Saturated Fats & Lymphedema

When it comes to lymphedema, what’s better than compression than compression garments and lymphatic drainage?

If you guessed “saturated fats”, then here is where we must disappoint you, because no, it’s rather the opposite—a diet low in saturated fats will ease lymphedema symptoms, while a diet high in saturated fats can bring on or worsen lymphedema.

But first, what is lymphedema?

More than one way to lymphedema

Lymphedema’s name literally means “lymphatic swelling”, and that’s exactly what it is.

First, know that lymphedema can be divided into primary and secondary lymphedema:

• Primary lymphedema = if you have a congenital genetic mutation that results in a malformed, and thus dysfunctional, lymphatic system
• Secondary lymphedema = you originally had a nicely working lymphatic system, which was then damaged by something else

The former is definitionally congenital.

Note: it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that such a genetic mutation could be acquired later by something that affects the genes (retrovirus, genotoxic substances, radiation, cancer, etc), but if this occurs, it would still be definitionally secondary lymphedema, because it occurred as a result of something damaging an initially normal, functional lymphatic system.

Secondary lymphedema usually comes about as a result of such things as cancer treatment, infection, or injury, including the typical progress of untreated lipedema.

Lipedema occurs mostly in women, mostly in times of hormonal change, with increasing risk as time goes by (so for example, puberty yields a lower risk than pregnancy, which yields a lower risk than menopause).

Lipedema’s name literally means “fat swelling”, and can easily be mistaken for obesity or, in its earlier stages, just pain old cellulite.

Rather than derail this article by going more deeply into lipedema, we’ll drop a link to our previous article on such: Watch Out For Lipedema

FABP4: a protein that’s sometimes not so fab after all

FABP4 is short for “fatty-acid-binding protein 4”.

You can probably guess what its job is.

Now, while this is a job that does need to be done, people with lymphedema (either kind) have nearly 3x as much of this protein, and inhibiting it (with a chemical inhibitor) results in a 50% reduction in lymphedema.

If you don’t have such chemical inhibitors in your kitchen, don’t worry, because a dietary intervention achieves very similar results—at least, in animal experiments so far, but in this case it’s highly unlikely that the results won’t translate to human patients, it’s just that that science has yet to be done, to be sure.

Specifically, per the most recent research by Dr. Karina Gomes et al., switching to a diet high in saturated fats brought on or worsened lymphedema (as mentioned up top), and/but importantly, switching to a diet low in saturated fats reversed these effects.

You can read this study in full, here: Saturated fatty acids induce lipotoxicity in lymphatic endothelial cells contributing to secondary lymphedema development

Want to learn more?

Check out:

• Nutrition To Combat Lymphedema & Lipedema ← this is a bit older, so it doesn’t mention the saturated fat connection, but has some other good pointers
• Can Saturated Fats Be Healthy? ← yes, albeit in very small portions, and only certain kinds, and certainly not butter, cream, or fatty meat (fish have their place, though!)
• Butter vs Plant Oils: What The Latest Evidence Shows ← this was a topic of some debate in the US earlier this year (2025, at time of writing), but the science quite clear

Enjoy!