#16 How NEAT and GRAS
Impact Your Health

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You could be feeling the impact of a sedentary lifestyle even with regular exercise.

Now, more than ever it's important to find ways of staying active throughout the day because 30-60 minutes of exercise doesn't compensate for 8+ hours of sitting. 

Listen to this episode for simple ways to increase your non-exercise activity to help keep the pounds off and lower your risk of cancer recurrence. 

Then hear what the evidence has to say about common ingredients that are generally recognized as safe. You may want to reconsider whether these chemicals are safe enough to be a part of your lifestyle.

 


Read the full transcript: 

0:01
This is Laura Lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach. I'm a healthy lifestyle coach, a clinical Ayurveda specialist, a personal trainer, and I'm also a breast cancer survivor. In this podcast, we talk about healthy thinking and mindfulness practices, eating well, moving your body for health and longevity. And we'll also hear from other breast cancer survivors who have reengaged with life, and have incredible stories to share. This podcast is your go to resource for getting back to life after breast cancer.

0:38
Welcome to Episode 16 of the breast cancer recovery coach. I am Laura Lummer. And I'm super excited that you're downloading this episode today, because we've got some great stuff to talk about. First, let's acknowledge that we are smack in the middle of October, also known as Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And it is just so cool to see the outpouring that our communities that that the world just puts into this heightened awareness of breast cancer, of early detection, and just also all the support that goes into not only the research, but the support of people who are going through the process of trying of being treated for breast cancer and their family and loved ones. Because if you're listening to this podcast, you like me are more than likely a breast cancer survivor. And you know that it's a tough road. It's a tough experience to go through. And yet we see more and more women going through this and men going through this. So my hope today is to bring some awareness to a couple of different areas that we as breast cancer survivors can focus on to create a little healthier lifestyle for ourselves. Now, as a health coach, it's really my job to give information to my clients, and to ask the right questions to kind of help them figure out what it is that they want in their lives, or they're willing to change in their lives or different behaviors they're willing to adopt in order to achieve their health goals. Now, a lot of us want to have healthier life. But maybe we're just not ready to make certain changes, or maybe don't know what to do in order to make those changes or how to go about it. So in today's show, I'm going to talk about one thing that is physically focused small tips to help you incorporate a little more activity into your life without incorporating or increasing your amount of official exercise, right, incorporating more workouts. So we're going to talk about the topic of neat non exercise Activity Thermogenesis which is a really crazy scientific way of saying burning extra calories in your day to day lifestyle without having to do put on some gym shoes and get out there and you know, run on the treadmill. And we're also going to talk about grass, which is another acronym for generally recognized as safe. And in that part of the show, we're going to talk about a certain group of ingredients that we find in our food and in a lot of our body care products. It's kind of a controversial group of ingredients, maybe you've heard about them, we'll go into them in a little bit of depth. And I'll give you some more information that you can do research on. Because I know I've said this in many shows before. And I'll probably say many more. But what we put on our body is just as important as what we put in our body. Most of us who have had breast cancer don't have a specific cause that we can point back to you know, some people have a genetic predisposition. Some people have a family history, but the majority of people who are diagnosed with breast cancer, it can be any kind of environmental causes or maybe even genes or different chromosomes that haven't yet been discovered. So rather than trying to figure all that out, which something that probably never will happen, let's just look at the information that's here for us now on how different things can impact our health and increase our risk of recurrence and how we can control those how we can make some changes. So let's look at things that we can actually do something about. Alright, so we're gonna start off with talking about moving your body. Now some people get out there, they love to exercise, they don't have a daily routine, they have daily walks or weightlifting or whatever it is that they enjoy doing. And that is fantastic. But what we're finding, and I can use myself as a point of reference as well that even though I make a point of exercising for at least an hour every day, some days I have maybe a lot more desk work to do than other days. So let's say that I worked out for an hour in the morning, then I come back I get ready and I sit down and I'm at work for the next nine or 10 hours sitting on my butt. Well, you may or may not have heard the term

