Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Ask Mark Anything: Flu Season, Ashwagandha, And More

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Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Ask Mark Anything. My name is Hershel Perth. I'm the Dr. Hyman Plus Community Manager and I'm joined by Darcy Gross.

Hi, Darcy. Hi.

She's one of the producers of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries. And of course, we're here with our expert, Dr. Hyman. Hi, Dr. Hyman. Hi, everybody. How's it going? Thanks for joining us today. So we've collected all of your questions and we're here to ask Mark anything. So let's go ahead and get started. So the holidays just finished up and we know that flu and avoiding the flu is on everybody's mind, especially since there's a lot of travel going on. so our community wants to know, what are some simple steps you take daily to stay healthy and avoid the flu?

Well, you know, it is, it is flu season, just like it's COVID season all the time now. And many of us are not sure how to take care of our immune systems. Most of us know for our heart, we need to exercise and eat healthy, but people don't understand how much your lifestyle impacts the function of your immune system and your ability to fight infections, to fight cancer even, and to recover from infections. So it's really important to learn the basics of what your immune system does and how to get it to function better. And the first thing you need to do is to upgrade your lifestyle. For sure, your lifestyle has a huge impact. What you eat, exercise, sleep, stress, all play a huge role in regulating immunity. Now, we know for example from some studies that if you inject a rhinovirus, basically a cold virus into somebody's nose directly, basically infect them with a cold, not everybody will get sick. And they found that those who scored highest on stress questionnaires, actually became sick while those who scored low on the stress questionnaires did not become sick. So, you know, you can become very resilient and say, well, I was in the same room where I slept in the same bed with someone who was sick and I didn't get sick. The infection's there. What's different is your host. And long ago, Louis Pasteur came up with the germ theory of disease, which states that this germ is causing the illness. Like a Streptococcal bacteria causes Streptococcal pneumonia, secured by penicillin. And that led to this whole name it, blame it, entertain frame of medicine, which is essentially, you know, name the disease, find the drug that treats it, and that's it. And it just, it just does not really work like that. The host plays much bigger role. And Claude Bernard at the same time had this idea that if we took care of the host, that we could resist infection. And that is true. Uh, so what should we do? One, we should eat. Right. And what does that mean? Well, I've written about 45,000 books on this. So. you probably know what I'm talking about, but it's sugar is one of the most powerful immune suppressants and is why we see in COVID, those who are obese or have high sugar diets actually have a suppressed immune response. And this is validated through multiple research studies. It's not just an opinion. So sugar and refined starches and carbohydrates are a huge driver of immune dysfunction. So first thing is get rid of those or reduce them dramatically. Second is increase dramatically the intake of plant phytochemicals through a plant rich, colorful, diverse diet. So lots of colorful fruits and vegetables of all sorts and sizes and shapes. The other thing I would add to a diet that is an immune supporting diet is mushrooms. Now there's a whole category of mushrooms that we're starting to eat, not just those white button mushrooms, but things like shiitake and maitake, which you can buy in the grocery store now and you can roast, you can cook. These are powerful immune modulating properties. Maitake is even being used in, in cancer as a, as an immune modulator. so having a complex array of mushrooms in your diet is important. Garlic and onions and other great immune support, particularly garlic is an antimicrobial, very, very powerful immune support, as well as an antimicrobial antiviral. Oregano is great. You can use oregano in food. You can take it oregano drops, but that's also a great immune support. So it's important to just really upgrade your diet, have adequate protein, because your immune system needs protein in order to fight infections. How do your antibodies work? Well, they're proteins. So if you're eating poor quality protein or not enough protein, your immune system can't fight. And when you are sick, you need more protein because your immune system has to work harder. So good quality protein, we generally raise beef, clean fish, eggs, nuts and seeds, beans and grains can be okay, but they often don't provide the full complement of amino acids. Even when combined, you need a large amounts of the volumes, which provides a lot of starch. So I'm really focused on high quality protein and obviously good fats, omega three fats, very anti-inflammatory from wild fish and Omega threes are so key. So diet's really, really important. Exercise also really important, not over exercise, but not under exercise. So having the right kinds of exercise super important. Uh, you know, walking, moderate, vigorous, exercise strength training all help boost immunity. Sleep very critical. So if you, wanna boost your immune system, make sure you get at least seven, eight hours of high quality sleep a night, learn how to do stress reduction techniques, meditation, yoga, breath work all help modulate immunity. And then there's a whole category of other things. you can do, hormetic therapies like hot and cold therapy, saunas, great for immunity, increase in a immune system, help, help kill infections. I mean, how does your body kill infections through a fever? So heat actually can be very helpful. Also, cold plunges seems a little bit, kind of contradictory, but it actually can help kind of reset your immune system as well. So hot and cold therapy is great, great idea. Hot bath, cold shower, very easy to do at home. And then there's a whole category of supplements that you can take to help boost immunity. Top of the list is vitamin D. Vitamin D3 is article. We've seen if your vitamin D level is adequate, there's a 75 inadequate means I think over 50 nanograms per deciliter. This is not just what it's normal on a lab test, which is usually 30 or sometimes even 20, but it should be probably 50 or more that there's a 75% reduction in the flu, which is better than any vaccine for flu. So it's simple, it's cheap, it's safe, it's easy. Make sure you check your levels because some people need more or less. Some people need a thousand or 2000 to to 50, some people need 5,000 units of vitamin D3. So that's really important. And then zinc, selenium, vitamin C, all important immune modulators. A whole class of adaptogens can be very helpful in just strengthening your overall stress resilience that I love to use, whether it's ginseng or Lithocarpus, Siberian ginseng, Ashwagandha. These are all herbs that you can take to help just increase your stress resilience over the winter. Sometimes I do put people on cocktails immune mushrooms, basically shiitake, maitake, reishi, cordyceps, shagga, that are just immune modulating mushrooms. And you can take them as combinations. Host defense is a great product that my community makes it, or maybe it's called my community, my host defense. I don't know, can't remember, but anyway, it's a great product that has a combination of these mushrooms and immune actives. There's also other things you can do that, that are immune modulating beta-3 glucans, which are part of your immune system, immunoglobulins, which you can take as, as part of whey protein or or separately. So there's a whole host of things that help modulate immune function. You know, sometimes you can use echinacea if you feel like you're getting run down. I wouldn't take that long term. But when you combine all these things into a holistic lifestyle supported by the right diet and the right kinds of supplements, I think most people do well. And I've gotten, I mean, I've not gotten the flu. I don't ever remember getting the flu. I did get COVID, but I haven't gotten the flu. So hopefully that gives you kind of a map for how to do this. And I've written a number of blogs about this and videos, so we'll link to those in the show notes.

