Episode Overview

Have you ever wondered why foods like bread or pasta don’t sit quite right with you anymore—even though you’ve never had a problem with gluten in the past?

In this episode of Better Than Before Breast Cancer, we explore how gluten, gut health, glyphosate, and mood are deeply connected—especially after breast cancer treatment.

You’ll learn:

• Why gluten can affect your gut and brain even without celiac disease
• The role of zonulin and leaky gut in inflammation and depression
• How breast cancer treatments like hormone therapy and aromatase inhibitors impact your gut
• What glyphosate is, how it’s used in wheat harvesting, and why it may make gluten harder to tolerate
• What the science says: two studies on gluten, gut health, and depression
• Simple steps to support your gut, reduce brain fog, and feel more like you again

This episode is for you if you’ve been feeling bloated, foggy, or emotionally off and want to understand how food, gut health, and healing work together after cancer.

Resources & Studies Mentioned:

Better Than Before Breast Cancer Life Coaching Membership

Meal plans

📚 Gluten intake and depression study (Nutrients, 2021)

📚 Glyphosate and gut microbiome disruption (Frontiers in Microbiology, 2020)

🎧 Tune in now and start feeling better from the inside out.

Listen on your favorite platform:
🎙 Subscribe & leave a review on Apple Podcasts → Better Than Before Breast Cancer with The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

💌 Join my email list for weekly wellness tips & podcast updates → The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