5:00
I'm sitting is the new smoking. But back in, I think it was 2014, The Huffington Post came out with an article sitting is the new smoking ways that a sedentary lifestyle is killing you and more and more in the fitness industry. Instead of using the verbiage of getting people up and getting people moving, we're trying to say just don't sit, just try not to sit. And so let's look at a few ways that we can go through our day without doing so much sitting. And here's a little insight into why that's really important to us as breast cancer survivors. Now, it's no secret to any buddy that leading a sedentary lifestyle is a major contributing factor to obesity. There's some lucky people out there that don't have to worry about it, that their genetics, they're just naturally thin. But even for those people, and I've said this before, just being thin does not necessarily mean that you're healthy. So but we'll come back to that later. So looking at obesity, if we have an obesity epidemic in the United States now, where recent statistics are showing that nearly 40% of our adult population is obese. And with respect to breast cancer survivors, that can be even more dangerous than people who have not yet been diagnosed with any type of cancer. In the Journal of Clinical Oncology, there was a report published summarizing the findings of a meta analysis of studies, so many different clinical research papers were brought together, they looked at the results from all these different papers, and then summarized it, what they found was that obesity wasn't just associated with having more cancer or having poor outcomes for breast cancer. But they found that women who were obese had an almost 30%, increased risk of disease recurrence or death, then women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and were not obese. Now, that's a huge difference in risk of recurrence. And in fact, I know even for myself and the choices that I made with respect to chemotherapy, radiation, tamoxifen, or what other treatments, my doctor proposed to me, that the decisions I made on which treatments I would undergo didn't even lessen my risk of recurrence by as much as 30%. So that's tremendous. And thinking that reducing the amount of fat that we carry around on our body might help us by that large of a percentage. Hopefully, it's something that's really motivating for you, because it's one of the few things that we have quite a bit of control over. So let's look at how we can increase our non exercise caloric burn throughout the day, and kind of help us get a little extra body fat off in the meantime, as well.

7:45
We're all familiar with the common ones. Now Park as far away from the front door as possible, take the stairs instead of the elevator. But what else could you incorporate into your day. So here are a couple of fun and easy ones. One is when you're making those phone calls during the day, whether you're at home, or you're at work, if you're on the cell phone, get up and keep walking, keep moving while you're talking on the phone. If it's a personal call at home or on a break or something of that nature, don't sit down and have a cup of coffee, just stay up, walk around the house, maybe walk out onto the patio or into the yard and continue to walk while you're talking on the phone. If it's at work, and you have a landline, consider getting yourself a headset. Most telephones that work now will work with a headset. So consider making that investment into your health getting a headset and walking around while you're making those phone calls at work. Another easy fix for getting more neat activity at work is using a stand up desk. Now a stand up desk is adjustable. So you don't have to just stand all day long. I use one in my office from very desk. And that's really nice. Because it's wide enough, I work with two monitors. So it's wide enough to hold the two monitors, my computer, my keyboard, all of that. And it's got little handles that you just gently squeezed on the side so you can lower it or raise it as you need. So if you need to sit, you can sit with them. If you're wearing different shoes, you can raise it higher or lower. So it's adjustable for lots of different people in sizes. And

9:17
the standup desks can run anywhere from 100 to maybe a little over $300 Depending on the size and all of the tricks and neat stuff that you get on it. But it is worth the investment in yourself and in your health to check these out. Okay, how about scheduling a walking meeting? Now I realize this isn't going to work for everybody that you work with. But for those people who would be interested, do you think you can say hey, instead of meeting at this in this conference room, how about if we just walk around the building or walk around outside or you know there's usually a common area around offices so schedule a meeting and say you know, let's meet for this half hour and walk around. That won't always work but where you can squeezing in squeezing in every little bit of

