Episode Overview

At a recent conference, a physician was asked a simple question.
What is the best diet for someone with cancer?

The answer was immediate.
Low fat, high fiber, avoid red meat.

That moment sparked this episode and an entire new series.

In this first episode of Breast Cancer Nutrition, Just the Facts, Laura breaks down what the science actually says about red meat, what kinds of studies are being used to make broad claims, and why those claims often go far beyond what the evidence supports.

You will learn how observational nutrition studies are structured, what statistically significant really means, and why short-term trials and long-term outcomes are not the same thing.

Laura also walks through one of the most frequently cited human studies on red meat, explaining how it was conducted, what it controlled, what it did not control, and what conclusions can and cannot be drawn from the results.

This episode is not about telling you what to eat.
It is about helping you understand the science well enough to stop feeling confused and pressured by blanket nutrition advice.

In this episode, you will hear about:

• Why there have never been a long-term gold standard red meat study in humans

• How observational studies rely on self-reported food recall

• What statistically significant actually means in plain language

• The Stanford SWAP-MEAT trial and its real strengths and limits

• Why nutrition science offers probabilities, not universal rules

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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. Hey there, friends, welcome to another episode. Episode 448, of better than before breast cancer. I'm your host, Laura Lummer, and I'm on a little bit of a rant today. So not not a horrible rant like I just really feel the need to clarify something, and I really wish that we were more careful in the wellness and health industry about the way we talk about food, because it's so confusing, and that frustrates the heck out of me. So let me share a little bit of a story. I was recently at a conference, and it was a conference addressing a room full of risk and gynecological cancer survivors and patients, and I was a speaker, and I was speaking mostly about mindset and living intentionally, and the different ways that we can make lifestyle choices to support our healing. And there was another key speaker there who was a physician, and she was doing a Q and A, and one of the questions was, basically, what's the best diet for someone with cancer? And her response was, low fat, high fiber, avoid red meat as much as possible. And my daughter was sitting next to me, and she reached over, and she put her hand on my leg and gave me a little squeeze. Like, take a breath. Mom, take a breath. Mom. Because I was like, what? How can we say that there's just, I cannot tell you how much this gets under my skin, because there's no way we can sit there and address a room of dozens of people, all with different bodies, different metabolisms, different stress levels, different circadian rhythms, different sleep habits, different gut health, and say, here's the best Diet for you all. It's infuriating, and it's one of the reasons why so many people struggle with food and struggle to figure out nutrition, because we're following general guidelines that are given to millions of people, and you are an individual who will respond to food in the individual way that your body, your environment, what's in your food, what's around you, is going to influence the way that this diet affects you and the way that it supports you. So I am not saying that fiber is bad. I am not saying that red meat is the be all and the end all is some miracle food. What I'm saying and just addressing is that an answer that says there's one right way to eat for everyone is not okay. It's just not true. And when someone says this is the diet, this is the way to eat, they're missing the most important part of the nutrition equation. You the person, the individual. If somebody said to me, what's the best diet, here's what I would say, Whole Foods, organic as much as possible, mostly plants, plant for it, portion controlled, healthy amounts of protein and good healthy fats. And when you get all of those pieces into your diet, now you have to look at what your nutrition genetics say work best for you and support you in the best way, what your labs reflect you may need to support those genetics in your body in the healthiest way and have them express in the healthiest way. And to look at a gut test and see what bacteria are thriving in your gut that are supporting absorption of good nutrients, because these all three work together, right? The the nutrition blueprint is the blueprint. It's like, here's what you're programmed to do. The labs are saying, This is how your lifestyle is supporting you, and this is we're showing you may need more support. And the gut test is saying, Wow, if you're doing all these things and you feel like you're doing the right thing, but