Secrets to Conquer Autoimmune Disease

Foreign. Excited to share groundbreaking science for anyone who's been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition or is on the path to resolving horrible symptoms that have not been taken seriously by their doctor. And sadly, that's a lot of people. Autoimmune diseases, when you add them all up, affect 50 million Americans, far more than those who have type 2 diabetes. The truth is, in our modern world, autoimmunity is one of the fastest growing diseases, with some studies suggesting an increase of 3 to 12% annually. That's crazy. Why are we seeing these skyrocketing rates of autoimmune disease? Millions of people are suffering, and conventional medicine is just not equipped to provide answers. They just manage symptoms and suppress inflammation without dealing with the root cause. And that leaves people to suffer unnecessarily. Hundreds of patients have come to see me at my clinic and my other colleagues at my clinic at the Ultra Wellness center with either an autoimmune disease or with vague symptoms that resemble autoimmunity. And mostly their doctors brush them off. And now, unfortunately, Long Covid seems to be driving an increase in autoimmune disease as well. So we got a mess on our hands. But I'm here to tell you that these symptoms don't have to go on forever. I'm here to offer guidance, support, and hope with a functional medicine approach to navigating autoimmunity. In fact, I've cleared up my own autoimmunity using this approach. Hi, I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to Health Hacks. I want to begin with a story of a remarkable young girl from Texas named Isabel. And I want to tell you her story because it's just so profound and it reflects a lot of how we approach autoimmune disease with a functional medicine perspective and how successful we can be in addressing these diseases by looking at the root cause. Now, Isabel was a 10 year old girl from Texas who loved horseback riding. She came in with severe autoimmune disease symptoms. Swollen face and joints, inability to make a fist, hair loss, Raynaud's disease, skin rashes. I mean, she had dermatitis, arthritis, myositis, every kind of itis you can imagine because her body was just one big inflamed mess. She had something called mixed connective tissue disease. Now, what did her traditional doctors do? Well, they gave her high doses of intravenous steroids, like 1200 milligrams of Solum, which is like a horse dose every three weeks, and many other strong medications to suppress your immune system, including methotrexate. Which is a chemo drug. Aspirin, because of the blood clotting, because the inflammation, acid blockers because of how it affected her GI tract and many, many other drugs with serious side effects. Now, how do we think differently about treating autoimmune disease? Using the functional medicine framework, it's very different. It's not about naming the disease and saying you have lupus or mixed connective tissue disease or Ms. Or Hashimoto's or rheumatoid arthritis or whatever the disease is. We don't care so much about the name. We want to know what the root cause is, not what the disease is, but the why. Why is there so much inflammation? So we really have to gather our patient's story, and this is really important. Now you look way back, way back to the beginning. What was the mother's life like during pregnancy? What did she eat? Was she under stress? What. What was the birth like? Was it vaginal birth? Was it a C section which affects the microbiome of the baby? Did the baby breastfeed? How long did the baby breastfeed? Were there early issues such as infections that required antibiotics? It could have altered the gut microbiome and affected the baby. Were there food sensitivities? Were there rashes, diaper rash? I wanna know everything about that story because it tells me how the person was set up to have a dysregulated immune system. And I look at also family history, diet, lifestyle, environmental factors, toxin exposures, mold exposures, I mean, you name it, we look at everything. Now, this young girl, she had a lot of various things. She had mold in her home, and she also loved sugar, she loved dairy, she loved tuna. She actually loved a lot of sushi. This little kid, I don't know, but she had a lot of tuna, which had mercury. And she also had repeated antibiotics or all sorts of infections. So she had all these predisposing factors, gut issues. She had tuna exposure. She was eating foods that are high in processed foods, sugar, dairy and gluten. And so she was at risk for. For dysregulation of her immune system. And we did a number of immun tests. Now, typically, doctors will look at the antibodies, and she had elevated antibodies across the board. I mean, you name it, she had it. Every single autoimmune antibody was elevated and severely elevated. She also had severe muscle damage and liver damage. Part of the overall inflammation. She had effects on her white blood count or red blood counts, all of which were part of the autoimmunity. She had low vitamin D And, and that was what her doctors looked at. Now they didn't really pay much to what the root cause analysis was. They don't really know how to navigate to the root cause. So they didn't look at things like gluten. Well, we did and we found she had very high antibodies to gluten or gliadin, which means her gut was leaky. Even though she didn't have any gut symptoms, she was very much affected by what she was eating and she had what we call a leaky gut. And of course, not surprising when we did a mercury challenge test, not just a blood level, but a challenge test to look at the body stores of heavy metals, she had a very high level of mercury. So what we did was really quite simple. We just took out the bad stuff and put in the good stuff. This is really the foundational framework of functional medicine. We look for root causes, it's root cause medicine. We look for how these various factors that you're getting that might be triggering inflammation are working. And we also look at what the body's missing. It needs to properly regulate, like whether it's enough vitamin D or enough healthy gut bacteria. And so we, we did some very simple interventions on her. Put her on an anti inflammatory elimination diet. We got rid of gluten, dairy, sugar, processed food. We put her on whole food diets, we gave her a few basic supplements, a multivitamin. We gave her vitamin D, which she was low in fish oil, which is anti inflammatory. And we gave her an antifungal to clear out the bad yeast in her growth from all the antibiotics. We gave her a little bit of liver support and we, we really helped her rebuild her gut with a gut repair program which is so key in functional medicine. We gave her probiotics, we g gut healing compounds like glutamine and other things that can help heal the gut. And then ultimately we treated her for heavy metals with DMSA for metal chelation. So what was really quite remarkable, this girl, was that in two months she came back and she was completely symptom free and she'd gotten off all her medications in just two months. Now this is a girl who'd been suffering for a long