#343 You Are What You Eat - Breast Cancer and Misleading Nutrition Messages

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A Breast Cancer diagnosis can make the world of nutrition even more confusing and overwhelming than it was before.

Add a bunch of Netflix documentaries to that and you can be left in total fear of food.

Should you be a vegan?

Will meat make you sick?

Is everyone selling a program?

In this episode, I’ll shed some light on a new popular nutrition documentary.

We’ll bust through some biases and peel away some of the fear tactics to leave you with a healthy balanced approach to feeding your body with confidence and a healthy range of whole food.

 

Referred to in this episode:

Work with Laura


Docuseries:

You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment

Christopher Gardner

Trifecta Nutrition

The Charlie Foundation

Miyokos Creamery

 

Books:
The Unseen Body

 

Follow me on Social Media: 

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Read the full transcript:

0:00
You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills and the insights and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis. If you're looking for a way to create a life, that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started.

0:33
Hey, friends, welcome to episode 343 have better than before breast cancer with me, Laura Lummer, your host, the breast cancer recovery coach. This is our Tuesday terrain talk. And I'm excited to get into it. Because something that I hear about all the time, something I've talked about here on the podcast. And something that just frustrates the hell out of me is all the confusion that is created around food. And I think that we have a special niche here, right in this community. Not only is it difficult to face food confusion, make living a healthy lifestyle difficult for most people. That being that we are either people having had a cancer diagnosis, living with a cancer diagnosis, managing cancer somehow in our lives, we do have special needs. Because there is a lot of science behind the importance of carbohydrate restriction when it comes to one a healthy body, but to to nourishing the population of people who have or have had in our trying to prevent cancer. So when we hear diets, or we see these reports, there was a podcast I did a while ago on a report that came out that said intermittent fasting cause increase in heart disease and it was absolute total bullshit, right? Just propaganda. And I did a show on that, where I've showed you all the evidence. So hopefully, you know that made sense. And there are all kinds of shows. They're all you know, for anything, right? I can go on Netflix, and I can find a documentary or Docu series that's going to promote one kind of diet or the other. And in my opinion, there's got to be a middle ground. You know, I follow a ketogenic diet more of a Mediterranean diet. One, not because I believe in following a diet, but because I want to accomplish a metabolic state of ketosis, because I want the benefit that being in that state metabolic state, that benefit that it creates for my body, and for my healing. That's the point. But you don't have to just eat a ketogenic diet to get into ketosis. There are lots of ways that you can do that, just by carb restriction and intermittent fasting and making sure you incorporate in healthy fats. So even if you were a vegetarian and never ate meat, because a lot of people hear about the ketogenic diet, and they just think meat and cheese. And there are ways you can be dairy free on a ketogenic diet, there are so many ways. So whenever someone just promote one way of doing things like eat meat, cheese and bacon, eat nothing but processed vegan meats and things like that. I just it's so frustrating. Because why don't we tell all sides of the story? Why don't we give all of the information and setting instead of trying to prove a point, instead of going in with an agenda? And I think about this, as I'm saying this, will you hear me say this? I think, Well, Laura, you have an agenda. You'd like people to get into ketosis. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I do believe from everything I've seen, from my own experience, from the science from the data from the studies from the anecdotal information. Being in a state of therapeutic ketosis is super beneficial in so many ways, for so many different metabolic imbalances, go to the Charlie foundation and read about all the things that are helped and treated by being in a state of ketosis, you know, from Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, all kinds of things. I'll link to that in the show notes for this episode. So from that sense, yes, but I'm not going to tell you, you have to eat a certain way to get there. I will help my people figure out based on what they love and what works with their lifestyle, how they can get into some level of this state of ketosis because of the benefits it will bring to them. Right, because of the way it will fix their metabolic health. So my agenda is get healthier, right? There are lots of ways to do that. So I'm on this soapbox, because this weekend I watched a show with my husband on Netflix and it was called you You are what you eat. And this show was they were saying we were doing a twin study, they were taking identical twins, because identical twins have the same DNA. And this is an amazing example of epigenetics, right? Because DNA means here's your DNA, here