Health Experts Show You How to Protect Your Immune System I Health Theory

number one what is the immune system the best visualization is uh i'm old enough to remember a kid's game called red rover red rover and actually most of us remember that our the current generation of children don't play that game anymore where we all locked arms and there were two lines of kids and you ran across and had to break through the arms and you got captured or you took a captive so the lining of our gut is actually the same surface area as a tennis court in there and unfortunately for us the lining of the gut is only one cell thick and so imagine one cell thickness keeping everything you eat or everything living in you like bacteria separated from you and they're all held together locked arm in arm with tight junctions now on the other side of the wall is your border patrol your immune system and 65 of all the white cells in our body are up against this wall why are they there because that's where the problem is going to happen if it's going to happen so when these foreign proteins get across the wall the immune system basically sounds the alarm sounds the air raid sirens we go to threat level five we scramble the fighter jets and we actually go to war status and as i talk about in the book that war status is manifested in multiple ways whether it's brain fog whether it's arthritis whether it's depression or anxiety whether it's coronary artery disease which is how i got interested in it in the first place and all of these things come right back to what hippocrates said 2500 years ago that if you want to cure the disease head to the gut as you know the 70 of our immune system is along our gut lining what we eat is what feeds the microbiome and that actually trains our immune system and when your microbiome is out of balance your immune system is out of balance and when your body is out of balance it is at not at ease and which is what we call disease all right so let's back up and give people a quick breakdown of exactly what the microbiome is um and the coolest example i've ever heard you use is talking about humans as a form of ai that's basically meant to lug around the microbiome explain that i thought that was really a pretty powerful insight yeah so actually you know you think about that and say how did humans actually got created and if you think from the perspective of the nature as you know uh on on our spacecraft we call planet earth these are single cell organisms the eukaryotes and the bacteria and viruses and the fungi and east and the mold they have been around for billions of years the humans are give or take about a couple of hundred thousand years old so you wonder how did humans got created so here's my tongue-in-cheek story of how i believe it actually happened one day all these organisms got together they were living in africa and they say you know we're sick and tired of living in this small space we want to take over the world and they all looked at each other and one of the smarter ones said you know i think i know what to do what would you do what if we can create something where trillions of us can live inside it all we have to do is keep this thing healthy it's going to walk around everywhere we're going to make them crave what we want they're going to find that food for us they're going to go all over the world they're going to poop everywhere they're going to spread us around and we're going to take over the world and they created human and the humans as the humans were evolving suddenly they started to worry as you know we and you and i now worry about artificial intelligence and we keep wondering if this thing we just created call artificial intelligence if someday god is smarter than us what would happen to us and these guys were no dumb they start thinking about that and so one of the young one went to the master and said master master we created this thing called humans what if this thing got smarter than us what will we do master says not to worry how so master he says right inside their cell they call that mitochondria you know it's one of her brothers right it's one of the ancient bacteria we talk to it all the time this thing is the energy factory for their self they go out of control we turn the energy off they're done they say master you're so brilliant until the another younger one said master master you're completely forgetting the point here they're starting to develop this thing called brain what are we going to do with that masters is not to worry remember most of us live inside the gut we put a direct connection from the gut right to their brain they call that a vagus nerve and they they don't quite remember just because they call it a vagus nerve like las vegas what happens in the gut doesn't stay in the gut it goes everywhere we in fact control what happens in their brain and we let them know what we want through something they call neurotransmitters so you remember serotonin yeah i remember serotonin it makes them feel good yeah guess what we produce 90 percent of the serotonin right in the gut we don't let them produce it they want to feel good they got to feed us and all this stuff they controlled our amygdala through their micro rna interference they control our prefrontal cortex so our decision making our behavior what we do what we want is controlled by them and you see young ones just remember like a good leader we make them think they're making a decision we are the ones simply pulling the strings so just sit back enjoy and let them take care of us number two how do we level up our immune system so you know one of the families this lady was overweight i diagnosed her with type 2 diabetes right real loaded joint pain um which her doctors had told her she was only i think late 30s she was overweight i think it was about 200 pounds okay um really bad knee and so knee and ankle pain okay and she was told you know you're gonna have to take anti-inflammatories because your weight is so much you're putting too much strain on your joints you know etc etc you felt quite low sometimes all these sort of things and i could tell just by seeing