Yeah, super helpful. And I think the good part about all of that is that all the things that you mentioned can also help with COVID too. So perfect.

Absolutely. Thank you for that.

Any infection? Definitely. Darcy, over to you.

Yeah, so luckily the next question plays right into some of the answer that you had already given for the previous question, which is all about the benefits of ashwagandha. and who specifically could benefit from it. And I think it also comes into a bigger question that I have, which is, so you mentioned that ashwagandha was an adaptogen, and I'm just curious how that works in your body.

Adaptogens are a class of compounds that essentially help you adapt to stress. They increase your stress resilience. So the Russians figured this out, the Soviets did, and they use a lot of these adaptogenic herbs like ginseng or cordyceps or rhodiola or lutherococcus or ashwagandha to help their astronauts increase their resilience and vitality and strength and stamina while in space. So there's plenty of research on these compounds. It's really quite exciting. I use them regularly as part of my general wellness program. I think ashwagandha is an Ayurvedic herb that's been used for thousands of years. That's very powerful and has multiple effects. It helps reduce stress anxiety and calm your nervous system in your brain. It helps to lower blood sugar and triglycerides, which can be helpful in many studies. And it actually increases your fitness level, believe it or not. It increases your muscle strength and, and muscle mass. It increases your VO2 max, which is your cardiovascular fitness. So it has a lot of really quite amazing benefits. It improves sexual function in women and, and in terms of sexual function, libido in men and boost fertility. and testosterone in men. It helps improve memory and focus and attention as opposed to heart health by increasing your fitness in VO2 max. So it has a lot of really wonderful benefits. It can be taken as a tea, it can be taken as a supplement as part of a combination of herbs and supplements. But I definitely recommend it as a core adaptogenic therapy in some of my patients. Yeah.

Wow, that's fascinating. Thank you for all that information about ashwagandha and other adaptogens. super interesting. And over to you, Herschel.

Yeah, I learned something new about that when I didn't realize it had benefits to help with muscle building and stuff. Definitely add to cart right now. All right, so on to our next question. We've heard you talk quite a bit about ozone therapy, but can you explain what it is? How does it work and what are the benefits of ozone therapy?

