Why VitaPlena

My name is Ana-Marina, Ani for short. I'm currently in my 4th year of medical school.

Like everyone who ends up working with oncology in one way or another, I have a personal story and a wish to help people.

For three years straight I thought I'd go into surgery. Don't get me wrong, I still love doing fine work with my hands, but I realized that way I could only be useful to one patient for 8 hours at a time, and I started thinking about how I could be useful to more people in less time. I went through general and neurosurgery rotations, which probably helped my interest in the digestive and nervous systems find their way into each other.

In my second year we had biochemistry — honestly, people always looked at me a little suspiciously, because it was a subject I was passionate about while most people around me hated it. Biochemistry — the way the body turns food into energy, into cells, into life — always struck me as more interesting than almost anything else in the textbooks.

But the real moment everything changed wasn't in a lecture hall or a seminar. It was when I met a patient who couldn't eat — and no one around him quite knew what to tell him. It was when I saw a broken system, one where parenteral nutrition is treated as a taboo subject. A system where oncology diagnoses are clinical pathways confined to a single department, instead of treating the disease with the full integration it actually needs.

The oncologist knows the tumor. But not the protein requirements in cachexia. The dietitian — if the patient even has access to one — doesn't know the chemotherapy protocol or how to assess which one was chosen and why. And the patient stands somewhere in between, confused, hungry, scared.

I understood something then: this wasn't an isolated case. It's a systemic gap — in my own education, in the healthcare system, in the way we talk about cancer.

That's why I started VitaPlena. Not because I have all the answers — I'm still a student, not a doctor — but because I decided it's better to write with care and scientific accuracy than to let silence speak in my place.

Here you'll find articles based on ESPEN, ASCO, and PubMed — not trends. Written in plain language, for patients and their families. And a community where no one is alone with the question "what do I eat now."

I'm still learning. I still get things wrong sometimes. But I believe every patient deserves to be heard — and nourished with care, not just calories.

— Ani