this at the root cause here she's got inflammation going on in her body i need to get her inflammation levels down quickly and let's see how many of these seemingly separate symptoms start to get better right so we drastically i drastically changed the diet i said look i'm going to i'm going to help you i'm going to walk you through this one hold your hand through this process but the first few days are going to be hard there's no question but i'm going to help you do that the diet was designed around her type 2 diabetes but i'll tell you what was the most incredible thing for me is three days in said i don't have any joint pain i said what nothing she says no my ankle pain is just gone i don't have any she has not lost enough weight in three days to get rid of her joint pain right arguably she hasn't lost any weight what's going on there what's going on there as people don't realize that food is information it's not just calories it's not just blood sugar it's information the food that you eat interacts with your gut bugs and it interacts with your immune system so i think of these three things diets gut microbiome and immune system and these three things interact with each other right meaning they're communicating with with each other their state influences the state of the other exactly okay and when people talk about inflammation a lot of people have heard that chronic inflammation is behind many of the conditions we see today whether it's obesity type 2 diabetes some cases of depression all kinds of things come from inflammation inflammation comes from your immune system and most of your immune system resides inside your gut so if you eat food that's going to give your your body the information that everything's okay that i don't need to you know think that my body's under attack because that's ultimately what inflammation is right inflammation in the short term helps us so if if i get up to say hi to you and i twist my ankle right my ankle is going to get swollen red hot that's inflammation that's a good thing it's going to help my ankle heal but that inflammation should switch off in a few days and everything goes back to normal if that inflammation stays switched on indefinitely that's the problem that's what we're seeing cause all these problems these days that's what that lady had she had chronic inflammation your body thinks it's under attack the food you're putting in makes your body think i'm under attack here i need to put out inflammation to try and dampen everything down so what i did with this lady is her diet was full of colorful vegetables okay i cut out all the refined and processed food she was having just real natural foods that's all we did with her right but then suddenly that interaction between her food her gut microbes and her immune system everything calms down i love those too because there's actually a hugely intimate connection between the microbiome and the second brain so the microbiome is a term for a the colony of bacteria that live reside in the large intestine we also have a microbiome on our skin and in our mucous membranes and in our genital urinary tract and like in our scalp the one the microbiome in the gut they number between 1 trillion and 10 trillion cells so humans are we humans each of us has about a trillion cells so we are at least as much bacterial as we are human if we took all the bacteria out of like an inch and a half of your large intestine more bacteria live there than all humans that have ever lived since the dawn of our species okay that's a lot so we are really um outnumbered but and so so for their their stats collectively they weigh about three or four pounds right so this is like organ size and they are represented by thousands of different species and strains and you use the word ecosystem and i love that because it is the microbiome is very much an ecosystem and like an ecosystem on earth diversity is like the buffer against ruin right so you want your gut to have a lot of different species because if i don't know you get a pathogen or you take antibiotics like that's going to wipe some of your guys out so you want other guys to be able to take over it's just like if you you know you have a garden but you're only growing lettuce say well say the slugs move in right you're going to lose your whole garden but if you were growing lettuce and carrots and blueberries and had an apple tree like the slugs aren't going to make you lose everything you have that diversity in there to buffer against negative consequence and the microbiome is very very hot right now there's a lot of research that's being done on it and what we're learning is that it does everything from helping us humanize the food we eat so we eat a lot of plants right what does that mean so humanize means our bacteria help take plant nutrients and plant pieces you know to be extremely simplistic and manipulate them so that they can be absorbed and utilized by our human cells so it's almost like a conduit or like they're alchemical it's like they're creating this alchemy that allows us to actually derive the nutrition from the foods that we're eating the microbiome also helps manufacture certain uh vitamins and um like sort of sub vitamins so it also helps with blood pressure and blood lipids and our waistline and it helps talk to our immune system so that our immune system doesn't become over stimulated or too lazy it talks with our enteric nervous system to help promote optimal motility it recycles reduces detoxifies a number of different hormones it activates certain hormones i mean what have i met like there's there's virtually no corner of our body that our microbiome doesn't touch taking if people have eczema you know like skin rashes dermatitis acne probiotics can help with that you have environmental allergies probiotics can help with that number three what exactly should we be eating for immune health well you know all food is information not just calories it's all information it's instructions it's literally like code that programs your biology with every bite so at like an epigenetic level it's in every level so every bite of food you take can