are your genes. Epigenetics is what lifestyle factors influence those genes expression, how those genes present themselves. And you may know some identical twins, let's say, you know, identical twins, and you look at them, and they're adults now, or maybe even older teenagers or something, and you look at them, and you're saying, but I can tell them apart. But they look different to me. Because even though they have the same genes, they have different perceptions and experiences in life. They may have different food preferences, they may respond to stress differently, there can be all kinds of factors, they may have different ones may have different lifestyles and careers that maybe expose them to different toxins live in different parts of the world, or the country. All those things influence our gene expression. And they can cause physical changes, and mental and emotional changes in our body. So when we see identical twins, and we say use them in a study, it's kind of a good basis, right? So it's like you have the same genes. Let's see what influences your health. So this show, first of all, it in my opinion. Now, this is not any medical advice. I'm giving this as my opinion, because I would like to help bring balance into your world, into this world of so much polarization. It just drives me bananas. And I know it causes confusion and stress for you for the people that I work with. And when we're in confusion, stress and overwhelm, we don't do anything, we don't take the steps to support ourselves. So I hate that people with agendas, keep putting things out there to say do it my way. And it's misleading, and it's biased. And let's face it being a vegan. So the study looked at if you had a vegan diet, which is completely plant based, no animal products, or an omnivore diet. So including vegetables, and meats, and all the things animal and plant products, and they took these identical twins. And they said, We did all of this testing. And they said I'm going to put you for eight weeks on a plant based diet. And you for eight weeks on an omnivore diet. And I'm going to retest all of these things. And we're going to see what happened. Now, soon as I started watching it. I felt this is going to be biased, because the study was headed by Christopher Gardner, who I will link to his bio also in the show notes for this episode. And I've listened to him speak before. And the man is a vegan, and he promotes a vegan diet. So to me, that's a conflict of interest right off the bat. It's like, let's see how much we can prove that a vegan diet is good. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe we had a completely open mind. That's just my perception, right? So we're going through this documentary. And I just want to point out a couple of points where bias is so obvious to me and information is left out. And it is irritating, because it makes people think that eating animal products is unhealthy. And that is not true. Now, I'll touch on why. And I'll touch on, in some cases how it is true, because not all animal products are created equally. So I think that this documentary makes a good case for two really important things, maybe three, three really important things. One, eat more vegetables, vegetables are good for you plant products. And I do not mean fake stuff that you buy at the grocery store that's in a box that's processed and packaged, fake meats, meat alternatives, things like that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about real plants, go to the produce section, get plants, eat salads, make side dishes, Eat lots more vegetables, we don't eat enough. And I think that this Docu series does a great job of presenting the evidence for that. The second thing I think it does a great job of is presenting evidence for why not to eat meat that is produced from a factory farm. It is disgusting. And I'll go into more of why not just because of the environmental reasons because I'm not even talking about environmental impact. Right now. I'm just talking about you and your health, me and my health. So I think it does a great case for that. And third, I think it does an amazing job of showing the importance of exercise. Okay, four things improves in the four things. The fourth thing It proves is how much time and energy and effort it takes to create lifestyle change and to consistently engage in healthy habits. Very good at presenting a case So for those four things, now, that being said, in this Docu series, they talk repeatedly they use the word meet repeatedly meet is unhealthy meet, and then they start showing these operations that are called Kafo C A F O operations. CAFO stands for concentrated animal feeding operations. They are factory farms, they are big pools where they farmed fish, there are giant giant normas horrendous operations with 1000s and 1000s of cows, they're dirty and nasty, and the cows are not raised the way a cow is supposed to be raised. Pigs are not raised the way a pig is supposed to be raised. They're not out eating grass wandering through pastures, they're being fed grains. And these grains are not organic grains. So the grains are covered in pesticides. They're given antibiotics because they're in Philsie, horrendous conditions. So they're given antibiotics in their feed, not only are they given grains, oftentimes candy is put in the feed. Other animal parts from other slaughtered animals are in the feed that's given to a cow a cow is herbivore. Gross, horrible. So what happens?

