Taking Supplements or not

I take AdCal-D3 giant chewable tablets.

My GP offered to put them on prescription, but I said I was happy to buy them. You don't need a prescription for them, but you should check with your doctor if it's OK for you to take calcium supplements - there are some conditions where you can't (including some types of bone mets).

I also take Pomi-T. I looked at the ingredients and decided it was at worse harmless. However, I couldn't eat fruit and veg for around 6 months, and I guess it might have made up a bit during that period. Couldn't eat broccoli, my favorite veg for a year after RT.

Edited by member 02 Dec 2020 at 23:29  | Reason: Not specified

Broccoli generated really bad runs, as good as any powerful enema, except they lasted all weekend. So bad, that wiping made my arse bleed, and I was passing blood too.

After 2 weeks without veg during the RT, my body was really craving some. On Friday after a treatment, I cooked a whole broccoli and eat it, thinking it had all weekend to work its way out of my system. BIG MISTAKE. I spent the whole weekend strapped down to the toilet seat, and crawled in to my Monday session. I wasn't completely sure if the bleeding arse was down to the radiation or the non-stop runs, but it healed quickly with the hydrogel cream they gave me even though RT continued, so it was down to the runs. This became known as the Broccoli Incident between myself and the review radiographer, and we always laughed as we passed each other in the corridor afterwards.

However, afterward the RT as I gradually reintroduced fruit and veg and found I could tolerate it, broccoli remained the one that took me straight back to runs and passing blood. Maybe the Broccoli Incident sensitised my bowls to it? It was almost a year later when I did manage to eat a small portion. I haven't yet eaten a whole broccoli again!

There is a suggestion to avoid Vitamin D during radiotherapy. I don't think I've ever heard a prostate cancer patient told to do this, but some breast cancer patients are told this.

The reason for this is Vitamin D is supposed to be good at avoiding free radical damage to DNA, whereas radiotherapy is deliberately generating free radical damage to DNA - that's an essential part of how it works.

I was taking vitamin D though radiotherapy because I didn't know about this until afterwards. If I had known, I would have stopped taking vitamin D a few weeks before RT, and started again afterwards.

The effects of radiotherapy continue for 18 months to 2 years as the fatally damaged cells gradually die, but there's no more DNA corruption being generated after the RT by free radicals, so I think you could restart vitamin D a day or so afterwards. However, I've never read a research paper which talks about this, so I'm guessing.

Lycopene is insoluble, so simply eating a fresh tomato won't get your body to absorb the lycopene - it just passes through as fibre. Lycopene needs to be dissolved in oil in order to be absorbed, so you need the tomatoes cooked (including skins where the lycopene is most concentrated) in oil, and to consume that oil.

Good sources are tomato ketchup, most tomato soups (containing oil), some tomato puree concentrates (containing oil). A fresh tomato isn't much use though.

While there's some suggestion lycopene may reduce the incidence of prostate cancer, there's no suggestion it makes any difference once you have prostate cancer, which is the situation of the people in this forum.

I've no idea what form the lycopene is inside lycopene supplements, but unless they're oil capsules (like cod liver oil capsules are), I doubt it would do anything.