👩‍💻 Follow me on Instagram for daily inspiration → @thebreastcancerrecoverycoach

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 on the insides 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 405 of better than before breast cancer. I'm your host. Laura Lummer, I am very excited to be here with you today, and before we jump into this really interesting topic that I think you're really going to get a lot out of, I have a couple of announcements to make. First, I want to extend a really heartfelt thank you to chime and Katie that you both left really amazing reviews for the podcast, and it just means the world to me. I want you to know I saw them. I appreciate them. I know it takes time to, you know, log in and leave a review, and I appreciate your time. It means a lot to me, and it means a lot for the show and for other women who need to find this information and chime just thank you so much for saying what you did. And my it makes my heart happy to hear that the information on a show really resonates with you and helps you to find more happiness in your life. So thank you. And for those of you who are listening, if you've never left a reviewer rating for the show, or you're a new listener and you get something out of the show, it means everything to a podcast to have reviews and ratings, and so if you can take the time to leave a review or hit five stars, I would really appreciate it. It just means everything. So thank you so much for even considering it. Or if you're watching the show on Youtube and you're a subscriber or not a subscriber, it's amazing to me how many people watch the show, but don't subscribe to the channel, and if you subscribe to it, that really helps the show a lot on YouTube. So if you would consider taking the time to do that, much appreciated. Thank you so much. All right. Second, really cool thing I'm super excited to announce, so I work with a lot of women who need to make some revisions to the way they nourish their body, and it can be overwhelming, it can be confusing, and we have a lot of thoughts about food and food prep and cooking and time and life, and it all makes sense. There's a lot to do when we talk about nourishing our body, our thoughts about food and the habits we have around food. And I am super excited to announce that I have partnered with three export genetics and living plate RX, which is an incredible team of dietitians and nutritionists, to create meal plans that I can now offer you. You'll find these meal plans on my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com, forward slash meals. And there are six different choices. So you know you don't have to go ketogenic. There are six different choices. And what I love about them, especially for those of you who are interested in you in your nutrition genome, or those of you who have done your nutrition genome with me and you know you need more support when it comes to inflammation or methylation or detoxification, these meal plans have been designed to support these pathways in your diet. I also have a ketogenic meal plan and a specific carbohydrate meal plan, which there's actually a show coming up that talks about what that specific, heart specific carbohydrate meal plan is about, and how it can help you. So please go to the website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com, forward slash meals, or click on the link below where you're listening to or watching this podcast on YouTube, and check them out. They're fully customizable. And there's a little video that's on that page that shows you how the meal plans work. But they're fully customizable. I think they can make your life a lot easier. You can move things around. If there are things in them that you don't like, you can print out grocery lists. It's super cool, and I'm very excited. And they're only $19 a month, so it's a wonderful support if you need more support in improving the way that you nourish your body, and I highly encourage you to check them out. Alright, so let's get to the show. I want to talk about something. It's going to hit a little close to our hearts here today, bread, pasta, pastries, the cozy, delicious, comforting foods that so many of us love, that so many of us turn to when we want comfort, when we feel bored, when we want a treat, and. And this is a really important thing to talk about, because, you know, let's be honest, carbs get a bad rep. We talk about carbs as if all of them are bad for us, but they're very much a staple in so many diets, right? Pastas and just, we call them our comfort foods for a reason, because maybe they were special meals when we were growing up, or, you know, maybe that, that delicious smelling hot, yummy piece of sourdough bread that comes out and you melt butter all over it and dip it into your favorite pasta sauce, right? My mouth is watering just talking about it, it brings a sense of comfort, and often love, a message of love, a feeling of love to our hearts. And so it's not just about food. When we talk about those types of carbohydrates, and I'm specifically talking about carbohydrates that are high in gluten. So the pastas, the breads and the cereals, they can bring this really kind of emotional connection, or thoughts of emotional connection to our lives and to our hearts. And so when we've gone through something like breast cancer and we've been traumatized and we want to get healthy, and we feel like we're off and we've got brain fog and bloating and indigestion and all of the things and even that are exacerbated by the medications that we take. The last thing we want to do is give up something that brings us a sense of comfort. We don't want to feel deprived. We don't want to feel like we have to do more. Why do I have to do more? I hear this all the time, right? I've been through so much. Why do I have to give up more? So I want to talk about this today from not a place of deprivation, not a place of you have to, but from a place of education and information to understand how these foods can have an impact on kind of the suffering that we go through, and why it's important to understand how they can work in your body, even if you don't think or realize or If you've never been told that you have a sensitivity to them, I will coach people often and work with them on their diet where they don't think they have a gluten sensitivity. Specifically, you know, they've never been diagnosed with celiac they don't have celiac disease, but when we remove gluten from the diet, they start to feel a lot better. So let me talk about some reasons that that might be happening so you can get an understanding of what gluten in your diet can be doing to your digestion and why it's important to you. And again, we're going to explore this with curiosity. We're not exploring this with judgment. I am not saying, never have a piece of bread again. Never have a croissant again. We've got to live our life. That's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying, let's give this some consideration. Let's keep an open mind to what eating gluten containing foods mean and how they might affect you. So if you are a person who thinks you've never had or you don't believe you've ever had an issue with gluten before, it may play a different role in your health after you've gone through surgery, radiation, chemotherapy or hormone therapies like aromatase inhibitors. So these treatments, in and of themselves, can disrupt the gut microbiome and weaken the gut lining, and then they make your digestive system more reactive. So when I talk about weakening the gut lining, we want to think about our intestine. It's this tissue, and a tissue is made up of cells, and these cells are connected. Some of the cells in our body are really tightly connected. Some of them have a little more space in between those connections. So when we think about our gut, we think about permeability, the ability for things to move back and forth through the different tissues. We want that integrity of the tissues throughout our body to remain in its integrity. So if a tissue is supposed to have tight junctions, the cells are close together. We want it to stay that way. If it's supposed to have looser junctions, so that larger particles can go through it, larger nutrient particles, maybe then we want it to have that space as well. But when we're talking about a tissue that's supposed to have junctions or connections that are close together, and we have lifestyle habits, food or medications that cause those junctions to become wider and then larger particles go through. Then that's when we've got a problem. So it's more permeable, more things move through it, larger particles, and that can cause a problem. So when we eat gluten, gluten triggers Gluten is a protein in wheat. Gluten triggers the release of a protein in our body called Zonulin. And Zonulin opens up tight junctions in your gut lining so it can create more space for bigger things to go through. So this is. Increases in testing intestinal permeability, which is really a fancy term for leaky gut, it increases leaky gut. And so when your gut is more permeable, undigested food particles and toxins can get into your bloodstream and trigger an immune response. So this is really important for inflammatory processes can create more inflammation. And it's an interesting thing, because I'll often speak with people who have IBS intestinal issues in their gut, and one of the things that they turn to most frequently is carbohydrates, things like granola and granola bars and breads and cereals because they think it's easier to digest, but it could actually be triggering even more inflammation. So even without celiac disease, this can lead to inflammation, bloating, food sensitivity and changes in mood. This is a big deal, and this is why I want to make that connection between the treatments that we have, the foods we put in, and how the health of our gut is affected by those foods, and then the health of our gut affects our brain and our mood. So in 2021