11:21
The cows eat this food, that food becomes a part of them. This whole series is called you are what you eat, right? Well, those cows are what they eat. Those fish are what they eat. Those animals are what they eat, because what they eat makes up their body. And then we take their bodies and consume the muscle, right? What is meat it is the muscle from other animals? Well, just as if you have a crappy diet, you're going to have inflammation or something else going on in the muscles of your body. So do these animals. So when we buy food from factory farms, and if it doesn't said, Say 100% grass fed and that means grass fed and grass finished. Because sadly, labeling of food is allowed to be very deceptive in some food. And I even have a local butcher shop here where everybody loves to go because they're like, oh, it's all grass fed beef. And I went in there one time, and I said, so it was all of your beef, grass fed and grass finish. And they said, it's grass fed grain finished. That's a big difference. It's grass fed through its life in those last several weeks, usually about six or eight weeks of its life. Its fattened up by feeding it a bunch of grains which create inflammation in the animal and then it's slaughtered. But they get more bang for the buck, you get a fatter cow, you get a bigger animal more meat from it. So grass fed grass finished is important as that question, lots of times you'll see labeling grass fed, that may not mean that it isn't green finished. Okay. So when we buy factory farmed meat, or fish, we're getting something that is not being fed what it would normally eat in its natural habitat. Right? It's being fed inflammatory things and oftentimes injected with hormones given antibiotics, just gross. Now, this Docu series goes into that. And yet at the same time, it's showing that it's kind of confusing, because it's talking about meat. And then it's showing these factory farms. And it's not really differentiating by saying, hey, it does talk to like a rancher who has grass fed grass finished animals, but it doesn't really clearly say, there's a difference here. And let's test or look at the difference in grass fed naturally, pasture raised animals, whether they're chicken which should be able to grow out, walk around a farm and eat bugs, and all of that kind of stuff. Or a cow that's just supposed to eat grass. But the Docu series does not really go into that. It's the way that it's constructed to me was misleading. I will say I found it to be misleading, because it makes you think that any kind of meat is coming from this environment. And that is not true. And they all have different impact on our health. So what I say don't eat factory farmed meat. Yes, I would donate factory farmed fish. Yes, I would. I would say wild caught pasture raised grass fed grass finished 100% of the time, that's a totally different diet, and is going to have a totally different impact because it's going to be higher in healthier nutrients. And it's going to have it's going to be lower in Omega six fatty acids and inflammatory fatty acids. Okay, so that's one point where it's deceptive, where they continually refer to just meat. Well, they're showing factory farms yet. I will give credit for this. The food service they use for this study is a food service that when you read I did go on that website and I'll post a link to it here. The food looks good. They've got ketogenic plans, Paleo plans V Egon plans vegetarian plans, and it looks like good quality food. And they do say grass fed. I didn't find on the website it was grass fed grass finished meat. So I'm not sure about that. But this is the foodservice that used for this observational study. Now the study only went for eight weeks. This is another important thing to consider. Eight weeks is not a long time to change the health of a human being can it have an impact? It? absolutely can. Can different diets take longer to impact a person? Yes. Can different people's genetics take longer? Can their metabolic health have an influence on how fast their body changes? Yes, yes, yes, all of that. So eight weeks study is a very short period of time. And it was a small population. And I think they got some good results that say, Hey, this was worth looking further into. Right. I think some great stuff was on this Docu series. But the irritating part is where the misleading stuff comes in. Because there's a clear agenda, this Docu series to get people to eat, to be vegan to follow a vegan lifestyle. Okay. So the second thing, there's this comment that they make, and they're talking about how it's not good nutrition to eat animal products, and they're showing people getting ready to go to World War Two, and they're saying so many people back in the day before we said low fat, high carb, so many people were too skinny and malnourished, even go to war.