stuff is still going wrong. What's happening in the gut, and what can we do to heal it and support it? Okay, those were foundational things. Why don't I hear that? Why don't I hear anyone talking about understanding the individual's system that food is going into? You can tell I get a little passionate about this. So I decided what I want to do on this podcast is I actually created a series of podcasts, and I want to address a couple of the biggest myths and clarify I am not doing this series to prove one food is better than the other food, to say people are. Right or people are wrong. I want to help you understand why the science confuses you, why what people say about food confuses you, why it's overwhelming, why it's conflicting. And I hope that by talking about this and really clarifying and simplifying some of the language that's used in scientific studies and some of what the findings actually mean, you could feel safer about the fact that maybe the science of nutrition isn't what you think it is. It isn't written in stone, right? It isn't cemented. It's a lot of it is saying, I think that's probably the best thing for now, right? I've talked about in podcasts before how it's very difficult to do a gold standard study when it comes to nutrition, because a gold standard study requires that everything is a very controlled environment, and it's double blind. So it requires that these people who are testing one way, and these people are testing the other way. Don't know who's testing what, because we have preconceived notions. We have placebo effects, and even though scientists try to adjust studies for that, it's not perfect, and you can't do a double blind study. You can't fool people and say that's not meat, you're not eating meat. We know what we're eating, right? So I've created a series, and over the next several episodes of this podcast, you're going to be hearing about today, we're going to talk about red meat, because red meat was called out in this very clearly, in the talk that I was at, don't eat red meat, which silly carbohydrates. We're going to talk about plant based versus animal based eating, and what's really the truth in how they can be good or maybe not good for certain people. We'll talk about dairy. We'll talk about fats and oils. We'll talk about ketosis and very low carbohydrate eating. So that one's a little bit different than just talking about carbohydrates. And I'm going to talk about weight loss and weight gain, and this the limits of calories in calories out. What did calories in calories out really mean? And we'll go into depth into that. So again, I'm not trying to tell you what to eat, but I want to help you understand your body well enough that you can make an informed decision without fear, without guilt or pressure, that you don't have to follow someone else's rules, and that you can just take in what this means and sort it out for what's best for you. All right, so because red meat has talked about a lot, and it came up and kind of like set this fire for me, I want to talk about red meat. I think it's become one of these very emotionally charged foods in nutrition. It's talked about as if it's just settled right when? When this doctor said it, she there was no question about it. She just said no red meat or avoid it as much as possible. Well, when you actually look at the science, there's a very different picture. Here's the first thing that I want you to know about red meat. There has never, never, not once been a long term randomized, double blind human study where people were assigned to eat red meat or avoid eating red meat for years, then followed to see who developed cancer, heart disease or who died. That study does not exist, and that is important, because in science, the type of study determines how confident we can be in the conclusions. So when you hear strong claims about red meat causing disease, these these claims are not coming from gold standard trials. They are coming mostly from observational studies, and it's important to understand how those studies are structured. So in an observational study, researchers do not control what people eat, they don't assign diets, they don't provide food. They simply observe large groups of people over time and look for patterns. So funny, if we structure this in a way that we call it a study, suddenly, it's not anecdotal, because if I just talked about a large group of people that I worked with, and what I saw that would be called anecdotal but in a setting where we're writing it up, we're calling it a study and a clinical trial, and using this evidence to tell other people how to eat. So I don't want to go too far off track there, but usually in a study like this, observational study, participants are asked to fill out food questionnaires. They ask them to remember how often they ate certain foods? Sometimes it's over the past month, sometimes it's over the past year, and that information is recorded. Let me ask you right now, what did you eat last Monday for breakfast?