Yeah, ozone therapy has been around for a long time. The ozone generator was discovered by Nikolai Tesla, the guy who Tesla car company is named after, is a brilliant physicist and inventor. And it is something we're all familiar with when you smell that kind of fresh smell after lightning storm, thunderstorm. That's ozone that's generated by lightning. It's O3, it's a molecule instead of O2, which is oxygen, it's O3, it's a little bit more volatile, it's a gas. and it has a number of different effects. It's an oxidative therapy. Now we think, oh, we should be worried about oxidation and we should be taking antioxidants. And, and it's true we need to, it's true we need to really optimize our, our antioxidant system, or we call our redox system reduction oxidation system so we don't get overwhelmed with oxidation. But oxidation is not necessarily bad. It actually stimulates the body into a set of responses that creates healing. So the body has its own innate healing. system and we have to learn how to trigger it in order to create health. So when there's a stress to the body that doesn't kill you, essentially it makes you stronger. That's what this is about. So we call this hormesis. Hormesis is essentially a stress that doesn't kill you, that makes you stronger. Like exercise, if you're lifting weights, if you're using weights, you're tearing your muscle fibers, those muscle fibers that have to repair and then recruit more, reparative compounds from your own body and building bigger and new muscles, which is a good thing. Uh, also when you exercise, if you run and, and do sprints, for example, interval training. You'll increase your VO two max, which increases your metabolic health and your mitochondrial function and your overall fitness and even longevity. So we, we're very familiar with little stresses. Uh, you've heard about calorie restriction or time restricted eating or intermittent fasting or these are, these are little stresses that the body receives that then kicks in its all in a, in a healing system. So the same thing is true with ozone and it's been used, for well over a century, initially used it topically in war wounds because you soak gauze in ozonated water and it can basically cure infections that were from war wounds. That's how it was originally used. It's been used intravenously, it can be used rectally, it can be used vaginally, it can be used intranasally. You can't breathe it. If you feel ozone is dangerous, if you Google ozone online, you'll see the FDA website that said this is dangerous, has no medical use. And yes, it's very dangerous if you breathe it, it can destroy your lungs and kill you. but also the same thing is true of water. You put inhale water, it's called drowning and you die. So it matters where it goes and how it gets in. So the most common forms of ozone are used intravenously mixing with your blood by pulling your blood out and, and dissolving the ozone in your blood and putting it back in. And this creates a, a short burst of oxidation and creates these compounds called ozone nights. And what that does is it, it seems to activate almost all the healing systems in your body. It increases stem cell production. It activates your anti-inflammatory systems. It inhibits your inflammatory systems. It increases your antioxidant enzymes because your body makes antioxidant enzymes that are more powerful than any you can take in food. But it activates the production of those enzymes because it sees an oxidative stress. It also improves mitochondrial function and repair. It helps detoxification, and it also helps to improve your blood overall blood health. So prevents blood clotting and micro clots and so forth. Actually, if you look at there's a number of large trials that were started in Europe around COVID and Ozone and showing very promising benefits. And I was in touch with some of the researchers over there who were using it. It was pretty much ignored here in the United States, unfortunately, but it's not a cure, let's say, for Ozone for COVID, but it can really help with infections and immunity. So I find it a very, very helpful therapy for my patients for a whole range of conditions, from latent infections like tick-borne illness, chronic viral infections like EBV, for autoimmunity and it's just a general wellness tune-up. I use it as a longevity treatment personally, and I've found it very helpful when I had autoimmune disease and mold toxicity and was, you know, 30 pounds lighter than I am now and basically in bed five months and couldn't do anything and move. It really dramatically helped me within a few days of getting ozone. So it's something you have to use cautiously with a doctor and has to be done right and so forth. it's a powerful medical therapy. And there's, you know, I think 50, 000 articles in the scientific literature on it. Most of them are in Europe and not, not in the United States, but it's, it's a very powerful therapy that I, I think will be more and more used. The problem is it's, it's kind of free. Right. There's no, it's not a drug. It's, it's a natural molecule. It's something that, you know, you've seen an oxygen tank, an ozone generator, and, and pretty much then it's, it's, it's the cost of administration. It's whatever time it takes of the practitioner. So it's relatively cost effective and can be very helpful in many of these kinds of chronic issues, chronic fatigue, things that just are hard to treat with other modalities.

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