16:30
Yeah, it was during the Great Depression. What did the what a World War Two and the Great Depression, what was happening? People were starving to death. Okay. That is just that was dumb. That was just dumb, right. And so then they talked about how factory farms started up, during and after the war. And that is true. And that is where health started change because factory farm foods are not healthy for us, right? They talk about dietary cholesterol. And they talk about the cholesterol that you get from eating animal products. And then they go into talking about how dangerous cholesterol is. Well, that also is very misleading. Because dietary cholesterol is not 100% of the way you get cholesterol into the body, your genetics influence 70 to 90% of the amount of cholesterol meds made in your body. So dietary cholesterol has small influence on our health and to say like if you have high cholesterol, that that is because you're eating animal products is very misleading. Lots of people have genetics that come from places where you'll hear people say, Oh, it's in my family. My mom had high cholesterol, my dad high cholesterol, my grandma, my grandpa, everybody. Oh, where were they from? Norway, Finland, European states where people lived on high fat diets and genetically have high cholesterol. Did they have high rates of heart disease in those countries? Not necessarily. No. It was just genetically how their bodies evolved. So are we looking at that and taking that into consideration? Are we just blaming it on eating animal products, there's so many different factors when it comes to looking at cholesterol, and cholesterol panel is made up of multiple things. And one very important factor in that cholesterol panel is triglycerides. So where were the triglycerides, like let's get specific. If we're going to demonize something, let's look at the real facts. And if you can show me the facts. And you can say, Look, this was true. They say in the show it increased LDL cholesterol when people ate meat. And it's what does that mean? How much meat? What were they doing and they refer to as the standard American diet? Well, I got to tell you, the standard American diet is not a carnivore diet, in the sense that if you're a meat eater, and you're eating a standard American diet, you're not just eating meat. You're eating french fries, you're eating hamburger bonds, you're eating all kinds of potatoes, you're eating all kinds of starches. A standard American diet is processed meats, poultry, farm meats, junk food, is not healthy grass fed wild caught foods. It has a different impact on your body. And I think that that language was very misleading. And it's a damn shame. Because again, there was some good evidence presented, that gives you good food for thought. And if you weren't skewing it one way, I would be much more interested in learning more about that study. So one of the things they talk about this one set of twins are these two guys who have a food company that's all about cheese, and they love cheese and they talk about cheese so they go into kind of demonizing cheese. And I'm not saying it's wrong because you know what, there's a lot of delicious cheese out there. But if you're getting cheese that is made from factory raised animals, then you may not be getting a healthy product. If you're getting cheese from pasture raised grass fed cows, that's a different story than if you're getting cheese, or any kind of dairy from a factory farmed animal that's going to be a more inflammatory food. So I don't 100% disagree with that. But again, I find it's misleading that you're not clarifying. Why is this cheese considered bad? They're just blaming it on cholesterol again, and there's much more to the cholesterol story. And cholesterol is viewed very differently from the metabolic health perspective than it is from the standard of care perspective. And genetics and genetic pathways play a part in that also. And I'm not saying that some standard of care therapies aren't good for people with high cholesterol. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying, why aren't we presenting the whole picture and really informing people. So another thing they talk about is the benefits of more fruits and vegetables. Absolutely. And they talk about all these studies that show that it's so much better to have more fruits and vegetables have salutely. But eating more fruits and vegetables doesn't mean not eating free range eggs, and I mean free range like real free range, not just like factory free range, which means as long as they have like six feet of land they can walk around on then they get a label at free range. I'm talking real farm raised chickens, right. So eating more fruits and vegetables doesn't mean that it's not healthy to eat some animal products. The problem is, and I think the benefit is shown with eating more fruits and vegetables, because most people in the United States at least don't eat them. They don't even have like two servings of vegetables on a consistent basis every single day in their lives, let alone the nine to 15 servings that are recommended. So is eat more vegetables a good recommendation? It absolutely is. And here's an interesting thing in the study. They gave all these vegetables to the vegan people, the people who were on the vegan side, and they gave an it looked like a really well constructed healthy omnivore diet. But even though it was a healthy diet, were they giving them as many vegetables as they were giving the vegan people. So if they were giving the vegan people 12 servings of vegetables a day, then I would like to see the omnivore people get 12 servings of vegetables plus whatever servings of animal products they had, right? Two different things like we're comparing apples to oranges by saying you ate a ton of vegetables. And then you had meat with some vegetables and some other starches and some other cheeses and all that. So again, apples to oranges, right? Do I think it's better to eat more fruits and vegetables 100% I do. One of the things they talked about in the study is BMI, your body mass index, and I love this lady, she does DEXA scans and she says BMI is dogshit. And she's not wrong, right? BMI is not an accurate measurement of people's body composition. So