The last thing you need when you are unwell is cake, chocolate or some other treat laden with sugar and refined carbohydrates that offer little nutritional benefit. If you’ve ever wondered what to bring someone who is ailing, Chai Cancer Care’s resident nutritionist has the answer in a new cookbook full of recipes to nourish loved ones back to health. And it offers far more than our Jewish penicillin.

Off the back of hearing patients complain that their well-meaning friends bring around unhealthy food at a time when they need to improve their nutrition, Susan Fruhman created a cookbook. How Can I Help You? is aimed at patients in treatment for cancer, those wanting to prevent illness and anyone who simply wants to improve their health through food. All proceeds from its sales are going to Chai.

“I want people to be able to pick the book up and say, 'please can you make me this soup or lunch from here', or ‘I can't have wheat, so can you make these coconut pancakes?’”

She says it’s important to be honest and suggest that friends bring over nourishing vegetable or chicken soup. “They will be so pleased that you have told them, because people like to help, and they like to do so in the right way.”

Fruhman’s journey towards becoming a nutritionist and healing others through food began with her son’s decision to be vegetarian when he was five. It prompted the mother-of-three to become more inventive in the kitchen.

“My passion and confidence in cooking diverse foods was sparked by him,” she says of how she had gingerly sought out healthy veggie alternatives to meat and fish. “It was really important for my journey, which I never knew at the time I was going to go on.”

Fruhman grew up in Manchester with Sephardi Iraqi-born parents who had met in Israel, but although her mother was an “amazing cook” of Middle Eastern food, meat and fish had always been the base of family meals. “At the time I didn't really understand what vegetarian food was, other than your typical pasta and pizza. My journey in trying to understand nutrition began, and I got really interested in ‘what is a healthy diet?'”

After gaining a psychology degree and a postgraduate teaching certificate, she took a u-turn from a career in educational psychology and embarked on becoming a nutritionist. She never looked back. When she started her course in 2009, it felt easy, as she had already been doing it to meet her own family’s dietary needs.

“It was always my passion,” she says. “Over the years, I had seen and felt very strongly about the power of nutrition with regard to staying healthy, improving people’s state of health and preventing chronic disease. I saw that this was something we had to grasp with both hands and learn about as it can and does change people’s lives for the better. It is extremely powerful.”

Fruhman had always known about the Jewish charity Chai Cancer Care and the work it does in supporting people with cancer. During her training, she had studied how to support cancer patients with nutrition, and while she had clients coming to her on a private basis, she realised that Chai did not offer any nutritional support.

“So I approached Chai myself.”

As Chai’s nutritional therapist since 2017, Fruhman supports clients before, during and after therapy. She explains that while patients are having treatment, adapting what they are eating in the days surrounding their treatment can ease their symptoms.

“Thoughtful nutrition can reduce inflammation and support their well-being,” she says. “There are many different facets: people might need to lose some weight. They could be pre-diabetic and need to balance their blood sugar.”

She explains that food is better for the body than supplements, since it can be hard to know how much absorption has taken place, and whether your body can absorb them.

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“The body loves food first, so it will always take the nutrients from the food. But food is so synergistic to the body, it will be beautifully absorbed. Getting your food right is so important.”

While recipe books can sometimes be laden with obscure ingredients that can be hard to track down (dried hop flowers anyone?), in How can I Help You? Fruhman makes a point of including products easily found in a supermarket. However, she urges people to not be afraid to try different things.

“I aim to make everything really easy to cook. There aren't too many ingredients in each recipe. It's highlighting it to people and saying, ‘Be courageous, give it a go.'”

Quinoa, which some kosher authorities now permit as being kosher for Pesach as it is a grass and not a grain, is another healthy option. As Fruhman finds people often don’t know how to cook it she dedicates a section in the book especially to it. She also recommends building up a spice and herb cupboard to add flavour to foods such as tofu which are healthy but can be bland.

While there are plenty of vegetarian and vegan recipes, this is not a vegetarian cookbook, and includes both chicken and turkey. She explains that it’s about creating a balance and not following the latest fad diet.

“Just have a sensible approach to eating and from there you can go on to tweak things with more specialised things,” she says. "There are so many different kinds of diets being bandied about: we should all go high-protein; we should all go keto; we should all intermittent fast. They have their place, but it has to be in a considered way, with a therapist's guidance. What we all need to learn to do is eat a balanced diet, and people have lost sight of what this sense of balance is. I feel strongly about that.”

Fruhman says the book is “particularly poignant” for those who wish to improve their nutrition before, during and after treatment but is also invaluable for anyone keen to understand how to eat more healthily. But whatever their specific needs, she just wants to get people cooking healthily for the long term.

“It's a diet for life. If they continue to eat this healthy food, then I believe that will give them healthy longevity. That's my aim.”

Click here for Susan’s five top tips for ensuring you’re eating right. 

Susan Fruhman 

Buy the book here.