The David Gillespie Blog

In April this year Angelina Jolie had both her breasts removed because she had a mutation in a BRCA (tumour suppressor) gene.  Jolie’s genetic mutation meant that she had five times the risk of contracting breast cancer and significantly increased risks for other cancers.  The good news is that it is a rare mutation (responsible for less than 5% of all breast cancer cases).  The bad news is that we are being force-fed a substance which disables the BRCA defence system for the whole population.

We need fully functioning BRCA genes because oxidation is a critical part of the biochemistry that keeps us alive.  This oxidation inevitably results in reactive by-products which have the potential to cause DNA damage leading to cancerous mutations.    Even when we are perfectly healthy, each of our cells is fighting offhundreds of hits a day from oxidative damage to DNA.

But we are well equipped to deal with normal levels of oxidation.  We come complete with our own little fire-brigade (antioxidants) and our own little repair crews (proteins created by BRCA genes) to run around patching up the fire damage.  Angelina’s repair crews were disabled which is why her risk of cancer was so high.  But people with that problem are a very small part of the cancer tsunami that is engulfing us.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in Australian women and the numbers being affected continue to accelerate at an extraordinary rate.  Today 40 women will be diagnosed with disease. Tomorrow another 40 will be added to the list.  By 2020 that number will be closer to 50 a day.  But this is not happening because of an explosion in BRCA mutations like Jolie’s.  This is happening because people with perfectly functional BRCA genes and antioxidant defences are having them disabled by seed oils.

Omega-6 fat dominates oils extracted from seeds (such as Sunflower, Canola, Soybean and Ricebran oils).  And we know for certain that, in rats, dietary Omega-6 fats rapidly accelerate the growth and spread of breast cancers.  In humans, study after study is coming to the same conclusion.  Higher Omega-6 fat consumption usually doubles the risk of breast cancer.  That’s true in the US (80% increased risk), Sweden(83%), Mexico(92%), Israel(100%), China(106%), France(131%), and Singapore(145%).

And it’s not just breast cancer.  A randomized controlled trialin US men reported a near doubling in deaths from all cancers in the group that consumed 15% of their diet as Omega-6 fats when compared to a control group that only consumed 5%.  And a similar study in France showed that when the trial group reduced their Omega-6 fats (from 5.3% of calories to 3.6%), cancer rates were also reduced (by 61%).

Before you tell me you’re ok because you always cook in olive oil, you should know that the oil we add is a very small part of the fat we actually consume.  Seed oils are much cheaper than animal or fruit fats (such as Olive, Avocado or Coconut Oils).  Because of this, they are now an integral part of margarine and baked goods and bread and salad dressings and pestos and meal bases and frozen food and, well, every other product (with a label) in our supermarkets.

It is also increasingly a significant component of grain fed meat (most of the meat in a supermarket) and even farmed fish (most of the fish in a supermarket). And it is just about the only fat used to fry take-awayfood in 21^st century Australia.  In other words, it is almost impossible to avoid unless you grow and assemble your own food.

Clearly those dispensing healthy eating advice find the evidence on seed oils unconvincing (or are wilfully ignorant of it), because they are actively advising us to increase our consumption of these lethal fats.  But when I see trials which show causation in other mammals, backed up by repeated and consistent human population studies and nailed down with randomized controlled human trials, I’m convinced.

I know there is a lot of money at stake here.  Removing seed oils from the food supply would devastate the processed food industry overnight.  Fortunes would be destroyed and our food supply would need to be fundamentally rebuilt.  But I’d much rather see a few corporate empires burn than see one more woman diagnosed with breast cancer because it was cheaper to use seed oils than traditional fats.

Photo: Georges Biard [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The science has definitively demonstrated that the dominant fats in margarine increase our risk of developing breast cancer. But that science has been comprehensively ignored by the Health Authorities. Is their obsession with pushing margarine for heart health clouding their vision?

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in Australian women. One in nine women will develop the disease in their lifetime.

We are getting very good at detecting and treating the cancer (88 per cent of new cases survive five years or more). But there are no signs of any reduction in the numbers of women developing the disease in the first place. In the last 30 years the incidence has increased dramatically.

An Australian woman in 2012 was almost 50% more likely to develop breast cancer than her mother was in 1982. If the woman lived in the ACT, was white and is affluent, her risk is even higher.

Forty new cases will be diagnosed today. Forty women will discover they have breast cancer today that thought they were well yesterday. And tomorrow another 40 will join the list. And another 40 the day after that. Even more disturbingly three of those women every day will be under 40.

