Endometriosis: Is it being caused by the air you breath and the food you eat?

The Hidden Connection Between Endometriosis and a Common Food Ingredient

In 2012, I gave my wife Lizzie good reason to file divorce papers. I cheated on her with a box of fried chicken. KFC was the last major fast-food joint in Australia to switch from using animal fat to seed oil in its fryers. Maccas had switched in 2004 and almost all others had changed over in the intervening decade. I heard the switch was coming so the day before it happened had purchased some KFC as a last good-bye. The problem was I didn’t bring any home for Lizzie. Her favourite snack was about to be turned into poisonous garbage and I hadn’t allowed her a last meal. I am very lucky we are still married.

Why were we so worried about the oil in the KFC fryers? Seed oils, better known as vegetable oils, like canola, sunflower, soybean, almond and grapeseed are now the primary source of almost all fat in the Australian packaged food supply thanks, in no small part to the efforts of the Australian Heart Foundation and the Australian governmental advice on healthy eating dispensed since the early eighties. As well as all packaged food, every deep fryer in the country is full of seed oil, every sandwich made in a café is smeared in margarine made from seed oils and every dab of mayo on that sanger is wholly made from these fats.

Those oils contain omega-6 fats which our bodies turn into a highly carcinogenic aldehyde called 4-HNE. 4-HNE is like the aldehydes we create when we drink alcohol (acetyl-aldehyde) and smoke (acrolein), but worse. 4-HNE can only be made from the omega-6 fats in seed oils. And we don’t even need to consume the oils to receive a dose of 4-HNE. Just being near these oils as they are heated is enough for us to get a lungful of this highly toxic substance. All those kids standing over fryers in fast food joints and all those folks cooking dinner using a hot pan filled with oil are receiving a serious dose even before they put any of the food they cook in their mouths.

Aldehydes like 4-HNE are known to be extraordinarily harmful in that they disrupt our DNA. The list of diseases likely to be caused by 4-HNE is very long and growing longer by the day. It includes Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease and cancers. In terms of carcinogenic aldehyde production, having seed oils in our diet is like binge drinking all day every day and chain smoking while we do it - from birth.

Evidence is now accumulating that endometriosis can be added to the list. Endometriosis is a debilitating disease that currently affects at least 1 in 9 Australian women. It involves the growth of cells like those lining the inside of the uterus in areas outside the uterus. These non-cancerous growths can be found on various organs such as the ovaries, fallopian tubes, tissue around the uterus and ovaries, intestines, bladder, and even the diaphragm. In rare cases, it can occur in other parts of the body too. The condition causes chronic pain during menstruation and up to half the women affected also face infertility. There is no cure (other than menopause). Treatment is focused on reducing pain.

The consensus view among doctors is that we have no idea what causes endometriosis. Accurate data on how many women are affected by the disease has been very hard to come by, but Australia has some of the best available and it is not pretty reading. The ‘1 in 9 women’ number often quoted in the press is bad enough but is it from a study of women born between 1973-78. It showed that by the time they were 44, 11.4 per cent had been diagnosed with endometriosis. The other limb of that study is rarely mentioned. It is tracking a second cohort born between 1989 and 1995. Those women had four times(!) the cumulative prevalence by the age of 24. By the age of 29 that had settled to a mere 65% increase. Those women haven’t turned 34 yet but the trend is not looking good.

It is probable that increased diagnostic capability and awareness is responsible for some of the growth, especially the incredible increases among younger women. But it would be foolish to assume that there is not an underlying change that is causing unprecedented acceleration in the disease.

So, what could be causing this? The answer may lie in the massive increases in consumption of seed oils. In a recent study, scientists from Stanford University in the US found that tissue samples from women with endometriosis had higher levels of 4-HNE, the aldehyde created by seed oil consumption.

There are many studies that show even moderate alcohol consumption increases the likelihood of having endometriosis. And it has been shown that that liver disease caused by the aldehydes can be reversed by reducing 4-HNE. So, the scientists reasoned something similar may be possible with 4-HNE and endometriosis. And they were right. The researchers found that they could prevent the development of endometriosis and eliminate the pain by lowering 4-HNE levels in mice. They didn’t do this by lowering seed oil consumption, they just gave a drug which boosted the body’s ability to neutralize 4-HNE.

No doubt drug companies are salivating over the prospect of making a pill out of the compound used to achieve these results. But how about instead of inventing a better band-aid, we stop inflicting injury. How about we tell people not to consume the seed oils generating the 4-HNE. How about we face up the reality that telling us all to eat seed oils and stuffing our food supply with them was a big, big mistake, not least because it causes endometriosis. And how about we do all of that right now. And while we wait for the health authorities to get their act together, the science says women can get started on reducing their risk of endometriosis right now by simply removing seed oils from their diet.