Episode Overview

For decades, we were told fat was the enemy. Fat-free yogurt. Fat-free cookies. Fat-free everything. And we believed we were doing the right thing.

But what if the real issue was never fat itself?

In this episode of the Nutrition After Breast Cancer: Just the Facts series, we break down what actually happened during the low-fat era, how industrial seed oils changed our food supply, and what current science suggests about fats and inflammation, especially in the context of triple-negative breast cancer.

You’ll learn:

• What the Seven Countries Study really showed
• Why obesity increased during the low-fat movement
• How omega-6 and omega-3 fats affect inflammation
• Why cell membranes are made of fat and why that matters
• What research says about DHA and triple-negative breast cancer
• Why olive oil headlines can be misleading
• How genetics like FADS1, FADS2, APOE, and PPAR influence fat metabolism
• What oils to minimize and what to emphasize
• Why balance and context matter more than fear

This episode is about replacing confusion with clarity.

Because healing is not about eliminating fat.
It is about choosing the right fats.

Resources Mentioned:

Download the Essential Fatty Acids Guide
https://thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/oil

Listen to Episode 326 for a deeper dive on oils
https://thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/326

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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 there, friends. Welcome to Episode 452

0:37
of better than before breast cancer. This is another addition, almost the last one. We got one more coming after this in in our nutrition and breast cancer, just the fact series. And today we're going to be talking about something so important. We're going to be talking about fats and fats in the diet. So let's start off with a little bit of story. I want you to picture this here I am in the late 1980s a young mother, two children at that time, totally in to health and fitness. Love weightlifting, love running. I'm at the grocery store. I've got my cart, and it's full of fat free yogurt and fat free cookies, because it's okay to have cookies as long as they're fat free, right? Fat free salad dressing, fat free milk. Everything tastes like sadness in a bottle, but I'm so proud of myself because that's what I was told. Fat makes you fat. Fat clogs your arteries. Fat free is the way to go. But it turns out that that story was never really true. Yeah, we got bamboozled. And for those of us who are healing, who are working on achieving an optimal state of health, especially up to breast cancer and triple negative breast cancer, understanding which fats actually matter to us is one of the most important pieces of the recovery puzzle. So let's talk about what happened with the low fat movement, why our body needs certain fats to heal, and how some of us might have very unique genetic needs, especially when it comes to Omega three and Omega six fatty acids. So how did we get here to the place where everyone is afraid of fat now some people are buying into it a little more. The ketogenic diet is taking over a little more, and we're going to talk about that in the next episode. But for the most part, it's really hard for people to move away from the idea they should eat low fat. In fact, when I'm working with clients, oftentimes I'm looking at their food journals. They're talking to me about what they eat, and they'll say, you know, I bought this low fat yogurt, or I bought this fat free thing. And I will ask them, tell me why you chose that. Like, why do you choose fat free? And like, well, isn't fat bad for you? Still, we're thinking that here's where this came from. In the 1950s a scientist named Ancel Keys published the Seven Countries Study. He looked at heart disease and fat consumption across different countries, and he concluded that dietary fat, especially saturated fat, was the villain, the cause of all of our problems when it came to health. But here's what most people don't know about. Ancel cases study, he actually had data from 22 countries, and he cherry picked seven that supported his idea and he ignored the rest. So for instance, France had a high fat intake and low rates of heart disease. They didn't fit the story, so France got left out. But by the late 1970s