10:00
movement is what helps. Another trick that I use, when in my office time is I have a stability ball chair. So these are super cool. And again, I'll post a link to an easy to find one on this podcast show notes. But using the stability ball chair is nice because if you want to sit, you can sit on it, and then practice lifting your feet, which engages your core. So you're actually getting a little bit of motion a little bit of exercise very gently at your desk. Or, when I use the standup desk at full height, oftentimes, I'll kneel on the stability ball chair, so then you're getting even more core work. And if you have your knees a little bit to the outside of the ball, and you're squeezing on the inside, you're working those thighs as well. And these are things you can work up to. Or if you're already used to this type of thing, you have an exercise program, these are just little tools that you could incorporate into an office environment to just keep that little non exercise activity going throughout the day. So let's talk about a couple of things you can do when you get home. Well, one of those things is that I'm not going to suggest that you miss your favorite TV shows, because I know we need some downtime, right? You want to come home, you want to have a little bit of downtime. But what about if you could do a little bit of exercise during your downtime, maybe if it's even isometric exercise. So if you're sitting in a chair, or you're sitting on the couch, bringing your buns out to the edge of that chair or that couch, and then just practicing, lifting your feet up off the floor, right, so hands down on the couch, next to your heels, and knees are bent in front of you, and you're just lifting the feet. So you're doing that isometric contraction of the core. Or there's even laying down on the floor to watch your favorite television show. And maybe get in some abdominal exercise while you're doing that, or some bridge, post some yoga pose some stretches while you're lying on the floor. And this actually might help you get a little better night's sleep as well. So for those of you who are thinking, well, I could definitely do that. But if so, might cut into me having a glass of wine while I'm watching my favorite TV show at night. Well, let's talk a little bit about alcohol consumption. Just as an FYI, it's something that we really want to be moderate with after having breast cancer. So for those of you who are thinking, you don't want to give up that extra glass of wine during the week, when you come home and watch your favorite TV show. Here's a little food for thought. Even though you may have heard that a one drink Max a day for women and men to drink max for men may help in putting off cardiovascular disease. The American Institute for Cancer Research has recently published evidence that suggests that there is no safe consumption level for the risk of breast cancer in women. And then in fact, for every 10 grams of alcohol, which is a standard drink is about 14 grams of alcohol, that breast cancer risk increases by 5%. So it's something to think about, you should know what the statistics say, again, there are other things that come into play when we're looking at a balanced lifestyle. And there's nothing wrong with enjoying a glass well 5% increase. So we make our own choices, right. And if you want to incorporate that into your life, then that's great. That's your choice. But just know that there are other choices you can make. Or you can make choices less frequently. And those might have a bigger impact on your health.

13:45
Something that you can do once you get home also, is when you come home and you make dinner. If you're like me, you don't want to live without your dishwasher. But taking the time to hand wash dishes actually can be of benefit. So maybe it's not a huge ordeal, you know, it's a couple of little plates, and you're not too tired at the end of your day, take the time to stand there and wash the dishes. It's just a little more increase in activity, maybe deciding to do the laundry at night, so that you're getting up and down. If you're watching a TV show, let the commercials run instead of fast forward through them on the DVR get up and change a load of laundry. So I think you started to get the idea, right? It's just don't sit as much. And maybe that's a little easier of a concept for people to become ingrained with is it's kind of a trigger when you catch yourself sitting think, Oh, is there something else I could be doing? Could I be standing up to do this instead? Can I walk around and still get this done? And so that trigger for you will be the act of sitting the triggers the thought process of maybe I can be doing more. So there are some things we can do to keep our body healthy, physically moving around continually throughout our day increasing our level of activity.

