ABSTRACT
This chapter was made possible because of recent findings that specialized aspects of nutrition play a major and hitherto unsuspected role in both the causation of disease and regeneration on a cellular level, which is absolutely fundamental in dealing with cancer and other degenerative diseases. The research is sufficiently specialized to amount to a new field in medicine – nutritional medicine. The relevance of nutrition to palliative care is considerable because of its tangible influence on the lengthening of life and improvement in quality of life, even in terminally ill patients.
Patients and carers have a number of dietary and nutritional concerns and can benefit from appropriate nutritional advice and support. We need to acknowledge that nutrition is everybody's responsibility and implement a multidisciplinary approach to nutritional care. The first step to good nutritional care is nutrition assessment, which can lead to an individualised nutritional care plan.
The emerging significance of nutritional and lifestyle medicine means that even undergraduate students need to be aware of the developments in this field, which must not be neglected in shaping the treatment of palliative care patients. In this chapter the author makes a plea for the recognition that many aspects of healthcare and medicine centred on nutritional considerations are evolving quite fundamentally.