we've got body weight, which is a number on a scale. And we've got composition, which includes the amount of lean mass in your body compared to the amount of fat mass in your body, right. So you've got bones, you've got lean mass, which is muscle, and you've got fat and you've got liquid in your body, right water were mostly water. So BMI is not an accurate representation of what's going on with you. And they explained they do a good job of explaining that in this Docu series. Because let's say that you are an overweight person, you have a high percentage of body fat. So a couple of the women on this show were 45% body fat, almost half of their weight is fat in their body. Okay, that is excessive, it's important to know that. But if you were and there's a gentleman on there who's very, very fit and has a lot of muscle, if you were a very muscular person and you looked at your BMI, it would show you as obese, because its body mass index, it's a equation that takes your weight and your height and divides them by a certain calculation and says this is your BMI. Now, here's the thing, though, if you are a very fit, athletic person with a lot of muscle, BMI is not going to apply to you. It's going to tell you you're you're overweight, because it's just looking at weight and height. But if you are a standard average American, and I've tried this on myself and several other people throughout my life, and you do the BMI calculation, and then you get that person on like a body fat scale, it's gonna actually come out pretty close. So I thought that was kind of fascinating. Maybe five, you know, like five or eight percentage points different, but it's still going to give you a good idea if you are the average American person who is sedentary and overweight is going to give you an idea of where you're at. Now, if you know you're athletic and active and muscular, it's not going to work you need to get a more accurate measurement. That BMI is going to give you some idea for the average person and say You are not in a healthy state of being right. So we can use that in some of the average cases just as a loose guideline knowing it's not accurately telling us what is going on with the body. And that's important because we need to know how much body fat a person has, and how much of that fat is visceral fat, how much of that fat is in their organs. One of these the crisis's that we're facing now is non alcoholic fatty liver disease. You know, the livers full of fat, oh my gosh, I'm listening to this book. It's called The Secret Life of the body or the secret body. I'll link to it in the shownotes here. And it's fascinating. And it's this doctor who's relaying his experience of medical school, and how he got into medical school why he wanted to become a doctor. And he kind of goes through the systems of the body system by system like this is the lymphatic system. And this is what he found fascinating. This what he found fascinating about urine about blood, and he goes into talking about fat and visceral fat organ fat and how when he was doing dissections on cadavers in medical school, what he saw, Oh, I got it is crazy. It is crazy the impact of fat that he saw on these cadavers, so it's super important for us to understand what percentage of our body is fat, because we need lean muscle, especially I alluded to this in the beginning or alluded to, and I said it straight out our population as cancer survivors. And most of us as breast cancer survivors are women over the age of 50. Not all for any means. But even for those who aren't. Oftentimes cancer treatment puts you into menopause, menopause, menopause affects your bone health. aromatase inhibitors affect your bone health, everything we're going through, right, we take things like Zometa and Xtiva. And we take the drugs that people with osteoporosis or osteopenia might take, because of the treatments and the impact they have on our bones. So for us, having lean body mass, having muscle tissue is super important. And in order to have that lean muscle, you got to have protein, adequate amounts of protein in your diet, I would say that once you're I mean, I think throughout your life, having the more muscle you have, the better the healthier, the better your body's going to perform, it increases your BMR, which is the amount of calories your body burns at rest, the more lean body mass you have, the more muscle, the more calories you burn at rest. So it helps in maintaining your weight that in addition to a healthy diet, and they talk about protein and getting adequate amounts of protein from a vegan diet. And again, not wrong, you can absolutely get adequate amounts of protein from a vegan diet, if you are super structured, and super careful because it is not easy to do. And so I did a little research on Chet GPT. And here's why this is important when they looked at the before and after. I don't want to spoil everything if you want to go see this Docu series, but one of the things that was noted was that the people in the vegan diet during this eight week period, lost muscle. All the vegans lost muscle. Some of them lost more muscle than they lost fat. So did they lose weight and shift the number on the scale? Yes. Was it healthy? Not if you lose more muscle than you lose fat? Absolutely not. So can you get enough protein so the recommendation is about 30 grams of protein. So let's go back instead of 30. Looking at it from a meal to meal basis, let's say point eight grams to one gram of protein per pound of normal healthy body weight throughout your day has a healthy intake of protein. I see people struggle constantly just to get that in with animal products in their diet. So I'm looking at how do you get protein into your diet and I went to chat GPT and I said okay, let's look at how much protein is in a skinless chicken breast. So three and a half ounces of a skinless chicken breast is going to on the average because of course every chicken is different, but on the average 31 grams of protein, zero carbohydrates. Remember I said before, carbohydrates are something we want to keep restricted in the cancer and cancer in population. So if I were to eat a vegan diet, and to get 31 grams of protein, which I want per meal, basically and if I'm only eating one