Despite its enormous impact, we know almost nothing about what causes the disease. The best the experts can tell us so far is what many would regard as the bleedin’ obvious – that we are more at risk if we are female, have relatives that have had the disease (or other cancers) or have previously had the disease (or other cancers) ourselves.

There is nothing in the official advice about the risks associated with polyunsaturated fat consumption. But researchers have known that there is a strong link between high polyunsaturated fat, seed oils (man-made oils extracted from grains and seeds such as canola, sunflower, grape-seed, corn and ricebran) and cancer for more than 40 years.

The Veterans Trial, completed in 1971, was conducted with a population of 846 Californian military veterans randomly assigned to two different kitchens. One kitchen replaced all animal-fat products with corn oil for the eight-year duration of the study. The other kitchen kept on serving a normal high-animal-fat diet.

The purpose of the trial was to determine whether animal fat caused heart disease, but it drew a blank on that front. Heart-disease-related events were slightly less than expected in both groups, and not significantly different from each other. But the researchers noticed something of far more concern. There was the dramatic difference in cancer deaths between the two groups. The incidence of fatal cancers in the corn-oil group was nearly double that of the normal-diet group by the end of the trial.

Ethical approval for more trials on humans was in short supply after that study saw the light of day. But rat studies performed in the 1970s and 1980s consistently noted that mammary (breast) cancer was formed more often in rats fed corn oil (high in polyunsaturated fats) than in those fed coconut oil (high in saturated fats). And a truly disturbing study published in 1997 showed that feeding the rat equivalent of a breastfeeding mother a diet high in polyunsaturated fat (43 per cent corn oil) doubled the rate of mammary cancer in her daughters, caused cancers to appear among them earlier and caused earlier onset of puberty.

In 1996, Swedish researchers decided it was time for a human study to provide some hard data on breast cancer. Scientists from the Karolinska Institute recruited 63,870 women aged 40–76 and monitored their diet and the occurrence of breast cancer for an average of 4.2 years. The dietary questionnaires used in the study enabled the researchers to determine exactly how much saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat the women were consuming.

They found no association between the total fat or saturated-fat (the dominant fat in animal fats) intake and a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer. Monounsaturated-fat (the dominant fat in Olive Oil) consumption reduced the risk of breast cancer by 20 per cent but polyunsaturated-fat consumption did exactly the opposite. Just as the rat studies had predicted, the women consuming the most polyunsaturated fat were 20 per cent more likely to develop breast cancer than the women consuming the least.

Since that study, further human studies have found significant associations between dietary polyunsaturated fat consumption (in particular the omega-6 fats which dominate seed oils) and the risk of developing breast cancer. A review of the studies conducted by the Université Joseph Fourier (Grenoble, France) concludes “there are several recent and concordant studies that strongly suggest that dietary omega-6 [polyunsaturated fats] … increase the risk of breast cancers.”

Meanwhile the Australian Heart Foundation is busily telling ‘Mums’ that they should be replacing butter with margarine. They are doing this because for the last 30 years they have been telling people that plant fats reduce the risk of heart disease. Unfortunately there is no evidence that this is true. Indeed it is likely that the omega-6 fats in margarine significantly increase the risk of heart disease and death. Even more unfortunately the margarine they want all our mums to eat is made from the very oils the French review concluded “increase the risk of breast cancer.”

This evidence is compelling. It demands critical discussion. It demands widespread publication. And it demands public warnings. But none of this is happening. The folks charged with safeguarding our safety are asleep at the wheel (I’m being generous). And the folks with a buck to make from selling us seed oils appear to be running the show.

We are not talking about a rare disease afflicting tropical fish. Breast cancer is a blight upon the community. There is not one person who will not be personally affected by the tragedy of this very modern epidemic. Our mothers, sisters and daughters (and even very occasionally our men folk) deserve better. Somebody wake the watchdogs – please. And while you wait for them to stir, stop eating seed oils.

Graphic designed by Freepik

Macular degeneration is the primary cause of blindness in Australia today.  And evidence is mounting that the likely cause of the disease is consumption of vegetable oils.  But once again Australia’s Dietitians Association is on the side of the processed food industry instead of the consumer (or in this case, the patient).

Our eyes are exquisitely complex pieces of machinery which work much like a camera.  Light from the outside world hits the the retina at the back of our eye.  The macula is the centre of the retina. It is responsible for our detailed vision.  If our macula is damaged, we can no longer see fine detail, drive, read or recognise faces.