3:57
this narrative became official. US policy, the food industry saw a huge opportunity. They removed fat from food, and they replace it with sugar, refined carbohydrates and a whole chemistry lab of food additives so that they could make the food actually taste like food again, and not just taste like food, but they brought in food scientist. They did psychological studies and focus groups so they could find out what flavors, what smells, what colors, stimulated even more desire in the human brain to eat more of their Franken foods. And we bought it hook, line and sinker, literally and figuratively. And here's something very important that we all need to hear. If you follow that advice like I did, you didn't know any better, none of us did. We were doing the best we could with the information we had, so there's no need to shame. Ourselves. There's no need to say, Oh, my God, if I only hadn't done that. You know, for 20 years before I knew better. But now we have more information, and now we know better. So let's talk for a minute about what happened after we all went low fat between 1977 and the year 2000 Americans reduced fat as a percentage of their diet from about 41% of the calories down to 33% of the calories. So we did follow the rules, but remember I said a percentage of calories. Here's what the numbers don't show well, the percentage of calories from fat went down, total calorie intake went up. So the actual amount of fat we were eating in grams didn't really decrease much at all. What really changed was that we added a lot more carbohydrates, mostly from processed food and sugar, and obesity rates exploded from 15% of adults in 1980 to over 40% today. And now this is also very interesting, heart disease deaths actually did go down during this time. Research that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007 showed that deaths from heart attacks dropped by about half between 1980 and 2000 so did the low fat diet really fail, or was there another reason that these lives were being saved? Let's look at what actually drove the improvements. Studies showed that 47% of the decline in heart disease came from medical treatment like stints, bypass surgery and better medications. About 44% came from risk factor changes, like fewer people smoking, better blood pressure control and improved cholesterol levels, but obesity and diabetes got worse during that time, and according to studies, the increase offset some of the heart health gains by eight to 10% respectively. So what does that tell us? It tells us that the problem was not that we ate less fat. The problem was what we replaced it with when the food industry took fat out, they added sugar, they added high fructose corn syrup, refined carbohydrates, and we ended up with a population eating low fat muffins that we felt real confident in because we could but they were basically Just cake. And so the lesson here food quality matters more than any single nutrient. Nothing operates in a silo, not when it comes to our health. So let's talk about what's happening in your body right now, what happens every single day in this body, this beautiful body you inhabit, and especially when you eat, every cell in your body has a membrane, and that membrane is made of mostly fat. So think of it like the skin of a cell, and that gatekeeper decides what gets in and what stays out. Here is the interesting part of this, the fats you eat become part of that membrane you are. What you eat does have some truth to it? So when you eat too many Omega six fatty acids, which are the kinds we find in soybean oil, corn oil, safflower oil, industrial produced oils, your cells incorporate those into their membranes. From there, they can turn those into different compounds which create, they're called pro inflammatory. They create, they encourage, they support inflammation in the body. Now, we need an inflammatory process in our body to a certain extent. Inflammation is important for healing, fighting infections, all of that. But when we have too much, we create a low grade inflammatory process throughout our body. That's the kind that you can't see, but it's also the kind that creates an environment where cancer cells can thrive. Then we have omega three fatty acids, which work very differently. When they are in your cell membrane, they produce anti inflammatory compounds. They calm things down. They make the cellular environment less hospitable to cancer. So our ancestors ate Omega six to omega three fats in about a ratio of one to one to four to one. Today, the typical American diet is 15 to one to 20 to one highly inflammatory diet. And just a side note here, there was a podcast that I did a while about that was all about these fatty acids. And actually have a free download that can guide you through these fatty acids. You can grab that free download at the. Rest cancer recovery coach.com, forward slash oil. And the podcast that accompanies it, that goes into even more detail on oils is podcast episode 326, and I'll link to all of that in the show notes for this episode. All right, so let's get back to this episode so you can see with a 15 to one or 20 to one average very inflammatory diet, how this can change everything at a cellular level. So where are all these Omega six fatty acids coming from? Well, Omega six oils are in just about every kind of processed food, salad dressings, crackers, breads, almost every restaurant, even healthy. Almond milk, healthy quotation marks I'm putting around it, healthy foods, foods with health halos, you will often see have sunflower or safflower oil added to them. These oils were not a part of the human diet in any significant