change your gene expression across a whole range of genes so you eat green you drink green tea or eat broccoli you upregulate the gene called glutathione as transferase that helps you detoxify heavy metals environmental chemicals metabolic toxins um so so it regulates your genes it regulates your hormones so if you lost starch and sugar it increases insulin lowers testosterone increases estrogen for example it affects your brain chemistry and what your hunger hormones are your craving levels are and what foods you you know you're attracted to it affects your immune system it regulates inflammation or it's anti-inflammatory it regulates your microbiome with every bite so every single system of your body is regulated by the quality of the food you eat and when you realize you shouldn't just focus on calories you should focus on quality and the information you're eating changed everything so that's really what i have people focus on and i think when people do that then you have a different relationship to your food you go well i'm eating am i going to need toxic information or am i going to eat healing information so if you had to just put together an all-weather eating strategy what would the ideal in air quotes i wrote about it i wrote a whole book about it it's called food what the heck should i eat and it's about these principles like homopagan principles it's really focused on quality first right nobody thinks we should be adding additives and hormones and abiotics and pesticides and glyphosate to our food like it's in it but nobody's like yeah we avoid it at the grocery store uh you know if you look at the label of something if it has something you can't recognize pronounce uh then you shouldn't have it or if you don't have it in your cupboard at home like butylated hydroxytoluene which is in almost every processed food is bht it's illegal in europe you wouldn't sprinkle it on your salad would you but no no so that's a good rule uh the second principle is you know we should be eating a plant-rich diet uh and and across the spectrum from fruits and vegetables to do you treat fruits and vegetables as sort of one in the same or no it should be vegetables and fruit right so it's like we should you don't want to be consuming only fruit because that's full of sugar and and if you're diabetic or you're overweight or have issues you might want to cut back on the sugary fruits or eat berries which are less glycemic lots of nuts and seeds everybody agrees with being lots of nuts and seeds you want to soak them reduce selecting that's fine if you're going to eat beans and grains pick low starch ones right and and also give us a few examples so like black rice which is like the blueberries of rice quinoa what does that mean well the black rice was called the emperor's rice or forbidden rice and it's full of these dark it's black so anytime you see color in nature there are polyphenols and phytochemicals in there so it's got more antioxidants per serving than blueberries and then and then you want to make sure if you're eating you know grains like gluten grains are are interesting so most of the gluten we eat is is wheat it's 133 pounds per person per year that's a pharmacologic dose it is worse for your blood sugar than table sugar really yes what yes when you look at the glycemic index which is how much the fixed amount of the food will raise your blood sugar table sugar is 80 bread is a hundred whoa i had no idea why because it's so processed and so quickly absorbed and if you want to eat like if you're not gluten sense you want to have pharaoh or einkorn wheat or you know spell you might tolerate those because those aren't highly altered genetically but the new the wheat we eat is super starchy has a lot more glyden proteins create more gluten sensitivity is sprayed with glyphosate at harvest to to de defoliate the plants and it also has preservative called calcium proprionate which causes autism in animal models and is shown to cause behavioral problems in kids so add all that stuff could be all the flour so i'm not a big flower person plus it's just like sugar so if you want to have other grains if you're not going to say like rye or barley that's fine and then beans again you know lime beans kidney beans if you're if look 75 percent of americans are overweight so most people should eat a lot of starch and that you know you have to eat three cups of beans to get the equivalent of like four six ounces of protein uh so i have this lentils and things like that um which are lower starch beans suzuki beans other kinds of beans i talk about in my book and then if you're eating animal products you want to animal products that are not going to hurt the animals not going to hurt you and not going to hurt the environment right so for beef it should be regeneratively raised ideally which is hard to find but you can actually get more and more of that around and there's ways to do it by by looking online to get it looking thrive market is a great resource for regeneratively raised beef and again chicken should be pasta raised pork and all that should be raised in ways that are are more organic or sustainable fish you want to eat fish that's sustainably harvested or you know sustainably organically aquacultured uh because we over harvest the fish and then we don't eat big fish it's like full of mercury and tuna and swords just because they've lived longer well what happens is the coal and all the fossil fuels go in the ocean going to algae it's storing the algae that the little fish eat the algae then the little bigger fish eat the little fish and it goes on up the food chain and you've got a swordfish or a tuna these are monster fish and they've bio-accumulated all this and so you want to you know eat the right animal products you want to eat the right grains the right beans the right vegetables the right fruits right nuts give me the right vegetables are we just looking for a color so so non-starchy vegetables if you want to cut out night shades and get rid of the lectins that's fine you know i don't care but i love tomatoes i'm not gonna do that and they don't make me feel bad we need