Lymphedema: What Doctors Don’t Tell You (Diet Connection)

What’s the difference between lymphedema and ordinary leg swelling? Discover the underlying causes of lymphedema, the connection between lymphedema and diet, and how supporting your metabolic health may help reduce chronic leg swelling and lymphedema symptoms.

Lymphedema, what doctors don’t tell you, the diet connection. Most people have this idea that lymphedema is just trapped water. That is so far from the truth. Every single day about 4 L of fluid leaks out of your blood vessels into the surrounding tissues, and that is completely normal. And then your lymphatic system comes in.

It goes in there and collects all this extra water and returns it back to the bloodstream. And here is the key part, it’s not just water leaking out, there’s protein that’s leaking out, too. And the only system that carries protein back out of the tissues is your lymphatic system. Nothing else can do it. So, if you have lymphedema, I know you’ve been told compression stockings are going to be key, do your exercises, elevate your legs, but there’s some critical things missing that I want to help you understand.

So, today we’re going to cover four main things. What actually is happening inside your tissues, what every single past skin infection does to your lymphatic system, and why water pills for lymphedema could actually make things worse. When the lymphatic system fails, protein gets trapped in your limbs. And protein is why lymphedema is completely different than ordinary swelling. So, let’s take a look at this.

If you have edema in your body, which is swelling, you have water that accumulates interstitial, like in between the cells. Whereas lymphedema is a little bit different. You have water plus protein. And the protein is trapped simply because the lymphatic system is not draining. The drainage system is blocked.

Over time that protein can trigger inflammation. And that inflammation can then cause scar tissue, and then create more dysfunction in the lymphatic system. And this is why when you first get lymphedema, it’s soft and squishy, and then over time it becomes firm, permanent kind of hard tissues. And I remember studying about the lymphatic system in school. And the way that we were taught is that the lymphatic system it doesn’t have a pump.

So, you’re only going to be able to push fluid if you actually move because lymphatic system is not hooked up to the heart, whereas the arterial system is. And so, unless you move, the lymphatic system is not going to pump. That’s actually not true. Your larger lymphatic vessels are wrapped in smooth muscle that actually fires on their own rhythm. Researchers have studied lymph transport in the human leg during standing, and they found that the majority of fluid that was traveling through the lymphatic system was coming from the vessel’s own contractions.

So, yes, movement does help, but that’s not at all the main engine. And so, when we’re dealing with lymphedema, we’re dealing with a broken pump. So, then the question is, what destroys the pump? Number one, chronic inflammation. The vessel lining, the very inside of that lining, releases something called nitric oxide.

When the tissue becomes inflamed, the signal gets flooded with too much nitric oxide, and then it becomes dysfunctional. The next thing that destroys the lymphatic system is infection. Now, think about what the lymphatic system does during an infection, okay? You got the lymph nodes that swell up. A lot of people when they get sick, they have enlarged lymph nodes underneath their armpits and their neck.

So, your lymphatic system is really involved with getting rid of infections. And if an infection goes on too long, that can negatively affect the lymphatic system. Especially, by the way, if you get a skin infection. They tested this in animal studies when they had skin infections that actually can affect the lymphatic system for up to 260 days after the infection where the lymphatic cells never grew back. So, in some cases it can create permanent damage.

This is why it’s really important to take care of your skin, make sure that you don’t neglect it, make sure that you eat really healthy because a lot of the skin is a reflection of what’s going on inside and what you put in your body. The other thing I want to mention is your lymph nodes. When you have to go through some surgery for some reason and they remove lymph nodes on let’s say your left growing area and then all of a sudden people get lymphedema in the left leg, but not in the right leg and that’s because you’re removing part of the lymphatic system to allow the drainage. So, each leg drains into its own lymphatic territory and this is the characteristic of lymphedema. Usually someone has it more on one side.

If you have it on both sides, you may just have edema. This is why diuretics do not help lymphedema because it’s removing the water, but it’s not removing the protein. So, when they take diuretics to get rid of the water, they have the same amount of protein, but now the protein is more concentrated and that can be more irritating to the tissues and accelerate the scar tissue. Now, if you’re on diuretics, I’m not telling you to come off that. I would just review this with your doctor and bring it up as a concern.

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When someone actually removes a tumor or they get surgery and they have to remove part of the lymphatic system, the biggest single predictor for the the of lymphedema has to do with how many metabolic problems I have at the same time. An 18-year study of over 5,000 breast cancer patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Patients who also had diabetes at the same time they had surgery, 55% were more likely to develop lymphedema than the group that did not have diabetes, that didn’t have metabolic problems. Same operation, different metabolic state. And so this relates to what happens inside your body when you have a metabolic problem, when you have diabetes.

You’re going to get chronic inflammation because the lymphatic system also has an inner one-cell layer of cells called the endothelial layer, very similar to the arterial system. And that endothelial layer of cells is very susceptible to inflammation if the person has high blood glucose. And it creates damage within that system, which can directly relate to damage to the next layer, which is all the smooth muscle. So now we can’t get the pumping action in the lymphatic system. From all the data that I looked at, lymphedema really seems to be connected to a metabolic problem.

So what can someone do about the situation? Number one, strength training is very, very important. Out of all the research that can potentially improve this drainage blockage, it’s the strength training which is at the top of the list versus being sedentary and not actively building up the muscles in the body. Strength training will also reduce the metabolic effect of blood sugar. It also reduces chronic inflammation.

So a lot of people ask me, “What supplements do I recommend? ” Now, of course, I’m not biased with my own high-quality supplement line, but if you go to Amazon and type Dr. Berg supplements, you’ll find more information. The second thing I would highly recommend is do whatever you can to protect your skin from the inside as well as from the outside. Take care of your skin because once the skin is infected, that can actually destroy the inner lymphatic system.

And one of the last things that’s rarely mentioned in lymphedema is do whatever you can to improve your metabolic health. And t