meal a day, I'm gonna want more protein than that. But in order to get 31 grams of protein through vegan source, which I looked at black beans and brown rice put together so you get a complete protein with enough of all of the amino acids to call it a complete protein. I would need 4.13 servings of black beans and 11.92 servings of brown rice put together right so I would need a serving of beans or rice or corn into our food guidelines is a half a cup. So that means I need to have 11 servings of brown rice, four servings of black beans put together to equal 31 grams of protein that comes out to consuming 82.6 grams of carbohydrates. Again, that's an average. And that equals 1800 calories. I don't even eat 1800 calories in a day. And we're talking about getting 31 grams of protein in a meal. That would require me consuming 82 grams of carbohydrates, which for someone who's not in a cancer in process, even, the recommendation is less than 100 grams of carbohydrates in a day, maybe 50 to 100 to get a healthy glucose to ketone index in your body. For me, my limit is 20 grams of carbohydrates a day, which I get from plants from vegetables and big salads, because you can eat a lot of vegetables and get very small amount of carbohydrate, which is why it's so healthy, which is why they're so good for us, you get a ton of nutrition, and you get a ton of vitamins, you get a ton of phytonutrients we get stuff, we don't even understand how it benefits us yet, but we know that it does. And we don't get a ton of carbohydrates and calories. So when we think about getting adequate amount of protein from a vegan source, and they're showing this on the Docu series, and they're saying look at these bodybuilders who are vegan, look how fit they are, look how strong they are. And they are. And they are in the gym for hours and hours a day. Because in order to keep their bodies metabolically healthy, consuming that much carbohydrate, you got to exercise your butt off. They're doing cardio, they're lifting super heavy weights. I can Okay, I participated in a year long study and I was a coach in this study. And my job was to work with breast cancer survivors to help them implement a program where they increase physical activity in the challenges and I worked with each person 12 weeks at a time, just to get them to walk 10 minutes a day normal walking, not even speed walking, not even break a sweat walking, but just not to be sedentary 100% of the time. It took a tremendous amount of effort planning, coaching, and working with their mindsets. Tell me I'm going to take the average overweight person on a standard American diet. And without like we saw in the Docu series trainers and chefs and pre planned meals, get this person to one eat that much food and to exercise that much and lift that much weight. It's not reasonable, right? So that really bothered me really, really bothered me. Is it awesome? Would it be amazing? What I love to see it? I absolutely would, can it be done? It absolutely can. And these people did it for eight weeks. And some of them didn't even stick to the plan for eight weeks. So it's a really interesting series to watch. I encourage you to watch it and see what you think. And I just wanted to add these comments in because I have received three different people have reached out to me over just the last week because it came out recently, I guess came out in January. And they just recently saw it and asked me should I not be eating animal products. And another thing that I want to address is that nowhere in this Docu series, do they talk about sugar or refined carbohydrates. They're just talking about meat and vegetables, animal products and vegetables. And that's a big, big miss. Because Ultra processed foods and high carbohydrate intake from refined sugars and carbohydrates is a huge part of the American diet and has a tremendous impact on cholesterol. So they're demonizing meat as the culprit when it comes to cholesterol. Let me read you this. sugar and carbohydrates can indirectly impact cholesterol levels through their effect on triglycerides. Remember I mentioned those a minute ago, that's the fatty acids that are circulating in your blood. So when you consume excess sugar and refined carbohydrates, which is never addressed in this series, such as white bread, pasta, pastries, sugary drinks, your blood converts them to triglycerides, which can raise triglyceride levels, and high triglyceride levels contribute to higher levels of LDL bad cholesterol and lower levels of HDL good cholesterol, thereby increasing the risk of heart disease and other cardiovascular issues. Additionally, consuming too much sugar and refined carbohydrates can lead to weight gain and obesity, which are also risk factors for high cholesterol levels. Maintaining a balanced diet that includes healthy fats, fiber rich foods, limiting sugar and refined carbohydrates helps to manage cholesterol levels and promote overall heart health. Thank you for your research check GPT see So that was a big miss in this series, right? They are just comparing meat and vegetables. And they're scaring people into thinking that a food product that could serve them, especially in our population by keeping carbohydrates low, increasing protein intake, getting a good healthy source of iron, getting actually lots of good nutrients. And I'm not saying I'm not a proponent of a carnivore diet, and a carnivore diet means literally, you just eat animal meat, like meat and eggs. That's it, right. I know a lot of doctors actually who are proponents and who have seen good results, I am not because for me, again, it's too extreme. And I don't think that's sustainable. Now, if I could pick any diet, and it was super healthy and kept my blood work in a healthy place, I would choose a vegan diet, because I love eating plant based food. But I found that for me, my bloodwork improved tremendously. When I added more protein into my diet, and my DNA literally screamed, you need more protein, your body requires more protein, and low carbohydrate, I am carbohydrate sensitive, I have every possible gene variant you could get for a high risk factor for type two diabetes. So low carb diet is so important for me when we think about healthy eating, and a healthy diet.

