Diet taboos after rectal cancer surgery

In the early postoperative period (within 1 month), avoid flatulent, indigestible, rough, and highly irritating foods. During the recovery period and long term, avoid processed meat products, excessive red meat, and moldy foods. All dietary choices should be based on your own tolerance. There is no need to blindly follow the "food list" posted online.

When many people first receive the notice after surgery, their whole families become nervous. They want to add chicken, beef, sheep, seafood, and even onions, ginger, and garlic to the blacklist of fasting, and feed the patients white porridge every time. As a result, the recovery speed is slowed down. In the past two years, I accompanied my elders in the general surgery hospital. Half of the six patients in the same ward who had undergone rectal cancer surgery had gone through dietary pitfalls.

When I was still discharged from the hospital a week after the operation, the first thing the doctor kept repeating was: You can't touch a sip of water, let alone eat, before passing the gas. Many family members feel sorry for the patient's lack of energy and secretly give him a few sips of warm soup, which can easily increase the burden on the intestines. After the gas is exhausted, start with a clear liquid diet, such as thin rice soup and pork rib soup with the oil and grease filtered out. There are many people who are afraid of it at this time. Don't touch milk, soy milk, and sweet drinks with a lot of sugar. These things are very easy to produce gas in the stomach. The intestinal peristalsis has not returned to normal after the operation. It is a trivial matter if it swells and causes pain in the anastomosis. In serious cases, it may cause anastomotic leakage. There was an aunt in her 60s in the same ward. Her daughter thought that fresh corn juice was nutritious, so she secretly brought a cup of unfiltered corn juice over. The aunt drank less than half of the cup and was sore that she huddled up all night. In the end, she had a stomach tube inserted to relieve the pressure, which was an old sin.

In the first month after being discharged from the hospital and returning home, it was basically transitioning to the soft food stage, and the controversy was the most controversial. The elders in the family will definitely say that "you can't eat hairy things", and all fish, shrimp, and chicken must be banned, otherwise wounds will easily "burn". At this time, if you go to different departments and ask doctors, you will most likely get two opinions: Western medicine has no concept of hair products at all. As long as you are not allergic to them before, these are high-quality protein sources. Eating more can promote mucous membrane and wound healing. ； If you ask a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, you may be advised to avoid scaleless fish, goose meat, and overly spicy food in the first two weeks after being discharged from the hospital to avoid stimulating inflammatory reactions. In fact, both statements are reasonable and can be treated as a compromise: If you usually eat shrimp and you are prone to allergies and rashes, then don’t touch it as soon as you recover. ； If you don't have any reaction after eating seafood, eating steamed fish or boiled shrimp two or three times a week will make up for it much faster than drinking plain porridge every day. What you really need to avoid at this stage are foods that are hard to chew and have hard residue, such as celery, leeks, multi-grain rice, and things that cannot be broken, such as nuts and brittle bones. The newly grown intestinal wall is still relatively fragile, and there may be edema at the anastomosis site. These hard residues can easily scratch the mucosa and cause obstruction in severe cases.

When the follow-up examination shows no problems 3 months after the operation, you can basically resume your normal diet. At this time, it is easy to go to two extremes: either you still dare not touch anything, and you have not touched the smell of meat for half a year.； Or let yourself go completely and enjoy barbecue hotpot every time. In fact, there is really no need to be so extreme. Many people say that if you have intestinal cancer, you cannot eat spicy food or touch ice for the rest of your life. How can it be so absolute? I know a young man from Sichuan who had rectal cancer surgery at the age of 28. All indicators were normal during the one-year post-operative review. He loves spicy food, and now he occasionally eats mildly spicy hotpot with his friends. As long as he doesn’t have diarrhea or abdominal pain after eating, it’s totally fine. What will really be on the blacklist for a long time are processed meat products that are clearly listed in the list of carcinogens by the WHO, such as sausages, bacon, cured meats, smoked meats, and fried and barbecued red meat. These products are inherently high-risk factors for inducing bowel cancer. If you eat them frequently after surgery, the risk of recurrence will be much higher. The Chinese Nutrition Society also recommends that the daily intake of red meat (pork, beef, and sheep) after surgery should be controlled within 50g per day, which is about the size of an egg. It is safer to eat more white meat, fresh vegetables and fruits. In addition, you must not touch moldy food. Leftover green leafy vegetables that have been stored for more than 12 hours have high nitrite content, so it is best not to eat them.

There are also a few big pitfalls that many people are likely to step into. Don’t believe the “starvation therapy” posted on the Internet. It is said that eating less can starve cancer cells to death. It is pure nonsense. I met a patient before who drank white porridge every day after surgery, saying that all the nutrients he ate were absorbed by the cancer cells. As a result, he lost more than 20 pounds in three months, and his immunity was completely destroyed. Before the cancer cells could relapse, he got pneumonia and was hospitalized. Don’t blindly buy cordyceps and Ganoderma spore powder that cost thousands of dollars per pound. The nutritional value of these things is really not as good as eating an egg, drinking a glass of warm milk, and eating half a pound of fresh vegetables every day. Unless the doctor clearly says that you are deficient in certain nutrients, there is no need to spend that wasted money.

After all, there is really no universally applicable contraindication list. Everyone’s intestinal tolerance is different. If someone else eats something that causes diarrhea, you may not have any problems. Observing your body's reactions is much more reliable than following a list of taboos on the Internet. After all, in addition to preventing recurrence after surgery, it is also important to live comfortably.