18 Oct Improve Breast Health Naturally
It’s October, which means you’re hearing a lot about breast cancer awareness and breast health! I wanted to bring some of our favorite ways you can improve breast health naturally. While early detection is key, why are we waiting for breast cancer to hit? Why can’t we support our breasts NOW? This is how we’re going to truly tackle the cancer conversation. It’s a little more than “just test and find it early!”
We’re going to dive into various dietary, lifestyle, and labs that you can be doing to improve breast health naturally! Let’s go!
Improve Breast Health Naturally
Minimize Bra Wearing
While bras can make a girl look good, bras can actually block lymphatic fluid flow into lymph nodes, especially if it’s a tighter bra that is digging in. This is not just below the breasts either, but around your armpit too! Without good lymphatic fluid flow, you are an increased risk of pooling various toxins around the breast tissue. This can increase risk of breast tenderness throughout your cycle, too!
And listen, we’re humans too…. while there are occasions and outfits that a bra is a must, try to take your bra off as much as possible when you’re at home. Wearing free flowing clothes can help reduce the negative impact on our lymphatic system.
There is thought that wearing NO bra will activate more muscles around the breasts to support breasts leading to perkier boobs over time. Bye-bye, saggy boobs!
Dry Brushing + Sauna Use
Speaking of our lymphatic system, dry brushing is a gentle way of helping move lymphatic fluid. I LOVE dry brushing before a good sauna session. We’re all about stacking healthy habits on top of each other. Both dry brushing + sauna use can help support detoxification in the body and get this garbage recycling system (aka our lymphatic system) moving and grooving.
We DON’T want stagnation of toxins around the breast tissue. We need to keep it moving.
Reducing Toxin Exposure {Clean Beauty}
Getting our detoxification system churning and burning is one thing, but we also have to stop “retoxing”. Beauty products that we are putting on our skin or smelling (like perfume) can contain harmful ingredients that affect women’s hormones and increase the liver burden of toxins that it has to filter through.
Some of these beauty products we’re putting right on top of our breasts, like lotion, and it absorbs near the breast tissue. For example: parabens are a common cosmetic preservative in most products on the market. Studies show that parabens can be stored at high concentrations in the breast tissue and increase growth of MCF-7 human breast cancer cells. If you’ve batted your eye and thought this wasn’t a big deal + “clean beauty” isn’t worth it, think again.
We even see environmental toxins, like BPA, play a role in stimulating breast cancer progression.
Eating Organic/Wholesome Foods
Just like cleaning up your beauty products, cleaning up your food is top of the list! Focus on eating real wholesome foods that are nutrient dense and serving your body with the fuel it needs. When you look at your plate, ask yourself “can I grow this?” or “can I kill this?”. This will guide you if you’re eating a nutrient dense food. If you answer ‘no’, you are most likely eating something more processed. There are healthy ‘processed’ foods, like hellooo Simple Mills crackers, but majority of your plate should be plants and animals in their freshest form.
Pesticides also increase risk of breast cancer, similiar to what those beauty ingredients can do. A study showed a positive association with farmer’s wives (and husbands) who use pesticides and their risk of developing breast cancer. Typically, cancer isn’t just ONE thing that causes it. It’s multiple small things, but all together can be overwhelming to the body.
So, that’s why it’s important that all these small changes add up over time!
Testing Your Hormones {NOT the way traditional medicine does it!}
It’s not just about serum levels of hormones. They are great too, but there is a lot of information you’re missing. We test hormones via urine because it will show us hormone levels, in addition to how estrogen is metabolizing through your liver. There are different pathways of estrogen detoxification. 2-OH is a very protective pathway and where majority of your estrogen should go. 4-OH is a pathway that is problematic because it directly damages DNA (aka increased risk of breast cancers). 16-OH is the third pathway that can be problematic for boobs because it has a strong estrogenic activity, which can increase breast cancer risk. By tweaking estrogen metabolism, you can improve your breast health!
If you’ve never tested hormones via urine before with a functional medicine provider, YOU MUST DO IT! This is one of our favorite labs that we run because it gives us peace of mind of seeing things that we can’t see on the surface (or via blood).
Need More Support To Improve Breast Health Naturally?
We gotcha! We’ll run the labs, assess how your diet and lifestyle may not be working for you, and figure out how we can holistically support you and your health goals beyond breast health!
Make sure you go over to our services page to get an idea of how we work. Then, fill out the form on the bottom of that page to take you to my calendar to schedule a 15 minute discovery call. We do this to get to you know better and see if we’re a good fit. We’ll also pick out the next steps – labs, what package, etc. Let’s improve breast health naturally!
