Oral feeding in the nutritional management of the cancer patient.

Nutritional therapy of the cancer patient by the oral route includes management of factors that may cause anorexia, attempts to modify the patient's eating behavior, and the offering of nutritional supplements to the patient. Anoretic factors for which specific strategies may be employed include taste abnormalities, pain, nausea, and depression. Modification of the patient's eating behavior involves patient education, monitoring, and feedback. Education includes nutritional instruction and instruction in favorable patterns for mealtime eating and stimulation of snack eating. Snack eating includes the use of nutritional supplements, and patient acceptance of commercially available supplements was studied. When synthetic chemically defined nutritional products were compared with milk-based product, patients preferred the milk-based product. Intercomparisons between milk-based products showed slight differences in preference ranking among these products and also differences between patients and controls in their relative order of ranking. Preference testing may be useful in assisting the health care team in selecting the optimal nutritional supplement to offer each patient.