15:00
Even without incorporating more actual exercise, now let's take a look at a category of ingredients that we commonly find in our food, in our cosmetics, and in you know, personal care products that there's been quite a bit of controversy about. Now sometimes we hear about an additive or an ingredient or something of that nature. And people just say, Oh, it's bad, don't use it, but you really don't know why. And I think it's really important to know why and what the study say and where you can look for more information in order for you again to make the most informed decision, because the category that we're going to talk about is called parabens. And parabens are an ingredient that in the United States are considered grass generally recognized as safe. Now grass is a designation that the FDA gives to food and cosmetic ingredients. And once an additive has been labeled as grass, food and cosmetic manufacturers are free to use that ingredient in products that are consumed by humans. But let's talk a little bit about what that standard is by which the FDA grants this tax designation because what the FDA designates as safe may not be aligned with how you would designate a chemical as being safe enough to put in or on your body. So let's talk about how many additives there are, there's a database on the FDA website of all generally recognized as safe ingredients. And when I looked at this just last week, so in the month of October 2017, there were 379 additives that are currently on the generally recognized as safe list in the database. And parabens are a group of these additives that you'll find on the generally recognized as safe list. Some of the more common parabens, you may hear a methyl paraben, ethyl paraben, and unless you're aware of and try to eliminate these from your life, you can pretty much pick up any body care product in your house, and you're probably going to see parabens listed towards the end of that ingredient list. You'll also find parabens in deodorant, tortillas, muffins, food dyes, and many different snack products. Now that might gross you out as soon as you hear you're thinking, I don't want to have the same ingredients in my deodorant that I have in my food. But let's give the benefit of the doubt and take for instance, a natural ingredient like baking soda. Baking soda is a wonderful deodorant. It's also in a ton of our food, right, and it's something we accept, and it's perfectly normal. So we don't want to judge just based on that. But we want to just look at how the FDA decides that these are safe additives for us to be using in and on our body. And let's look at a couple of the studies and what the studies say about the safety of these parabens, which are really, really common. That's why I picked them for this episode because they are controversial, and they're just so common, they're in so many of the products that we use. So first of all, the FDA with respect to food is guided by the food additive amendment that was passed in 1958. And this amendment is part of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. And a part of that amendment that the FDA uses when they're making a determination of generally recognized as safe is that there must be a reasonable certainty in the minds of competent scientists, that the substance added into our food supply is not harmful under the intended conditions of use. Now remember, this was passed in 1958. And in addition to that guideline, there's also the fact that companies are allowed to submit their own findings of the chemicals they produce to prove that their own chemicals are reasonably safe for human consumption. These ingredients can be used and can be put out into the food and personal care supply for humans to use while they're being reviewed and investigated even before they receive a designation of generally recognized and safe unless something very harmful to human health happens as a result of then of our exposure to these ingredients. And then in that case, the FDA will step in. Okay, so I want to talk to you about a couple of studies that I found on parabens and now the reason most people say that they have concerns about parabens is that they've been talked about as being endocrine disruptors. And so that means that they get in the way of the hormones and how our hormones work in our bodies. So is that true? Is there any evidence that shows that they really do accumulate in our bodies and that they really do interfere with anything that may have a connection to increasing risk of breast cancer?

20:00
So I went to another website, PubMed, which is a website where there's a whole database of all kinds of clinical studies and trials. And you can put in your keywords, find what you're looking for and read different studies. Now, as I've already said, there's a mindset that parabens are generally recognized as safe. And there are studies out there that say that they don't see any harm to human health in the clinical trials that they test these parabens and, and there are other ones that do. And the reason I'm going to bring your attention to just a couple of these is not to just be fear mongering. But just to say, we're gonna go with the assumption that this ingredient is generally recognized as safe, but I'm going to bring to your attention some other evidence that has come up about it, that may cause you to rethink whether or not you want to use it or investigate it a little more and find out some more information about it before you continue to use it or to ingest it. Okay, I typed in cancer and parabens into PubMed, and I got 117 Study results. The title of one of these studies was parabens can enable hallmarks and characteristics of cancer in human breast epithelial cells. This was a study that was published in the Journal of Applied toxicology in July of 2014. And this study was looking at different hallmarks. So these different earmarks on how parabens might impact breast cancer in humans. So one of the things that they found was that there were parabens that could be measured in 99% of the breast tissue samples that they received. And they found that at the concentrations that could be measured in these breast tissues, that parabens could sustain the life the proliferation of human breast cancer cells. Another thing that they found in this study was that parabens could prevent the deactivation of cancer cells because they played around and blocked the effectiveness of growth inhibitors that we naturally have in our body. They also found that parabens can lead to increased invasiveness in human breast cancer cells, which is basically the process of metastasis. And in conclusion, this study said that the ability of parabens to enable multiple cancer hallmarks in human breast cells provides grounds for more regulatory review of the implication of parabens found in breast cancer tissue. Another study in the Journal of Applied toxicology, published in September of 2016, was titled methyl paraben stimulates tumor initiating cells in estrogen receptor positive breast cancer. What this study showed is overall parabens increased tumor initiating cell activity. And then a third study in December of 2016, showed that parabens affected telomeres, they were related to telomere shortening. So telomere is this little cap that's on the end of our chromosomes. That's really oversimplifying it, but you get the picture. And these caps protect our chromosomes from degenerating studies have shown that when the telomeres were down, or they get shorter, that more damage big can impact the chromosomes and then that can increase our aging or accelerate aging and the onset of disease. And this study found that the shortening of telomere length was actually linked to Ethel parabens. And they found that there was more of an impact on the shortening of telomeres and women who were estrogen receptor positive than those who are triple negative, but still definitely an impact linked to that. And basically, they just determined that based on the individual sensitivity to this Tila mirror, shortening in the presence of ethyl paraben, that could be something that is a catalyst in disease. Now, I am not a conspiracy theorist. And I do believe that there are many, many, many wonderful things that the government does, and government agencies do that, that provide safety for us in our food supply. But I also know that the food and cosmetic industry is a big, big, big business. And when business and politics are involved in different industries, I think that puts a little bit of onus back on us as the consumer that we don't just assume that everything is as it appears to be. So what I encourage you to do is look more into this. Certainly I'm not suggesting that, you know, the FDA is out to poison us or that any other companies are out to poisonous. But I do believe that in this day and age, there's a sufficient amount of evidence to be able to say that corporations are out to make a profit. And in order to make a profit you have to have as