11:16
there was a study published in the journal nutrients, and it looked at people who did not have celiac disease but reported a sensitivity to gluten, and the researchers found that 70% of those participants had higher depression scores after consuming gluten, even though they did not have a diagnosed intolerance. So what can we gather from that that gluten can affect our mood and not just our digestion, because the health of the gut is impacting the health of the brain, and so this is really important when we're recovering from a disease and a life experience and trauma that affects our body, mind and emotions. But in addition to gluten just being this protein that we can be sensitive to and the reactions it can cause in our body, there's another major factor when it comes to consuming gluten containing foods, and that is Glyphosate. Glyphosate is an active ingredient in Roundup, which is one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, and it's heavily used on wheat crops in the United States, especially during harvest time, because it helps to dry the wheat faster and so it makes it easier to harvest. It's more convenient for agriculture, but it's not so great for our guts. So according to the USDA and other industry reports, a large percentage of non organic wheat. Okay, so there's a difference. Organic wheat is not sprayed with glyphosate. A large percentage of non organic wheat is sprayed with glyphosate right before harvest, and that means it ends up in the final product, in your bread, in your pasta in your cereals. So there was a study published in frontiers in microbiology, and it found that glyphosate may contribute to gut dysbiosis by disrupting the balance of beneficial and harmful bacteria in the gut, and once this balance is off, it can impact everything from digestion to immune function, to mental health. It's a really interesting study, and I have the links to both of those studies in the show notes for this episode. But it's really fascinating because it's looking at how maybe it isn't the gluten that's creating problems for some people, but what's on the gluten containing foods. So really interesting when we talk about foods that are containing different pesticides, we have to consider how that's going to affect our affect our toxic burden, and how that toxic burden affects inflammation, how the inflammation affects gut health, and it's just this whole chain reaction. So this chemical load could be a part of why so many people feel better when they cut out conventional wheat, even if they are not officially gluten intolerant. So here's another connection that ties all of this together. Breast cancer treatments already compromised your guts integrity and microbial diversity, so the health of our gut is influenced or impacted by the diversity of microbes in our gut, and hormone therapies like aromatase inhibitors, they lower estrogen, which estrogen is as a hormone that normally helps protect the gut lining and supports a healthy microbiome. So without that estrogen support your gut can become more reactive and more susceptible to both gluten and glyphosate effects, and then that gut disruption doesn't stop with digestion, because your gut makes about 90% of your body's serotonin, which is the neurotransmitter tied to. Feelings of calm and happiness. So if you're struggling with depression, anxiety, brain fog, it might not just be emotional, it could also have a biological component. So your body is telling you something, right? It's telling you something through the symptoms that you're experiencing, and the good news is that if we listen to our body, we can respond with care and support it in a way that reduces the suffering we experience. So as I said a few minutes ago, I am not here to tell you to swear off bread forever. I am not a fan of deprivation in any way, shape or form. I just want you to understand the information, read through the studies that I post here, and look up some more studies for yourself. There's a ton of information out there, but more importantly, notice how your body feels when you make these small changes. You know you are an end of one, right? You're your own clinical trial, and I have people say to me all the time, you know, I decided to avoid this food, or for the most part, I don't eat that food, because I just think I feel better. I notice I feel better if I don't have this food, maybe, whether it's dairy or gluten containing foods. And I always say to them, if you think that it's upsetting to you, you're right. You are the expert on you, and so when we tune into our body, when we understand the signals it's sending us, we're right. We don't need somebody else to diagnose us or label us. We know what's happening in our body, even when I'm helping people and supporting people with food, with meal plans, I don't want to tell someone what to eat. I'll give guidelines. I'm here to help. But every single person has to tune into their own body and say, How does this food affect me? We're all different, and you know what works for you, right? So what kind of things can you try if you are experiencing brain fog, bloating, indigestion, alternating constipation and diarrhea, or maybe not alternating one or the other, and you think that there's a sign that there's some inflammation going on in the digestive system that may be impacting the emotions and impacting your biology. You can experiment with just removing gluten for a couple weeks. Try removing it for two to three weeks and see how your gut and your mood responds, especially if you're feeling inflamed, bloaty, gassy, foggy. A lot of people think that, well, I went through this treatment, or I went through menopause, or it's this stage of life, and they think that we're supposed to feel like that, right? I hear this a lot. That's just the way it is