This Christmas, Fight Cancer With Your Fork

CookForYourLife.org offers special Christmas recipes for cancer patients

NEW YORK, Dec. 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- If you or someone you love is fighting cancer, Christmas can be especially difficult. It's hard to feel festive when you're suffering and cannot enjoy traditional holiday meals.

A first-of-its-kind nonprofit called CookForYourLife.org shows cancer patients (and their families and friends) how they can join in the holiday cheer without sacrificing either taste or the healthy ingredients they need to get well. Like the more than 300 other recipes on the site, the Healthy Holiday: CHRISTMAS recipes are delicious, easy to make and full of nutrients.

Cook for Your Life was founded in 2006 by two-time cancer survivor and former international fashion designer Ann Ogden. Her nonprofit offers free hands-on cooking and nutrition classes for cancer patients and their loved ones in New York City. It is also a national cancer-support resource that teaches simple, healthy cooking through an extensive website with hundreds of recipes, a host of how-to cooking videos and a cancer blog on nutrition and wellness.

A key feature of CookForYourLife.org is its unique search function. Using this tool, patients can locate recipes that fit how they feel during treatment – for example, undergoing chemo, feeling fatigued and in need of a high-calorie meal, or receiving radiation and craving a bland, vegetarian, gluten-free meal.

All of the recipes grew out of Ogden's own experience with first kidney cancer and then breast cancer. And all of the dishes do more than please the palette.  Based on the recommendations of the American Institute for Cancer Research for a diet full of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, chicken and fish, they help patients get well – and stay well.

Says Ogden, "During the holidays we all want to feel close to those we love and coming together for a holiday meal is a wonderful way to do that. These recipes are designed to keep the holiday special in families touched by cancer by offering delicious, healthy options everyone can enjoy."

With its informative articles and hundreds of recipes based on established science, Cook for Your Life is an invaluable and reliable resource for the growing number of people who look to the Internet for crucial information during a period in their lives when the need to know is paramount.

SOURCE Cook For Your Life