25:00
Little waste and as high a profit margin as possible. And in that mix, there may be risks taken with human health when it comes to the chemicals that are allowed to put in to preserve our products, to lessen the amount of waste that is put into these manufacture products and with our food as well. Now, if you're someone that you know, uses organic food, or even organic body care products, or natural products that don't have lots of chemical preservatives in them, you know, for a fact that those products or those foods will waste and rot much faster than something else that you can buy. I mean, you can buy a Twinkie, and it will still be around for my grandchildren to eat, you know. But if you made a loaf of bread today from real ingredients, it's not going to be around in two weeks from now it's going to be molded and rotten. So with respect to parabens, and the risk that they may pose to breast cancer survivors, or the risk that they may pose for increasing the odds of anyone getting breast cancer, I just encourage you to look more into the research, read more about it and make sure that it's something that you're aware of so that you're making that informed decision as to whether or not you want to consume it or use it on your body. There are many, many effective, beautiful products out there that are skincare products, there are many organic products that can replace certain products that are made with parabens, and maybe even products that aren't necessarily organic, but are that are more natural and don't have chemical preservatives in them. Now, an excellent source to look to when you're trying to determine the toxicity that's in a product is called the Environmental Working Group. And this organization has a website and an app and you can type in or scan your food and cosmetic products into their system. And the safety rating ratings. And any chemicals that are in them that are potentially dangerous to your health will pop up. And so you can just look a little more deeply into that as we celebrate Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we have to bring awareness to all things that might contribute to it more than just doing regular breast examinations and having early detection. And it's important for all of us to be sharing that information amongst each other. So that we're just putting more knowledge out there we're sharing information, and heightening that awareness of safety. It's difficult, if not impossible, and perhaps not even desirable. To eliminate all these kinds of chemicals from your life. There are some products or some foods that may have questionable ingredients and that you depend on. And just like how we decide how many glasses of wine we'll have during the week, we have to decide how many chemical exposures we're going to have as well. So I hope that this helps you as a little bit of information on getting some more physical activity in your life burning a few extra calories, staving off obesity, and contributing to healthy oxygen flow through your brain and your cognitive health as well. And also understanding some very common ingredients that you may want to have a little more awareness of, for lots of beautiful safe options for your personal care items, you can check out Beautycounter on my website, or go to beauty counter.com forward slash Laura Lummer and become a part of this movement of creating awareness and legislation and knowledge and empowering all women to have access to safer products that still make us look good and feel good because you know that's important too. Thank you for listening to the show this week. And if you haven't gone to my website yet and downloaded my book six habits of healthy happy breast cancer survivors, I hope you take the time to go and do that. And to leave a review for me in the iTunes Store. Maybe a nice comment or a couple of stars so that more breast cancer survivors will hear this show as it moves up in the iTunes rankings and becomes more visible. So keep getting out there. Keep creating awareness during this month of October and I look forward to talking with you again in two weeks. Until then, remember let your lifestyle be your medicine. Use courage to the test laid all your doubts

29:33
your mind is clearer than before your heart is full and wanting more your futures

29:43
Give it all you

29:46
know has

29:48
you been waiting on

29:55
this

 

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