Know about a cookbook with numerous nourishing recipes to deal with involuntary weight loss of cancer patients during the treatment

So this book was a collaboration between a number of institutions. It was funded by the Health Research Board, and we're enormously grateful to them for putting money towards improving the quality of life of cancer patients. This allowed us to work with our culinary colleagues in CIT, and also with the charitable organization Breakthrough Cancer Research to bring this whole project to fruition. So it was very much a collaboration across two different and third level institutions and a charity sector with HRB funding.

Up to 80% of cancer patients lose weight on an involuntary basis. So they're not losing weight intentionally. It can become a very distressing symptom for them. And what we've noticed is that during the course of our research in UCC that these patients who lose weight do much more poorly, unfortunately. And they develop more side effects to their treatments. They can't tolerate their chemotherapy as well. And unfortunately, their drugs have to be either reduced or stopped altogether, and we know that they live for a shorter period of time.

So the crucial thing is to try and get cancer patients to maintain their weight, whatever it was they started at, to try and get them to maintain weight throughout their treatment. And then their in with the best chance of fighting the disease. So we put together a bank of recipes. A lot of them were developed by dietitians working in the area of cancer. We had nurses and doctors send us in recipes too, and patients also were invited to send in their favorite recipes that they tolerated well during their chemotherapy.

And because the age profile of cancer patients tends to be a little older, we tried to make this all about traditional Irish foods, traditional Irish dishes that we can enrich as much as possible with food. So a lot of cancer patients are given supplements, but we kind of felt that it was better to just create a book all about food, and Irish food, and how best we can create nourishing dishes in small volumes. And many of them have problems with very poor appetites, nausea, vomiting, swallowing difficulty, sore mouths.

There's huge challenges to eating well while you have cancer. And so, we tried to create a bank of recipes that were both nourishing in a small volume that could help to prevent weight loss during treatments. So it's a collection of recipes-- main meals, light meals, desserts, snacks, and drinks that have all been enriched with lots of extra energy and protein to try and reduce the amount of weight that cancer patients lose while they're on their treatment.