our immune system to do what it's designed to do we just don't need it getting all hot and bothered like it can with autoimmunity so with myself and with my son we absolutely use food so no gluten for him in particular uh he can't do dairy and sugar doesn't flame him oh sugar's so bad so bad um it was i mean that's part of when we went to paris what did this kid get i mean so we pull back some supplements because we're traveling for a week we don't we're going to keep the probiotic we don't need the vitamin d and fish oil it's going to be okay except those three things are great at modulating the immune system so i pull those and i'm like we're in paris let's have gelato my child has like a psychiatric breakdown um and even once we figured out it was pandas if he got into any sugar things got so much worse for him so for him sugar's no go um but you know i don't like to focus on what not to eat and so very much my focus is let's bring in so much great quality food that you don't feel deprived and you don't feel like oh you know i'm like i i don't get to eat nobody ever wants to go gluten-free like it's it's delicious yet we have to recognize that in our country it's a privilege i mean it's great privilege that we can pick and choose what we want to eat and we have i mean never in history have had such access to food i mean here we were talking about turmeric that was not around when i was a kid so with my son and with myself we focus a lot on high quality produce and high quality protein high quality fats so can you give us some in each category yeah no cruciferous vegetables always part of the playlist daily um we love broccoli cauliflower brussels sprouts just yesterday him and i were on instagram eating uh raw cabbage great for when you fly because it helps with liver detoxification i actually that's the thing when you fly oh my goodness so i did i did a toxin panel and i did my toxins like ah not too bad i wonder if what happens when i travel i go traveling and i came back and with that test my glyphosate the metabolites for rocket fuel for pesticides now i grow a lot of my own food and i have had a chemical-free yard and my house is non-toxic chemicals for for 12 years now so to see all of this i'm like wow what is that that's being in airplanes that's sleeping on mattresses in hotels that's walking around where like hotels spraying glyphosate and these other chemicals around and so we actually get exposed to a lot of environmental toxins on planes and that's why we love cruciferous vegetables and if you're someone so as you were saying like so if your partner has digestive issues like cruciferous vegetables especially raw that's not going to work for you you can actually select for sprouts instead so this is a really economical and really nutrient-dense dense approach broccoli sprouts if you have about a quarter cup of them it's equivalent to what over two pounds of broccoli itself can give you in terms of sulfurophane and the molecules that eventually become dim and dim helps with liver detoxification and so when it comes to fat we do want to have variety but we want to avoid things like hydrogenated fats anything again if the chemist made it you probably don't want to eat it because mama nature she don't get it wrong very often but humans we get it wrong a lot and then it's like generations later that we're like oh what do we do so when it comes to fats i like to look at whole food fat so egg yolks getting avocados coming in eating nuts and seeds so bringing those in part of your diet maybe it's part of seed cycling or you're just adding them i think seeds are such a great economical and nutrient dense way to really boost your nutrition getting other foods like cold water fish in some well-cut salmon sardines mackerel these fatty fish great sources of omega-3 fatty acids you were all worried about metal heavy metals of course we are right what what how do we steer that game with fish yeah smaller the fish the better that's what we've come to understand so like i grew up and we ate shark and swordfish and my son's not going to eat those things because that's just the reality of the state of the planet right now so in that getting small fish this is definitely the best way to go if you are vegan or vegetarian they often you know to get omega-3s they opt for algae or they'll go with flax and the thing we have to understand is that as women especially we actually require our own natural estrogen to make the conversion from plant-based omegas into the epa and dha that we use so it's anti-inflammatory great for the brain so if you're on hormonal birth control though you're not making your own estrogen and if you're inflamed and you're having mood symptoms you may very well need to start thinking about going with the fish oil so with those fats uh the other thing is bringing in grass-fed butter coconut oil you know when i was getting my nutrition degree we were taught that saturated fat was the devil in the clinical side it was like you know saturated fat and cholesterol heart disease and then in the science classes it was like inflammation causes heart disease okay we're gonna your immune system is gonna cause oxidation oxidation of the fat that's gonna cause the plaques that's the problem and i'm like okay so like in clinical practice they're saying this and yet over here in the science they're like no it's inflammation it's immune system dysregulation i mean this is like 20 years ago we knew this and there's still people out there being like if you eat butter you're gonna die well i don't know i don't think it's just gonna be butter okay like it's probably gonna be compounded like everything else i cannot stress the importance of your health enough if there's anything i've learned from doing this show it's that health really does start in the gut not only did i learn that from the show the show exists because i learned that from my wife it is so important so if you want to take care of your immune system and thus your life head to the gut stay healthy guys wash your hands and be legendary my friends take care thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential