How Diet And Stress Affect Your Immune System

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

The people who won were the people who were just getting up and moving.

Walking around.

Yeah, I think it's good for your body, it's good for your brain, and it's clearly good for your immune system.

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Week'S episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, I'm Lauren Fagan, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Every part of your body, mind and lifestyle is interconnected and impacts your overall well-being. This is no different when it comes to the health of your immune system. Things like how you eat, your quality of sleep, and the health of your relationships are all crucial components to modulate the functioning of the immune system. Dr. Hyman spoke about this in conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Bland.

The good news is that in every person, every person, the body is renewing its immune system all the time. And that's really good news. The problem is, particularly for the reasons you've already described, that for many people, the rate at which the immune system is picking up bad memories exceeds the rate at which it is renewing itself. So it's not like you have no renewing. It's just that it can't keep up the pace with the things that are being damaged. And so, as we learned from Dr. Sydney Baker so many years ago in functional medicine, there's two things that you do. you take the thing away that's causing the problem, you add the thing that's missing. That's the basic concept of functional medicine. What you need to take away are all the factors that are enhancing and increasing the mutational injury and the epigenetic modification of the immune system while you're giving the things that lead to immune cell house cleaning. That process of immune cell house cleaning won a Nobel Prize in 2013 for its discovery. It has another term that we have put now into our lexicon called autophagy. Autophagy is self-eating of debris. The body has that process. It has these magical ways that it can restore itself. And if autophagy is present at the proper rate and balance, and it's not exceeded by the rate of injury, now what are you doing? You're immuno-rejuvenating. Yeah. And this is what people are talking.

About when they talk about time-restricted eating, intermittent fasting, ketogenic diets, fasting mimicking diets. They're all working on this process of activating the body's own garbage disposal system. Precisely.

And the cleanup projects that have to happen.

And when you're eating all the time, your body's got a chance to rest, renew and repair or immunorejuvenate. So let's go down the list practically of what are those things that cause immunosenescence that we need to get rid of, according to Sydney Baker, radiation, environmental toxins, diet, so basically your gut microbiome when there's bad bugs in there produce nasty chemicals and molecules, that leak into your bloodstream and create inflammation throughout your whole body. So if your gut's not happy, your immune system's not happy. That's because 60% of your immune system is in your gut.

That's exactly right. And so the third area, which may be a little bit more confusing for the average person, but let me try to make it hopefully understandable, is a form of body fat accumulation that's called central body fat or body fat that's around the midsection.

Belly fat.

It's around the organs, right? It's not subcutaneous fat. It would be organ fat. Organ fat turns out to be a very big contributor to this process of inflammaging and injury to the immune system.

And how do we get belly fat, by the way? Yeah, eating starch and sugar.

Precisely.

Which is what I've been talking about.

And you taught me decades ago. It's all about insulin resistance, which we've talked about a lot on this podcast. and this idea that when you eat this diet of starch and sugar, this is our diet in America, it's about 60% of our calories, that it drives this belly fat growth. And that is like a fire in the belly, literally.

Absolutely.

A fire in the belly.

What happens to us as humans, because of the availability we have of food and celebration around food and often foods that are not so good for us with a lot of immune activating substances like sugar, that we then find ourselves overdoing a good thing. And as we overdo a good thing, our body, as you said it earlier, doesn't have a rest. The immune system doesn't have a rest. The immune system likes to have a rest, just like the brain likes to have a rest when we sleep. When we're sleeping and our brain is.

Renewing, our immune system is renewing. So the answer is one of the things that causes damage to your immune system is eating all the time.

Yes. Is eating before bed, is not giving yourself a break for 12 hours. And lack of rest. Rest is a very powerful therapeutic tool that allows rejuvenation.

Right?

If you're constantly stimulating the friend in with things that could injure the immune system, you don't have the activity in the back end to rejuvenate it effectively. So this sleep cycle is connected to the way and the frequency we eat and what we eat. It is again a lifestyle pattern that all works together, not just like I'm.

Going to do one thing.

Yeah.

Okay. So that's now let's go to the big one, which is the one that I think has had the biggest controversy, but it's also the biggest area for discovery. And that is how does the experience in life speak through our immune system to our function of our immune system? And we used to think that kind of the immune system was over here and our brain was over here and so our bad life experiences, they would be over here, but our immune system was kind of insulated because of the blood-brain barrier. No, no, it's not true at all. What we now recognize very clearly is the experiences that we have in life the harmful post-traumatic stress syndromes, let's say, lock into our immune system. These specific mutational injuries, these epigenetic changes in such a way as they can dysregulate our immune system. So we can, months or years later, still be carrying that bad memory in our immune system that shifts us over into this inflammatory state. So never should we think that the experiences in living, the relationships we have, the love and appreciation, the sense of fulfillment, is not a direct, important component of our immune system.

So our relationships can be inflammatory, our thoughts can be inflammatory. You know, there's a whole term we used to use called psychoneuroimmunology. We keep having to change it now. Psychoneuroendo-microbiome.

Exactly.

Toxic love immunology. And it's like, and everything is like, you know, it's all connected.

And I think of the word joy.

Right?

Like I'm having joy right now. I'm having an emotional joy being with you and having this conversation. And it just lights me up. So what is it doing to my immune system? If I could go in with my microscopic eyes and, you know, travel through my immune system, I'd have lit up excited immune cells that were celebrating. I wouldn't have depressed, anxious, injurious immune cells. Yeah. So I think that this construct that we're describing is a model for living. of which the immune system, because it's constantly sampling our environment and feeding back to us what it sees, is a good entry point for health.

It's not an abstraction. I mean, your thoughts and your feelings, your emotions, your relationships all literally speak to your immune system in real time and regulate their function.

Yes.

For good or bad. And I think most of us don't understand that. I mean, even the field of sociogenomics is so fascinating to me. You can be sitting in a room with someone and having a deep, heartfelt connection, and you will turn off all the inflammatory genes in the body. If you're having an argument with somebody or you're not connecting with them, it's the opposite. That's right.

So it's not just some vague theory, it's actually well-documented science. And that is part of the word that you used earlier, of immuno-rejuvenation. If every day you had the greatest part of your day in that state that you've just described, I guarantee you you'd be rejuvenating your immune system. Because you'd have less injured cells, immuno senescence cells and you'd have more immuno rejuvenating cells.

Amazing. Okay, so basically to take to summarize, we have to get rid of toxins in our life as best as possible. I always go to the environmental working group or ew.org to learn how to avoid most of these toxins. We can't avoid all of them, obviously. We need to make sure we're not eating a diet that's inflammatory that causes visceral fat, which is starch and sugar and processed food and eating a whole foods diet. We need to make sure we are very conscious of our thoughts and relationships and connections and emotions because they have a big impact on us and practice techniques that can help with that like meditation or yoga various kinds of practices. Exercise also is important. Sleep is important. Not eating all the time is important. Having a break for 12, 14, 16 hours a day. These are really simple practical things that anybody can do to rejuvenate your immune system.

Yes. Dr. Hyman also spoke to Dr. Leonard Calabrese about the role that movement and.

Exercise play in creating a healthy immune system. So I've been interested in exercise and immunity for decades actually. Probably one of the first areas of behavior and immunity that I became interested in. And you know, I do believe in what we call the the J curve of exercise, that people who are sedentary, people who are sedentary, are immunocompromised. And we know this both from the laboratory and the risks of, you know, the kind of the canary in the coal mine that we measure usually is respiratory illnesses. And how many is normal and how many do you get?

Being a couch potato is bad for your immune system.

It is definitely bad for your immune system as well as virtually every other system in your body. But I'm looking from the lens of immunologic strength.

We just talk about heart disease and things like that, but this is a whole new view.

This is it. The thing that you can do to demonstrate immunologic enhancement is moderate exercise. And, you know, moderate exercise is still a moving target. And, you know, if we look at the guidelines, which have been recently revamped only in the past couple months, you know, Walking is an incredible form of immunologic strength building. And we actively endorse and what we talk to about our patients is just like with the diet, tell me where you're at in this spectrum of exercise. Are you the couch potato and you work in a cubicle and you're sitting there all day long, you're doing nothing, or are you, you know, training for ultra marathons at the other end? No matter where you are, we try to move people down a bit at a time. Too much of something is often as bad as not doing it. And there have been a lot of epidemiologic evidence that show people who are ultra exercisers can actually do harm.

Like marathon runners.

And beyond. Ultra marathon runners. I don't think it's coincidental, and I'm sure you've seen this in your practice, I've seen many people who have developed you know, what we would recognize now as chronic fatigue syndrome, who had started out as very high endurance athletes, and then something has fallen apart. And you just wonder in your head of whether this was a predisposing factor, but we get people moving. So there was a very interesting study done at the University of Colorado in the last about 18 months, where they experimentally took a group of people who work at a sedentary job, cubicle, sit there all day long, and they randomize them to you get to go to a gym and come in a half hour late and you do 30 minutes on the treadmill versus you who all you have to do is for five hours during the day get up and walk around five minutes out of each hour, five minutes out of each hour. And then they measured a number of outputs. And while they didn't do immunologic function, they looked at vitality, well-being, mood, et cetera. The people who won were the people who were just getting up and moving.

Walking around.

Yeah, I think it's good for your body, it's good for your brain, and it's clearly good for your immune system. So it's just a small bit of data. And similar to what we talked about from the Nurses Health Study on diet, there have been several large epidemiologic studies to show that people who carry the predisposition to rheumatoid arthritis, who are more physically active, will have a lower incidence of actually developing the disease over a lifetime. So you've got two areas that, you know, that there's clearly enough data for so many reasons. Cardiovascular health, emotional well-being, and immunologic strength.

In today's world, we know that having a balanced immune system is more important than ever. By reducing our exposure to environmental toxins, limiting our intake of sugar and starch, getting quality sleep, moving our bodies, and addressing our emotional well-being, we are taking vitally important steps to support our overall health. If you'd like to learn more about any of the topics you heard in today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Dr. Jeffrey Bland and Dr. Leonard Calabrese. if you have people in your life who could benefit from this information, please consider sharing this episode with your community. We need each other to create a healthier us. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed.

Healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try Free to start your seven-day free trial.