Macular degeneration begins in a layer of cells underneath the retina called the Retinal Pigment Epithelium (RPE). The RPE is responsible for transporting oxygen and other nutrients up to the retina and moving waste products down to the blood vessels underneath. It also contains a specialised immune system which reacts to some of the more dangerous waste products produced by the macula.

When the RPE wasted disposal system fails, junk from the retina builds up underneath the RPE. These junk deposits, known as drusen, appear as yellow spots on the retina and are visible in a normal eye examination.  As the disease progresses, vision loss happens because the RPE cells die (‘dry’ macula degeneration) or because the RPE cells fail to prevent blood vessels from growing into the retina (‘wet’ macula degeneration) from below the RPE.

The macula contains a high concentration of some of our most specialised hardware, the rod and cone cells that allow us to see in fine detail and in colour.  These cells are unusual in that they use polyunsaturated fats in their membranes rather than the saturated and monounsaturated fats used by most of the remainder of our cells.

If you’ve ever wondered what an essential fat (like omega-3 DHA) is essential for, there’s a big part of your answer.  The omega-3 DHA fats make up the outer segments of the light sensitive cells in the retina and are the most frequently replaced cell membranes in our body.

When these molecules are exposed to light they oxidise rapidly (this is thought to be an important part of how our light sensing cells work).   Normally oxidation is a very bad thing because of the waste products it produces (broken bits of fat molecules and free radicals).

But our body didn’t fall off the back of the potato truck yesterday.  The special immune system built into the RPE does a magnificent job of getting rid of all the junk, so the oxidation is not normally a problem.  That is unless we use the wrong kind of polyunsaturated fats.

Researchers have consistently found that people with macular degeneration have abnormally low levels of Omega-3 fatty acids in their retina.  This has inspired many studies which look at the dietary fat breakdown of the participants.

As expected a lot of those trials have shown that when people are eating a diet high in fish (the principal dietary source of the correct omega-3’s) they tend to have less macular degeneration.  But closer analysis of the figures has unearthed a very worrying exception.  They are only better off if they are also NOT eating omega-6 fats.  Indeed, people eating a diet high in omega-6 fats are twice as likely to have macular degeneration as those eating a diet low in those fats (regardless of how much omega-3 they are consuming).

We have known for at least two decades that our body isn’t that picky when it comes to omega-3 and omega-6 fats.  If we need an omega-3 polyunsaturated fat and the only one handy is omega-6 then our body just goes ahead and uses that.  And there’s no reason to suspect that our body isn’t doing exactly the same thing in our eyes.

A number of researchers have speculated that what is going on in macular degeneration is that when we eat too much omega-6 fat, our body is simply using that instead of the preferred omega-3.  When the omega-6’s are oxidised, their waste products are different to those produced by the omega-3’s.  This waste is not recognised by the RPE, not cleaned up by its immune function and accumulates as the drusen which lead to macular degeneration.

The only place we are likely to encounter significant quantities of omega-6 fats in our everyday life is in, well, everything.  Over the last two decades, the Australian Heart Foundation and the Dietitians Association of Australia (DAA) have been busily ensuring that the dominant health message in this country is that we should be eating those fats (rather than ‘unhealthy’ saturated fats).

The omega-6 fats occur in large quantities in ‘vegetable oils’ made from seeds (canola, cottonseed, soybean, sunflower, safflower, rice-bran and grape-seed).  And it is exactly those oils which now form the basis of every margarine, every fried food, every ‘ovenfry’ food, most biscuits, most breads, and most ‘heart-healthy’ products on sale in Australia today.

Faced with this research, the DAA’s response is exactly the same as their response to research that sugar is an extremely dangerous addition to our diet – denial.  Worse than that, their official position appears to be a rerun of a press-release provided by the Australian Oilseed Federation (the folks representing those with money to make out of seed oils).

Macular Degeneration is a debilitating disease which now affects a significant proportion of our population. The average Australia is four times more likely to suffer from macular degeneration than they are to suffer from Dementia.  One in seven Australians over the age of 50 (a little over a million people) has macular degeneration and this number is likely to increase by at least 70 per cent by 2030.

There is now significant evidence of the role of seed oils in the development of the disease.  But once again, the folks charged with looking out for our health are squarely on the side of their corporate sponsors.

Luckily there is something you can do without their assistance.  Don’t eat seed oils.

Image courtesy of dream designs at FreeDigitalPhotos.net