36:31
And we watch these kinds of shows. And they use fear tactics, and they leave out certain things. So there was this one part where they're looking at the results of the twin study. And they're looking at telomeres, and telomeres are important, right? Telomeres are kind of like if you had a shoelace and the little thing on the end of the shoelace that keeps it from fraying picture a chromosome picture that it's got a little cap on the end of it, that protects it from degrading, right, because as we age, and telomeres get smaller and smaller, these little parts of our DNA structure start to fray. And that's how we get what's called senescence cells cells that aren't working, right. And we want to reduce that as much as possible that has a huge impact on aging. So when we can keep the telomeres those caps on our chromosomes intact, or even lengthen them, that's going to improve the aging process. So at the end of the study they looked at and they said, well, people who ate more vegetables, their telomeres actually got longer. That's great news. And then they said, and people who are omnivore diet, well, their telomeres didn't change at all. Okay, that's interesting to know. So it didn't have a negative effect on their telomeres. How long were their telomeres already, right, there was just important pieces of information missing to skew this Docu series, to someone's belief that a vegan diet was better, right? There are some things they point out that show that there was more of a benefit for people who did consume some animal products. But I just think overall, the these kinds of shows need to be talked about more openly. And we need to point out the missing pieces. Can we take the good cut? Can we just present everything in totality and say, hey, guess what, like I looked at that. And I said to my husband, this is some good evidence on some sides. Why wouldn't we just say, Hey, you guys eat healthy sources of meat grown the way it's supposed to grow? That's not inflammatory, that's not full of hormones and antibiotics that's not going to make you sick, and eat it along with healthy sources of fat and tons of vegetables. Like that would be a great plan. Put that together any way you want it. Now, one of the things that you see a lot is a vegan cheese company called me Yoko's. I when I follow I've been a vegetarian for a long time, I was vegan for a period of time, and I love mucosae cheese products. And so I looked those up because it's a cashew based product. And cashews can have lots of fungicides and herbicides and pesticides on them and they're growing but Yoko's uses all organic cashews and cashew milks and cashew products. And when you look at the nutrient content on those cheeses, it's very low carbohydrate, so it's actually a good replacement for dairy in small amounts, right? So I love milk goat's cheese is their mozzarella cheese, I think is absolutely delicious. I love their smoked gouda mean, I really like their cheese. So if you're not a big fan of cheese, and you think, oh, eating this kind of diet, Mediterranean style or something, I either have to give up cheese, or I have to eat a bunch of gross greasy cheese. You can use some of those products like read the labels and look and see is something organic. Is it free of a bunch of chemicals that are often used in processing food, and if not, and it's low carbohydrate Maybe that's a good replacement that will help you have a healthier diet, and you can start to incorporate that. So there's another part of this Docu series where they're talking a lot about meat replacements. So plant based meats, and putting together plant based meats, and they're showing texture, and they're doing taste tests, and they're having people taste them. And I gotta tell you, again, I followed that lifestyle for a while, and there are some delicious tasting vegan meat products out there. And when you look a little deeper into them, they are ultra processed foods. Let's think about it, guys. How do I take a bean and make it look and taste like meat? How do I give it the color and texture of meat? That's not an easy process. I think that it's misleading for them to present it as if it's equal to a meat right one is going to be higher in carbohydrates. But to let me read you the statement from the USDA website. It says many consumers believe that plant based foods are minimally processed, more healthful, and nutritionally superior to otherwise similar animal based counterparts. This is from Lead Scientist at the ARS Eastern Regional Research Center, his name is John Luciana. Ski. This is a food safety and intervention Technology Research Company in Pennsylvania. And he says in reality, plant based meats are altra, processed food and contain numerous food grade chemicals and ingredients. So when we're talking about overall health, we got to think about that, do we want to be eating food colors, chemicals, all of these different ingredients. And then they go into this thing where they look at bacteria that's on chicken, right? They have these twins that are preparing chicken, and they're trying to look at how much bacteria is spread around the kitchen, if you're touching raw meat, and you're not being careful. And they show this and I'm thinking, well, no kidding. It's raw meat. Let's think about this rationally. Recently, it was used our brains. Raw Meat is a muscle tissue from a dead animal. Why is it refrigerated? Because the moment that animal dies, it's going to start rotting. Right, it's going to grow bacteria, you and me are bags of bacteria. Every living animal is a bag of bacteria. And I'll tell you what now, so is your produce because your produce is sprayed with animal poop is sprayed with fertilizers. So we have to be careful with bacteria, whether it's plant based, or animal based, but it only makes sense that picking up a piece of meat, you're going to be getting bacteria. So you better be careful. Food safety rule number one don't cross contaminate. Don't touch raw food than to touch cooked food. You're dealing with something that is covered in bacteria. And we're eating things specifically with specific types of bacteria to put into our body to feed the good bacteria inside of us. Right? I mean, the demonizing is so an unnecessary the dramatizing the overdramatizing the look at how gross This is, don't touch this stuff. It's like it's too confusing. It's unnecessary. And I want to do this show to just talk about it openly and say, Can we look at things with a little more balance? Can we compare apples to apples? Can we stop trying to fool people in to following our agenda? You know, I think there's a lot of great aspects about a vegan lifestyle. But I'll tell you what, for me, and I've had several clients who are vegans. And you know, when I started studying with nature winter, she's like, here's the the vitamin deficiencies you're going to see when you start working with vegans, and she was spot on, and I see them. So we have to take into consideration lots of factors, and be open to balance. Now if you have a moral compass that says or a religious thing that says, hey, I don't eat animal products, that's fine and honor that. And maybe there's other ways to tweak your diet. So you can still have some carb restriction. And this is the thing, a ton of vegetables. I know several vegans who are very unhealthy people, because vegan does not exclude sugar and flour. And so the or processed food, as I've touched on, so a lot of vegan diets are full of processed food, and high carbohydrate ingredients and refined ingredients. So if we're going to talk about a healthy vegan diet, then let's talk about someone who eats all kinds of vegetables, nothing but vegetables and lots and lots of healthy fats, and how are they going to get their protein? It's going to be very challenging and require a lot of planning and forethought. And that's why so many vegans are malnourished because they don't realize that and they don't have the time and the energy to put into it, to make sure that their diet is really well. All constructed. Now vegetarians a little easier because lacto ovo vegetarians are going to incorporate eggs. You know, some of them incorporate different kinds of dairy so we can get some more of the nutrients, but we just have to be, I think reasonable and moderate in our approach to food. You have to ask yourself, What do I like? What is healthy? And I think we're so far away from does even having the average healthy diet. Let's just start there. Can we just stop eating junk food and start trying to incorporate whole food? Can we start there without scaring people? You know?