9:52
Yeah, I don't know. And then researchers follow these people for many years to see who develops certain conditions or who dies. During the study period, and at the end, they compare groups. So for example, people who reported eating more red meat versus people who reported eating less. If they see differences, they call those associations, but there are big limits to this approach. First, the data is based on self reported recall. Okay, not real, trustworthy. Human memory is imperfect. People under report foods they believe are unhealthy, they over report foods they believe are healthy, and they're not trying to lie. They're just being human. Second, people who eat more red meat may have a different lifestyle in other ways. They may have different activity levels, they may have different stress levels, different sleep habits, different income levels, different access to health care, different overall diet quality. So researchers again, try to adjust for these factors statistically, but adjustment is not the same as control, and that's why observational studies can suggest patterns that they cannot prove cause and effect. So another term that you will hear when people talk about studies is that this study was statistically significant. Okay, statistically significant does not mean something is dangerous, something is harmful, or something is important. What it means is that the result is unlikely to have happened by random chance. That's it. So I did some digging, because I wanted to know what is the most popular, the most referred to, consider the most valuable study when it comes to red meat. And I want to talk about what was considered to be a well designed human study that often gets referenced, and it's a recent study because it shows both the strength and the limits of nutrition research. Okay, so this study was conducted by researchers at Stanford University, very well respected, led by Dr Christopher Gardner. It was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2020 it's called the swap meet trial. This study started off with 38 adults. 36 completed the full study. And what made this study strong is its design. So it was a randomized crossover trial, meaning that the same people did both phases, and each person served as their own comparison. So they're comparing their outcomes against themselves, and when they change their diets. Now, participants ate animal based meat for eight weeks and plant based meat alternatives for eight weeks in random order. So during each phase, they were instructed to eat at least two servings per day of the assigned product. Now here's the important part for clarification that often gets missed. The researchers did not put participants on a fully controlled diet. They did not control everything the people ate. They did not control calories, fiber intake, sugar intake, alcohol or overall food quality. Participants were specifically instructed to swap the protein source, not change the rest of their diet. That's not saying that they didn't change the rest of their diet, right? They kept eating their usual breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, or at least the best they could, or at least to the extent that they reported and they kept their usual habits, whether their habits were good habits or bad habits. So lifestyle factors were also not controlled. We weren't controlling exercise program, no sleep protocol, no stress interventions and participants were told to maintain their normal activity and lifestyle throughout the study. So the strength of this study came from the crossover design, because the same 36 people did both phases. So their genetics stayed the same, their baseline lifestyle tendencies stayed mostly the same right. Their habits carried over into both phases, as far as we know. So the main thing that changed was the type of meat they were eating. And at the end of each eight week phase, researchers measured blood markers, and they found that LDL cholesterol was about 11 points lower at the end of the plant based phase compared to the animal meat phase. So the math showed that this difference was statistically significant, meaning it was very unlikely to be due to chance, and they attributed the change to the meat so what does this tell us? It tells us that in this specific group of only 36 people, this is a very small group. Over eight weeks, certain blood markers were lower when they ate plant based meat alternatives instead of animal meat. What it does not tell us is that red meat causes heart disease. It does not tell us that everyone's color. Straw will rise if they eat red meat. It does not tell us anything about cancer risk, lifespan or long term health outcomes. It tells us about short term change in a specific biomarker in a specific context. And this is a perfect example of how nutrition science works. Short term randomized trials can show changes in markers. Long term observational studies can show associations, but turning those findings into absolute rules like never eat red meat goes way beyond what the evidence actually supports. So when I hear a physician say you should eat a low fat, high fiber diet with no red meat, knowing nothing about you, nothing about you other than you're here in this room, so you probably had some kind of cancer. That statement is not coming from definitive proof. It is coming from a way, oversimplified interpretation of complex, imperfect data, and that's the myth I want to challenge here, the myth that nutrition science gives us one correct answer. The truth is that nutrition science gives us patterns and probabilities and not universal rules. Some people will do well with red meat. I have seen people switch to carnivore diets and their health has it's been amazing. Some people don't I have had people come to me that they are vegans and they're insanely nutrient nutrient deficient. And some people I've had come to me on mostly plant diets, and they're doing good. They're