom, not the disease.

A further practical strength is the book's attention to caregivers specifically, not only patients. Several sections address how a caregiver can encourage eating without turning mealtimes into a source of conflict, a dynamic that comes up often in cancer households and that a purely recipe-focused cookbook might not think to address directly.

The recipes themselves tend to favor familiar, approachable dishes over unusual ingredients, on the theory that a person with a compromised appetite is more likely to actually eat something recognizable than to be tempted by an unfamiliar preparation, however nutritionally optimized. That is a reasonable, if unstated, piece of practical wisdom running through the book's choices.

Its strongest feature is exactly its institutional origin. A registered-dietitian-reviewed recipe collection carries a different kind of reliability than an individual author's personal theory of what helps, particularly in a genre where unproven claims about specific foods curing or slowing cancer are common. A reader can reasonably expect that recipes here were checked against basic nutrition adequacy rather than built around a single ingredient's supposed anticancer property.

It is also useful simply as a low-friction resource: recipes designed to be realistic for someone with limited energy and appetite to actually cook, rather than elaborate dishes that assume a person feels well.

Even with dietitian input, a published cookbook cannot account for an individual reader's specific blood counts, allergies, or treatment regimen, and any general food safety guidance in the book should be checked against a reader's own current situation, particularly during periods of neutropenia when raw or undercooked food advice changes.

Any specific claim tying a particular food or ingredient to slowing or treating cancer, if it appears in the book's framing language rather than its recipes, should be read skeptically regardless of the ACS name attached; ACS's own core medical position, consistent with NCI, is that no specific food has been shown to treat cancer, and that nutrition during treatment is about managing side effects and maintaining strength, not altering the disease itself.

As with any cookbook tied to a specific print edition, recipe and nutrition guidance can be revised in later printings, and a reader should check that they have a current edition if precise nutrition figures matter to them.

A reader should also keep in mind that a nonprofit's name on a cookbook cover reflects organizational review of the general content, not a personalized nutrition assessment of any individual reader's situation, which remains something only a reader's own care team and dietitian can provide.

The book's broader value lies in lowering the barrier between a household in crisis and a workable meal, and in doing so with the backing of an organization whose core mission is cancer patient support rather than food sales, which shapes its priorities in ways worth noting even for a reader who never opens the book itself and simply consults ACS's website directly.

A reader weighing whether to buy the book versus relying on ACS's free website content should know that the two serve slightly different purposes: the website is kept continuously updated and is free, while the book offers a curated, tested recipe collection in a single physical or digital volume, which some readers find easier to use in a kitchen than switching between browser tabs while cooking.

This is the clinical backdrop the cookbook's chapters are built to serve, and it is worth having in full rather than through a recipe headnote.

NCI describes a wide range of eating problems caused by cancer and its treatments. Chemotherapy can damage healthy cells in the mouth and digestive tract, causing loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, dry mouth, mouth sores, taste changes, and difficulty swallowing. Radiation therapy to the digestive system produces overlapping problems depending on where it targets. Surgery, hormone therapy, immunotherapy, targeted therapy, and stem cell transplant each bring distinct eating obstacles of their own.

A central point in NCI's guidance, and one that runs through this book's recipe choices even where it is not stated outright, is that eating well during cancer treatment often looks different from ordinary healthy-eating advice. NCI notes that people in treatment frequently need more protein and calories than usual to maintain strength and support the body's ability to repair itself and tolerate treatment, the opposite direction from typical calorie-conscious nutrition guidance.

When eating by mouth cannot provide enough nutrition, NCI describes two clinical routes rather than a change of recipe: enteral nutrition, meaning liquid nutrients delivered by feeding tube into the stomach or small intestine, whether short-term through a nasogastric tube or longer-term through a gastrostomy or jejunostomy tube, and parenteral nutrition, meaning nutrients delivered directly into the bloodstream through a catheter when the digestive tract itself cannot be used. Neither is something a cookbook, however well reviewed, replaces; both are clinical decisions made with an oncology team.

NCI's consistent recommendation is an individualized nutrition plan built with a registered dietitian, accounting for a person's specific treatment, side effects, and lab values, rather than a single diet applied uniformly. A well-reviewed cookbook is a reasonable source of ideas to bring into that conversation. See eating during chemotherapy and eating when you have no appetite for the symptom-level detail this cookbook's chapters echo in recipe form.

It suits a reader who wants a symptom-organized cookbook with the added confidence of institutional, dietitian-reviewed development, rather than a single author's personal theory of anticancer eating. It suits a caregiver looking for realistic, low-effort recipes for someone whose appetite and energy are both compromised.

It does not replace an individualized plan from an oncology dietitian who knows a reader's actual labs and treatment, and it is not organized around any single diagnosis. A reader whose interest is in nutrition science rather than recipes will find more depth in NCI's own materials than in a cookbook of any kind.

For the wider picture of separating solid nutrition guidance from marketing claims in this genre, see cancer nutrition without diet misinformation.

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• NCI — Nutrition in Cancer Care (PDQ)
• NCI — Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Eating during chemotherapy (Cancer Explained)

This page discusses What to Eat During Cancer Treatment for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care.