Annabel Croft Reveals Husband Might Have Survived Cancer If Given This Crucial Advice

Annabel Croft has opened up about her devastation following the loss of her husband, Mel Coleman, revealing that key advice might have given him a better chance of survival. Mel, a former America’s Cup yachtsman, tragically passed away in 2023 at the age of 60, just eight weeks after being diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.

Looking back, Annabel believes they weren’t given crucial information early enough—especially about nutrition—and now wonders if a change in diet could have helped him fight longer. Speaking on The MidPoint podcast, the former tennis star recalled reassuring her husband before their doctor’s appointment, only for them to be given the crushing news that his time was extremely limited.

“People don’t realize this,” she said. “He had stage four cancer. It started with colon cancer, but it could have been across everywhere at the same time. But it spread into the liver, it was spread into the kidneys, even possibly into the brain as well”, reported the Mirror.

Annabel shared the moment Mel first admitted something wasn’t right. “We were making the bed one day and he just turned to me and he said, ‘I haven’t told you this, Annabel, but I’ve got these funny pains in my side and they’re just not going away, they’re getting worse.’ It never dawned on me that it could be something so absolutely catastrophic.”

The couple’s worst fears were confirmed after Mel underwent scans. Annabel recalled: “A couple of weeks later, the scans came through and clearly the medical professionals were absolutely horrified by what they’d seen because they knew that he wouldn’t have much time left.”

One thing that still deeply troubles Annabel is how little guidance they received about diet after the diagnosis. “Worse than that,” she said, “I’ve since learned that if you have cancer, you absolutely must not put any sugar in your body at all, and that includes carbohydrates.”

But at the time, Mel was given the complete opposite advice. “When he had just had this news delivered, he said to the surgeon, ‘If I’m going to have to have lots of operations, what should I eat?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I have no idea about nutrition, I’ve never studied it – if you feel like some chocolate why don’t you have some chocolate.'”

Despite everything, Mel stayed hopeful. Annabel revealed that he had started a ketogenic diet, and his final scans actually showed a dramatic reduction in cancer cells. “The work that they were doing was working, and it’s just so tragic that he died of sepsis.”

Even in his final moments, Mel held onto hope. “The only thing I would say is he died with complete hope as to what he was doing,” Annabel shared. “They’d already told him he had very little time left and that he had to get his papers in order. And that was the very first meeting we had.”

Annabel and Mel had been together since she was 21, marrying in 1992 and raising three children—Amber, Lily, and Charlie. Now, Annabel is determined to share what she’s learned, hoping others facing similar battles can benefit from the knowledge they missed out on.