rocking it. But the diets are different. Their lifestyles are different. The diets are constructed differently. So some people feel better with more carbohydrates. Some people don't, and specific car carbohydrates are very important to address. So nutrition is not about finding one rule that works for everyone. It's about understanding your body well enough to know how your body responds to things. You are special. You are this biological unit that is unlike anyone else. That's why, when we go into cancer treatments, we're not told, here's a treatment I'm going to give you. This is going to cure cancer. We're told, we're going to give this to you and try it, and then we're going to test and we're going to scan and we're going to see if it works. Because we don't know. And some people the other day, actually, I was at an appointment with my oncologist, and we were talking about some of the things I was doing in my lifestyle, some integrative approaches I was taking and testing. And he said to me, I really hope that this integrative approach grows more because I just left another patient room. She's got a similar diagnosis to yours. She's on the same treatment as you, and she's not doing well at all. Why is that? Because her body is different from mine, her lifestyle is different from mine. So we can't say one medicine is going to work for her. We can't say one diet is going to work for her. We can't say it's going to work for me. I have had many different treatments since my stage four diagnosis. I've met many women who treatments that have stopped working for me continue to work for them. We must honor that we are unique and that health is a bio individual approach, and so is food. So does that mean that information that's out there isn't valuable. No, like having a lot of fiber in your diet is great, but where's that fiber coming from? Are you getting that fiber from vegetables? Are you getting that fiber from Whole Foods, if you're eating red meat? Are you getting it from factory farmed food that's been raised on grains and probably has a lot of omega six inflammatory acids in it. Are you getting it from a grass fed grass finished resource that will make a difference? So I'm going to be on my soapbox for a couple of episodes here, people, because I'm tired of information being put out there that is confusing and that's not really rooted in what is true. There are some foundational rules, as I said before, Whole Foods, right? We want a minimally processed diet. We don't want food flavors, food fragrances, food colorings. We don't want all that crap in our bodies. We want Whole Foods. But even when we talk about Whole Foods, which Whole Foods work for you and which ones don't? I have had clients come to me and they have had a gut test done, and that gut test has named several Whole Foods that their body is reacting to in a poor way. And when they take out those Whole Foods, I'm like, I thought that was good for me. I thought that was a good food. It isn't that one food is bad or good, it's that that can be a great food if it works for what's going on in your gut. And so they remove the whole food, and they see their issues disappear, right? So testing, in my opinion, and investing in testing, instead of investing in buying all kinds of different stuff for different kinds of diets, that's more important, like, know you understand you at a really daily. At a driven level, let's put the data on you as a body and an individual before we turn to data on what a piece of red meat is supposed to do for 36 people. So anyway, if you would like more support into learning how to understand yourself better, check out my website, the breast cancer recovery coach, there's a couple of programs that I have on my website. They're Do It Yourself programs. They've got videos in there that give you instruction. They've got handouts in there to learn how to think about nutrition in a way that works for you, and beyond just food and other things that you can do that help support your nutrient absorption and your overall wellness. So there's 90 days of wellness, and I also have the feel good reset. So we address a lot of things that are about food and nutrition, but mostly about learning about yourself and how learning about yourself can help you create a healthier lifestyle. So both of these programs are designed to help you tune in, tune in to your own body, learn how to feed yourself in ways that support you and your specific health skills. So I hope you continue to listen to what's coming up here we're going to do in some myth busting and some truth telling about nutrition, for the sake of clarity, not for the sake of telling you what to eat, but to help you stop outsourcing your health decisions to headlines and Instagram influencers and blanketed advice, and start making more informed decisions about what actually fits your body and your life, right? So in the next episode, we're going to talk about carbohydrates. We're going to talk about what's going on with carbohydrates? What do studies actually say? What do they get blamed for? How can they benefit us? And how could we maybe make better decisions when it comes to carbohydrates? And we'll keep going from there. Now, if you want even more detailed health, if you're interested in doing testing, understanding nutrition genomics, understanding what your labs tell you about how your genes are expressing, go to my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com and check out my metabolic health coaching packages. All right, friends, have a great week, and I will talk to you next week. Be good to yourself. Until then,

22:14
you've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. You're my mind is clearer than before. Your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door.

22:32
Give it all. You got no

22:35
hesitating. You've been waiting

22:38
all your life. Alive. This is your

22:44
moment. This is your moment. This is your

23:02
moment.