now. That's not the way it is. That's not that. That is your body saying something's off, something's not working right? You shouldn't be inflamed and bloated and foggy and uncomfortable. So listen to the signal your body is telling you it's not wrong. It's not broken. It's saying that's not working for me anymore. And this is the thing, that there are some foods that maybe used to work for you or used to never bother you, that after treatment, your relationship with those foods may have changed, right? So think about eliminating gluten containing foods, and that's not just your breads and pastas and cereals. Gluten is in a lot of different foods. It's in salad dressings and soy sauce. So read the labels and look for gluten free foods. There's actually an app, and I'll put a link to the show notes for this. That's a app that you can scan food labels for, and it'll tell you if it has gluten in it, all right? Also, instead of just thinking about what not to eat, because that's not fun, and we don't like to not have fun that doesn't feel good to think I can't have that I don't even like those words. I never say, Oh, I can't have that food. I always say, no, that's just something that I choose not to eat anymore, right? So let's think about choosing organic grains when possible, so that you can reduce your exposure to glyphosate. But let's also think about adding in gut healing foods, all right? What can you eat that's delicious that you enjoy and that feels good in your body when you eat it? Cooked greens, flax seed, ground flax seed, so you get all the benefits of it. Bone Broth, blueberries, right? Wild blueberries, raspberries, fermented veggies, delicious, colorful, anti inflammatory foods, probiotic and prebiotic fibers to help grow healthy gut bacteria, right? We've got that whole garden in our gut, and we want to feed it with the food that causes the good bacteria to proliferate and to continue to grow, garlic, onions, asparagus, green apples, prioritize gentle stress relief. Right? Stress impacts our gut, and we're talking about those serotonin levels. So if we have inflammation and that's affecting our serotonin levels, that's going to affect our mood. So we've got to support our entire body. We're. With stress reduction, your gut and your brain are constant communication, and stress can shut down digestion and fuel inflammation. They're talking all the time, saying, This doesn't feel good. I'm not working right. And we can make some really impactful adjustments with simple changes. So I know it can be hard to even think about letting go of foods that you assign the label of comfort food to, and especially when there's a lot of other things going on in your life. And maybe it is treatment, maybe it's just stressors or wherever, maybe it's just global stress, right? World stress. And so when we have a lot of stressors around us, we tend to buffer more buffer, mean, look for something external to give us an internal feeling of happiness or hit of dopamine temporarily. But is the long term effect really something that's benefiting us? So in addition to understanding how challenging it can be to change your diet, I also know how empowering and rewarding it feels to reclaim your energy, to have mental clarity, to not go through these afternoon dibs and constant brain fog, I know how good it feels to have a sense of well being when you turn in tune in to the signals your body sends you, and you nourish it in the way that it's asking for. So you don't have to make drastic changes overnight, and it doesn't have to be a forever thing. I think this is something that stops a lot of people. They think, oh my gosh, I have to do that. If I commit to that, then I have to do that forever. And that's not the case. Let's just try things for a couple weeks and see how you feel. See if it makes a difference. Try something new, and remember that feeling good is absolutely within your reach and your power. You have so much power over that, alright, if you want help with that right now, in my better than before breast cancer membership, we are in the feel good reset. My program is called the feel good reset. And for three months we're just going through everything, our relationship with food. And I've got so many bonuses for you in there and recipes for you in there, and in fact, you get 30 days of my of your choice of one of my meal plans for free to try to just wrap your arms around how meal planning works for you. And I've got bonus things that help you plan out how to batch cook and how to understand what's in your food. And it's not from the perspective of a diet, but it's from the perspective of listening to your body, understanding your body, connecting to your body, and doing what's right for you, and turning off all that noise outside that's so confusing about what your body needs, because you know what your body needs, and that's my belief. You are the expert on you. I just offer information for you to choose from and tell me what works for you. Alright, so join me in the better than before breast cancer membership. You can get all the details on my website. Just go to the breast cancer recovery coach com and click on coaching and programs right up at the top, join the better than before breast cancer membership, where that information is always in there. There are now four and a half, five years worth of lessons and webinars and courses, and everything I've ever created is inside that membership, plus we have live coaching, small group coaching. Every month, we've got personal coaching available. It's just, it's so everything you could possibly need to support yourself is inside the better than before breast cancer membership, all right, so check it out and get the support you need so that you can feel good. All right, and I'll talk to you again next week. Take care.