45:39
All right. I'm gonna get off my soapbox. I hope that helps you. Watch the Docu series, I'd love to hear from you your thoughts? Do you see the biases in it? Does it make sense to you? Does it encourage you one to eat more vegetables to to not eat factory farmed foods, and that in itself will reduce your intake of meat because grass fed grass finished meat and wild caught fish and properly pasture raised chickens are going to be more expensive? So do we need to eat meat all the time with every meal? No, we really don't. So we can get a better quality of meat and not eat it as much right or eat smaller portions of it. And then we've got exercise. The value of exercise, as shown in this Docu series is so important. So do you see that when you watch it, and the acknowledgement that a healthy lifestyle takes focus, it takes work, it takes energy. And oftentimes, especially when you're just getting started, outside support can be critical to your success. Because we've got to work with the mind. Also, we've got to work with our stories about food, it's really important as a huge impact on the things that are culturally important to us are sentimentally important to us on changes that we may be afraid of, for whatever reason. So I think that for those reasons, there's some good that can be taken from that Docu series. But I also just want to point out like, don't let it scare you don't think that if you have animal products in your diet that is somehow going to make you sick, you know, let's take things for what they really are. And let's look at the actual facts. All right. And if you want to dig deeper into your own health, I have metabolic health coaching programs that we look at your lab work, we look at your DNA, we look at your genetic profile from a nutritional and lifestyle perspective. And it includes coaching and it includes lifestyle planning, because it's super important and it can literally change your perspective of a healthy lifestyle. And it is specific to you because it's your genes your blood your labs your life. So if you want to dive deep in and see really what is the best thing I don't think it's the best thing isn't someone else's opinion is what your body is telling you it needs so you can find my metabolic health coaching programs on my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com and I'll link to them here in the show notes for this episode. All right friends, like and follow this podcast if you enjoy the information you get out of it and I'll talk to you again very soon take care

 

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