Dr. Diane Mueller explains how holiday sugar weakens immunity. Eating 75 grams of sugar or more in a day makes white blood cells inactive and disrupts your microbiome, which protects you across your gut, skin, respiratory tract, and sinuses. Keeping sugar below that threshold helps you stay healthy through the season.
Hey everybody, it's Dr. Diane Mueller, Lyme and mold illness expert. Happy Christmas Eve, happy Hanukkah, happy whatever you're celebrating today. And still in spirit of the holiday season, we are going to talk about sugar today and sugar's impact on the immune system. Because oftentimes people will tell me they are sick around the holidays from the stress and the travel, and all of that is true, right? Cortisol, our stress hormone, can turn down our immune system, right? So it leaves us— can leave us more susceptible to picking up various types of bugs. But another big reason for getting sick around the holidays is sugar. And sugar, basically around 75 grams a day or higher— so it's a considerable amount. But remember, sugar is in everything. It's in your sauces, in your protein bars, in your granola, almost everything that is processed, right? So if you're eating anything prepared at all, it probably has a degree of sugar in it. And then we get to the holidays and maybe if you're not even having the cookies, maybe you're trying them. And it's really easy for 75 grams around the holidays to pack on really fast in a day. 75 grams of sugar is going to do a couple of things. One, it's going to basically make your white blood cells go take a big fat nap. They're going to go to sleep. They can't do anything when they're asleep, right? So they literally stop working. They stop traveling around your body and finding those viruses and finding those bacteria. And so it can do that. Another huge thing that sugar will do is disrupt the microbiome. It disrupts all that good, that good bacteria. It's not only in your gut, it's on your skin, it's on your genitals, it's in your respiratory tract, it's in your sinuses. The microbiome is all over our body and sugar disrupts it. And guess what? Our microbiome is a huge part of our immune system. So around the holidays, take extra care to enjoy, right? Have your moments and enjoy. But I would really encourage you to not overenjoy. Right? Because that over-enjoyment sometimes can lead to us feeling sick, to our microbiome being disrupted, to all of these longer-term impacts. So remember, 75 grams is that magic number where a lot of the white blood cell dysfunction happens. So I would work to keep it significantly under that, right? Have your treat day, have your treat moment, but really remember to keep your immune system strong. It's very important to stay away from that sugar. So that's it for now. Happy holidays. Have a very, very great holiday season. Please do subscribe to my channel, and I'll see you again real soon.
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