David Hill: Most nutritionists have a similar history. They were either an athlete growing up or struggled with an eating disorder or had someone in their family with a food-related health condition. But not Danielle Meyer.

Danielle Meyer: I just appreciated the science of food and the idea of edible chemistry, and I also like to eat and I appreciate food.

David Hill: After getting her master's in food science and human nutrition from the University of Maine, Meyer landed a job as a dietician with a health care system in Virginia, providing nutrition counseling to cancer patients. And that's when she knew she had found her niche, whether it was using food to counter a side effect or telling a patient that, yes, it is okay to eat ice cream. Meyer was helping people in need every day. The work inspired her to become a board-certified specialist in oncology nutrition.

At UB, Meyer has combined a love of teaching with her background in nutrition as director of the undergraduate program in nutrition science in the School of Public Health and Health Professions. When not educating UB students, she is pursuing her PhD in nutrition science at UB.

Welcome to Driven to Discover, a University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. My name is David Hill and on this episode, I'll be talking to Danielle Meyer about nutrition and cancer.

Danielle, you didn't have the typical childhood of a person who becomes a nutritionist. What did you want to be when you grew up?

Danielle Meyer: You know, it always depends on the phase of life you're in. I'm sure at one point, I wanted to be a barista. But I was an art history major in another life and I always wanted to be an educator as well. I wanted to teach art history. So fundamentally, I've just always wanted to be an educator.

David Hill: And did you really end up focusing on nutrition because you love to eat?

Danielle Meyer: I did, because I started to really appreciate the science of food, especially when I got more into my major in food and nutrition science when I was an undergrad. I had been an art history major before, I was in biology, but biology is hard. There's physics and calculus. Because ultimately, I wanted to be a genetic counselor, and so I found food and nutrition because it met all my pre-reqs. So I thought this was the path, but then when I got into it, and you learn the chemical structure of a lemon, and you understand how food works and what motivates people and where psychology comes into it, and yeah, that's what really motivated me to just continue on.

David Hill: Not every day that people are inspired by lemons, I guess.

Danielle Meyer: No, that's very true. But when you learn about the organic chemistry of it, and especially with baking because it is a science, you just understand it better, and I think that heightened my interest and my love for it a lot more.

David Hill: Now, we're living in a time where people seem to be very confused about food—what's healthy, what's not healthy. There are lots of different approaches to eating. We have vegan and keto and paleo, gluten-free, there's intermittent fasting, and so on. What do you make of all of this?

Danielle Meyer: What really gets lost is, nutrition science is actually a young science. It's more recent than biology or physics or mathematics. So what I think is leading into that way, that there’s that confusion, is as we continue and the science gets better and the technology gets better, we are upending some things that we thought we had already known previously. That's what's really confusing. ‘You told me eggs weren't good for me. Now you tell me I should be eating eggs.’ And as the public, that can make us sound like we don't know what we're talking about or why can't we decide. And really, it's just the evolution of this very organic science. It's going to continue to improve and get better, and we're going to learn more as we go along.

One of the courses that I teach when I talk about the history of the FDA and food laws, I love showing old advertisements with misinformation or really weird marketing when it comes to weight loss or food or diet.

David Hill: What are some of the old advertisements and things that you share with your students?

Danielle Meyer: Oh, one of my favorites is a soap that will help you wash away the fat on your legs. There is also one, especially when we talk about ingredients or doctored food such as, you know, there were teething drops and a lot of cough suppressants for children at the time. We're talking like early 1800s, maybe late 1800s, they had heroin in them. It also did help them sleep because it is exactly what it is.

What also motivates certain people to get into nutrition is, like, selling supplements, and that's a lot of where this comes from. So it's marketing, it's misinformation, it's not understanding a really complicated science, or just a weird oversimplification.

David Hill: So getting back to paleo and vegan and all these different diets that exist today, are there any benefits to these?

Danielle Meyer: Are they effective at weight loss? Yeah, they definitely can be. But the more restrictive a diet is, the less you're going to adhere to it. So it might give you a short-term benefit. You may find weight loss or you may see an increase or a decrease of maybe a lab that you're trying to alter, but some of these just aren't sustainable. But if someone found success with it, then good for them. Usually, the trouble that I have is when someone says, ‘Well, this worked for me, so now it's gonna work for you.’ And again, now we're back into the sales part of it.

David Hill: And speaking of marketing, we always hear about super foods. Is there really such a thing as a super food?

Danielle Meyer: That is one of my favorite marketing terms of all time. Uh, no, it's not a FDA, USDA, it's not an official anything. What superfoods do, what that title or what the marketing's just trying to tell us, is this food is really healthy or it has really great health benefits. Now that's not untrue, but at the same time we do know that dark leafy greens are good for us. We have known that. Everyone generally knows that. But when you label it a superfood green smoothie, it makes it sound a little more exciting than just a, here is your spinach smoothie

David Hill: And the potato just has a bad rap, right? That's off limits?

Danielle Meyer: It does. I love the potato. I did my master's research with potatoes when I was at the University of Maine.

It's what we do to the poor potato. We fry it, we cover it in butter and sour cream and cheese, and then we add bacon. We turn it into chips. But there's nothing inherently wrong with the potato. Even a white potato. Potatoes have protein. They're an excellent source of potassium and really you can also just think of them as an interchangeable starch. So whatever you can put on pasta, you can put on a potato or vice versa. One of my favorite treats that I've had since even when I was an undergrad and that we actually continue to make as a family today is a chili potato, where you just put your chili on top of the baked potato. Because, why not?

David Hill: I will take a chili potato.

Now you specialize in nutrition and oncology. What role do you think food plays in cancer? Can the foods we eat and the way they are prepared affect whether someone gets cancer or, conversely, help them fight it?

Danielle Meyer: When we talk about food and cancer, nutrition and cancer, it's really important to remember just how complicated, especially cancer is. Cancer is a lot of things. You know, it can be influenced by our environment. Our genetics. Diet does have a role in some cases, but it's been really difficult to navigate a ‘this food is related to this thing’ or ‘this nutrient is related to that particular risk factor’. And we haven't really been able to find really conclusive evidence for a lot of that.

When it comes to maybe how we prepare things, there are risks associated with maybe charring or burning our food. There was evidence that suggested an increase in colorectal cancer risk with consuming those types of foods, but we can't divorce just diet when it comes to our cancer risk.

As far as fighting cancer, the recommendations are a generally plant-based healthy diet. The recommendations for cancer survivors are the same for cancer prevention, which is whole grains, colorful foods, well-balanced diet, limiting red meat, limiting processed meat. Which when you look at it, it's the foundation of a healthy diet. There isn't anything necessarily special to that.

David Hill: Now, we always hear people say that sugar feeds cancer cells, but is that true?

Danielle Meyer: This is probably one of the most popular nutrition myths I have to dispel. The sugar and cancer question is a really sad oversimplification of a really complicated science.

First of all, we tend to think about sugar as white table sugar. You talk to anyone, any consumer, any patient, that's the first thing they're going to picture. And then they'll go to, like, cookies and cakes and donuts and all those things too. So you'll have this false equivalency to thinking, okay, well, now I have to avoid cookies and donuts and all those, or things with white sugar.

What gets oversimplified is that glucose, which is the fuel for our cells, is also the fuel for cancer cells. They are still cells that are within us. They are just cells that don't have an off switch. So they too utilize glucose for their energy, just like every other cell in our body. So to say sugar feeds cancer, it's like, well, no, but yes, the glucose does, but it's not the white table sugar or processed sugar that a lot of people are picturing or imagining when they're thinking about this particular connection.

So as a dietician and working with cancer patients, what I did for my patients was to really help them sort through the noise, whether it was coming from their neighbor's cousin's daughter who heard this because her neighbor had cancer, and so you should do all these things. Or you get on the internet and you consult the oncologist Dr. Google, and you're going to find all kinds of misinformation. If you look hard enough, you will find a website that will tell you that strawberries will cure your cancer, but that's not how this works.

So as a dietician, I got to dispel a lot of those myths. I got to help correct and put people kind of back on a path, depending on their diagnosis or what the prognosis was. One of the greatest things that I got to do was give people permission to eat ice cream or to not worry about restrictions if there are so many other things that are happening that are actually more important. I never wanted food and nutrition to become a source of stress, especially when it didn't need to be. And I'm not just talking about the patient, but it's also their families and their caregivers. Because as a caregiver, it's really hard when you're told that they're not hungry or this doesn't taste right, because we do food and love. So I worked with the patients and their families to try and lessen this burdensome idea of what a diet when you have cancer or what cancer treatment had to look like.

David Hill: I know this next topic is very personal for you as it is for me. I know you recently lost your brother to colon cancer. My fiancée is currently undergoing treatment for colon cancer. We're seeing an increasing number of people under the age of 50 being diagnosed with cancer, particularly colorectal cancer, which is now the leading cause of death in men under 50 and the second leading cause of women under 50. Do you think the American diet has anything to do with this trend?

Danielle Meyer: So my brother passed in January, and he was 46. When I think about the role of diet, you again have to think about the idea of risk. Now our diets in the ’80s and ’90s were very different than what they were in the ’70s or in the ’60s. And we can keep going further and further back. Now we did see a big increase in consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages during that time as well. You could make the argument that that's also when we started to become more sedentary. So our physical activity decreased. Our consumption of more ultra-processed foods likely also started to increase.

So when I think about my brother, he checked off a lot of boxes that put him at high risk. So he had a high BMI. He was a smoker. He was a heavy consumer of alcohol. Definitely didn't have the best diet in general, a lot of processed meats. His favorite food was pizza, for sure.

We have a family history, too. To say it's just the diet—I don't think that's just it. It's definitely a part. I'm not saying it's not, but we also don't know why this is happening so much. And because it's really difficult in nutrition science to really parse out all those pieces, it's hard to say, oh, it was just the processed meats, because we don't know that. It's hard to say, oh, it's sugar-sweetened beverages, because we don't know that.

And that's what makes it so complicated. And I think it's the same way when we think of colorectal cancer and individuals under 50. And unfortunately, which you and I also have in common, is we also are seeing that these are more aggressive too. People over 50 have a much better rate of survival. That trend is going in the right direction. It's not the same for those who are under 50. And a lot of the recommendations and things that we talk about with colorectal cancer are aimed at that group who are 50 and over, and we just don't have the same kind of knowledge or recommendations yet for those who are under 50. I just don't think we know yet. And that's a really crummy answer to provide. I wish I could say, yep, totally, it's our diet, but not everyone under 50 is getting colorectal cancer.

And that I think also highlights where, yes, our risk is higher, and there are things that we can do to then decrease our risk. And that's what can be in our control for some things, like our diet and our physical activity and some of the lifestyle things that we do like smoking or drinking. So when those things are within our control, we should maybe feel a little bit better. But if you do all the right things and it still happens anyways, that's just as devastating.

So it's really hard to pin it on any one thing when it's probably all the things and the person. It's not a satisfying answer, but that's the one I have to give.

David Hill: Well, we've talked a lot about other people's diets. What is yours like?

Danielle Meyer: It is not awesome. I'll always be really honest about this. I am a mom of two boys who I like to describe are sports age. So that means we have practice and games and we're running everywhere. And my husband works and I work, so is it home-cooked meals every day? We certainly try, but it might be the home-cooked meal of, all right, we're popping in a frozen lasagna because this is what needs to happen. Do I have a fruit and vegetable with every meal? No, I don't. If I'm going to be honest, I'll be honest. No, not really.

It is really hard to have the perfect diet. People always say, "Oh, you're a dietician. Don't look at my grocery cart." I'm like, "Dude, don't look at mine. You're not going to like what you see either.” And trust me, we are not looking at your grocery carts. We genuinely don't care. You do you because I am doing me. And sometimes that means, yeah, it's a bad day, then it's chocolate cake for dinner, because that's what my day is going to call for. But it's not an everyday thing.

David Hill: I feel good knowing that if I pass you in the grocery store, I don't need to, you know, go the other way.

Danielle Meyer: No, and that's also why I enjoyed working with cancer patients so much more, because it is way more fun to tell someone to eat ice cream than to not to. It was the most rewarding part of my career. Now I get that satisfaction from my students and knowing as I've trained them and I share this information and then they go on to become professionals of their own. And I know that I had a little hand in helping to shape maybe a little bit more of their food philosophy as well.

We're not real strict. I'm not. I like to say I come from the moderation generation where it's like, listen, a little is good. A lot is not better. And that's okay. That's how I approach it.

David Hill: Great. Well, thanks so much, Danielle, for your time. This has been a wonderful conversation.

Danielle Meyer: It's been an absolute pleasure. I love talking about this. It's always great.