amount until about 100 years ago, when industrial processing made them cheap and shelf stable, so we went from maybe two to 3% of our calories from these oils to 10 to 20% in just a few generations. That is not evolution, friends, that's a radical experiment performed on our population without informed consent. So what about omega threes? What about the good anti inflammatory oils? Well, you can find those in fatty fish like salmon, mackerel, sardines and grass fed meats, and in flax seeds, chia seeds, walnuts, although in plants, they're in a different form that your body has to convert before it can use it. And also when it comes to fatty acids in the way that our body uses them, there's genetics that are involved here, so about 70% of people with European ancestry carry gene variants that make them less efficient at converting plant omega threes into the form your body can actually use. That's something that's really important to be aware of, especially since it's very common, at least, I see that it's very common when someone gets a cancer diagnosis, they tend to gravitate more towards a vegan or plant forward diet. So plant forward is great. We want to have a lot of plants. We want to have anti inflammatory foods. But if we're going all plants, we need to be very aware of whether or not our body can actually efficiently use these fatty acids, because if you're one of those people that has a specific genetic variant, flax seeds are not going to cut it. You need direct sources like fish or algae based supplements, and So research shows that higher omega three intake is associated with lower breast cancer risk, and for women already diagnosed, omega threes might even improve outcomes, although there needs to be more research on that to be sure. Now, I mentioned triple negative breast cancer because it is important to understand that there's a difference here. Triple negative breast cancer cells are very metabolically different than hormone positive breast cancer cells, and they can reprogram themselves to use lipids to use fats as fuel. So research is showing that these cancer cells can actively take up fatty acids and use them for energy and growth. But not all fats affect triple negative breast cancer the same way, omega threes have been shown, especially the DHA form, have been shown to slow triple negative breast cancer cell growth in a 2019 study that was published in the Journal of nutritional biochemistry. They found that DHA induced cell death in triple negative breast cancer cells while leaving healthy cells completely alone, and it changed the cell membrane composition and triggered oxidative stress, specifically in the cancer cells. So there's also emerging research that we need to talk about, where some studies in mice have shown that very high fat diets, especially those rich in oleic acid from olive oil, can promote metastasis in certain triple negative breast cancer models. So the cancer cells that express high levels of a transporter that's called CD 36 can use these fats as fuel. So does that mean olive oil is bad? No, it means context matters, and I hope we've been learning that through this entire series, it means moderate use of high quality fats as part of a whole food diet is very different from a diet that's extremely high in fat, especially if the fat is refined oils. But if you have triple negative breast cancer, you got to work with your team because the science is still evolving, and although Omega. Threes appear to be protective. It's very important that you seek balance, because tumor biology varies and genetics matter. So this isn't something to scare you and go, Oh my God, I don't want to eat olive oil anymore. This is just talk to your doctor, ask the doctor. Run the test, the tempest test, the garden 360s look at the Cancer DNA. We all have the ability to do that now, and many oncologists do that. So it's important to understand genetics, not only those types of genetics that doctors can use for diagnostic and treatment purposes, but also genetics that we can look at to help us understand how our body responds to fats. So when we're looking at low penetrance genes, genes that can be turned on and off by diet and lifestyle, there are other genetic variants that play a big role in how our body uses fat. So there are two gene variants called fads, one and two, which control whether you convert plant omega threes to the forms your body can use. Again, about 70% of people with European ancestry have less efficient versions of these genes, and if that's you, then you want to lean more towards fish. Omega threes, not just flax, not just plant based. Apo E. This is a gene that influences how your body handles cholesterol in response to saturated fat. So different variants mean that people need different approaches to the type of fats they incorporate in their diet. PPAR genes, they regulate fat metabolism and inflammation, among other things, and they affect how your body can respond to the fats that you eat. Even the infamous MTHFR affects folate metabolism. We always talk about that gene, a lot of people here and say, Oh, I have MTHFR. I need more B 12, but it does so many other things, and because it affects folate metabolism, it connects to how dietary fats influence oxidative stress in your cells. This is why there's no one size fits all answer, your genetics, your cancer type and your overall health matter. So what do you do with all of this information? What is important about fats? First of all, don't be afraid of them. They're important. They're important for our cellular structure. They're important for our brain. They're important for our body and our recovery. We want to avoid at all costs, industrial seed oils, soybean, corn, cotton, seed, safflower, sunflower, grapeseed, deep fried restaurant foods and anything with partially hydrogenated oils, which are also known as trans fats. We want to emphasize using extra virgin olive oil for dressings and low heat cooking, we want to use avocado oil if it's higher heat. Cooking, coconut oil in moderation, because it's a saturated plant based fat, we want to use grass fed butter or ghee. If you can tolerate dairy, you can use the butter. Ghee actually has those dairy solids pulled out, so lots of people can tolerate ghee, even if they can't tolerate butter. You know you we want to incorporate healthy, wild, caught sources of fatty fish a couple of times a week, two to three times a week, nuts, seeds, oils, avocados, whole food sources. But even when it comes to nuts and seeds, we want to be careful, because although, yes, they have omega threes in them, they also have higher levels of omega six oils. So when it comes to nuts and seeds, some practitioners that I've worked with say no nuts and seeds because of those inflammatory oils. Others say it's okay in moderation. But when I talk to people about nuts and seeds, and they feel really confident and uncomfortable eating them. They eat them by the handfuls. A serving of nuts and seeds is one ounce, friends. That's like three to six depending on the size of the nut. It's not a handful. And so we can go out and we buy these bags full of pre shelled which I personally love, like pistachio, because Pistachios are one of my favorites. But if I grab a handful of them, I'm not doing myself any favors, right? Easier that I don't have to pull them apart. But why do nuts come in hard to open shells? Because if we eat according to nature, it's a hassle to get to the nut, so we don't eat them by the handful. So just think about what we're eating and the quantity that we're eating in. So we need to consider things like high quality fish oil, high quality Omega three supplements, if that's something that your body needs. And there's certain tests that we can do to understand where the inflammatory process is in or out of the optimal range in our body. So labs like high sensitivity CRP can measure inflammation. We can get our omega three index tested, and we can do genetic testing low penetrance, looking at nutrition genomics and look for the fads. We can look for the APOE. We can look for foot two. We can look at many other gene variants that. Help us understand how our body uses fats. Make your own salad dressings. It's easier than you think, right? Read restaurant menus differently. Ask what oils they cook with. Ask if they're using olive oil. Ask if they're using seed oils. I have gone to a couple of conferences and meetings with the metabolic train Institute of Health Group, and they've been so thoughtful about finding restaurants we can go to, or when they bring in food for last October, like the metabolic health day conference, they were so careful to give very specific instructions to the hotel about not using seed oils in the food. So we had to just think differently about consuming the fats and ask questions, do the things that are simple and easy to incorporate to get rid of these inflammatory fats in your diet. So we go towards the healthy fats. If you have triple negative breast cancer, don't go to extreme with very high fat diets without medical supervision, not saying don't do it at all, be medically supervised, get the right testing done, and prioritize those Omega three anti inflammatory fats. Okay, so total fat should be focused on quality and monitored very closely with your team of licensed medical practitioners who understand nutrition. This is why I highly recommend anybody who's really working through the cancer process gets a naturopathic oncologist on board who's been trained in metabolic health practices, or an advocate, or someone like myself, so that you can get the proper guidance so we don't have to be afraid of fat. Going back to my story of being a young mom with a cart full of fat, free everything, and feeling great about it, right? I was trying, and that's all we can do, is try. I was given rules that said one thing, but now I know something different. My body needs fat to heal. It needs real fat, the kind that's been part of the human diet for 1000s of years, not industrial oils that were embedded in a factory 100 years ago, not low fat cookies where the fat has been replaced with sugar. Real fat that becomes a part of my cellular membranes, that calms inflammation in my body that supports my brain health, my hormones and my immune system, all right, so you deserve to know that the confusion was not your fault, but you get to make better choices now, because healing, it isn't about being perfect, it's about having good information and making the best choices you can with what you know as consistently as possible, and now you know you don't have to be afraid of fat. And if you want to go even deeper into the differences between these oils and cooking oils, check out podcast episode number 326, and download my guide to essential fatty acids, the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward, slash oil. All right, friends, be good to yourself, and I'll talk to you again next week with our final episode in the nutrition series. Just the Facts

23:13
you've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. Your mind is clearer than before. Your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door. Give it all you got no hesitating. You've been waiting all your life.

23:43
Time. This is your moment. This is your moment.