time and on serious medical therapy, who was disabled and unable to really function or go to school and had a very, very serious, almost life threatening condition of mixed connective tissue disease that was rampant. I mean, she was just on fire everywhere. And so also her blood work started to improve. And what was really quite amazing, after a year, all her auto antibodies went to normal. Her blood tests went to normal. Her symptoms were gone. She was feeling better. And in traditional medicine, doctors don't recheck antibodies. Oh, you've got the lupus antibodies or you've got the rheumatoid arthritis antibodies. There's no point in actually rechecking because they're gonna always be high. Well, that ain't true, my friends, if you understand how to deal with the root causes. For her, it was leaky gut, it was yeast overgrowth, dysbiosis, it was gluten, it was heavy metals. We were able to rebuild her gut and get rid of the metals, and her body was able to return to normal. And in a year, she was completely normal. She was riding her horses and she was doing great. And I called her a while ago and about 10 years after I treated her and. And, and she was still doing great and in college and having a great time. So it's quite amazing to see how powerful this approach is to turn people's life around. And I just want to say, if you have an autoimmune disease and you're being treated by traditional medicine, sadly, you're not getting the best available care. You might be getting the best available traditional medicine care, but you're not getting to the root cause. So I want. I want you to know that despite what your doctor may tell you, autoimmunity is not a lifelong sentence. You don't have to suffer in silence. So how do I know that's true? Well, I've cured myself. I had severe ulcerative colitis. I mean, really bad. I was going to the bathroom 20 times a day. I was in and out of the hospital. I had bloody stools. I lost 30 pounds. I mean, I was a bad shape, and I needed to fix myself. And I cured myself. And now I'm completely normal. I don't have any issues or episodes. I've cured many, many, many patients, whether it's from rheumatoid arthritis, from autoimmune diseases like lupus or Hashimoto's or mixed tissue disease or Crohn's disease, msc. But we can improve. It's quite amazing. The work of Terry Wallace has demonstrated this. And I mean, I got so bad. I was. When I. I had an antibiotic for a bad root canal, and I ended up having C. Diff, which is an intestinal infection. It's not uncommon after that. And that led to just a persistent autoimmune ulcerative colitis. And I saw the best doctors at Harvard. I had scopes I had everything you can imagine. I took steroids for six weeks. Nothing happened. And until I really doubled down, I had to use some special tricks, some advanced tricks in functional medicine. I was really able to fix myself. I mean, I don't know why, but I always get the toughest cases, which is myself. So. And now I'm great and I don't have any digestive issues. I've completely fixed my gut. I actually learned how to actually do that in some new ways using various kinds of therapies like ozone and various polyphenol cocktails. And in fact, I created a whole product that healed my gut. It's called gut food. You don't have to get it, obviously, but it's like a multivitamin, the gut. And it has prebiotics, probiotics and polyphenols. And it's really helped so many patients restore normal gut function. Now we can, if you, by the way, if you're interested, you can go to gutfood.com and learn more about it. Now we can do a lot to treat autoimmune diseases and we can heal the immune system so that people can really live normal lives without taking these intense immune suppressing drugs long term. Just Isabelle's story and my story and a successful treatment of thousands of patients at the Ultra Wellness center in Lennox, where I have a practice for the last 20 years has really demonstrated that this is possible. And it's not just me, it's thousands of functional medicine doctors around the country and around the world who are seeing this over and over again. And it's just heartbreaking to see how many people struggle with autoimmune disease and they don't need to. I mean, I kind of had it twice actually when I was had mercury poisoning way back in the 90s when I was 36 years old after living in China. That led to a different set of symptoms, including chronic fatigue, cognitive impairment, immunity, immune system. And I had positive autoimmune antibodies and I had muscle damage and I was like, I had myositis. I mean, it was really quite bad. And it took me years to figure it out because I didn't know what I know now. But it really made it clear to me that the body has this healing regenerative renewal system that if we can take advantage of it, we can repair all sorts of systems in our body. So in functional medicine we really have a deep understanding of the immune system. We call it the defense and repair system and how that integrates with actually your gut, particularly the gut immune system is really one system, that 60% of your immune system's in your gut. So we know a lot about how to regulate this and we know about other factors that, that may trigger autoimmunity. And we'll get, we'll get to those. But it's not just what you eat, it's not just your gut. But it could be environmental toxins, infections and so on. And we're seeing that with long. When the immune system has what it needs to heal itself, right? Which is right. Food, right. Anti inflammatory, whole foods, lifestyle changes. Because stress has a huge role to play in autoimmune disease. When we learn how to deal with environmental toxins and detoxify those from our body, when we use the right supplements, that can help help regulate immunity and inflammation, whether it's vitamin D or fish oil or even things like Himalayan tartery, buckwheat, which is an immune modulator. Sometimes we may need medications, but usually we don't. And we can do a lot more than just quote, manage the disease. And this is where I, I get a little crazy. You know, I don't want to manage chronic disease. I don't want to manage someone's diabetes or heart disease or autoimmune disease. I want them to get rid of it. Now you can't always do that. But, but I, I can tell you in, in most cases, we can dramatically improve their, their quality of life, reduce the use of medications and often completely cure them. Really, it sounds like I'm talking about something that's a sci fi project, but I can tell you, myself and thousands of other functional medicine practitioners around the country in the world have been successful in this approach. We've done this at Cleveland Clinic. We do this, my practice, Ultra Wellness center, all the time. And it's really important. So let's talk about the conventional medicine approach before we get into talking about the functional medicine approach. Approach. I just want to sort of talk about where conventional medicine fails. I had this patient just at Cleveland Clinic. And listen, Cleveland Clinic is an incredible institution. It's one of the top hospitals in the world. I think it's number two after Mayo Clinic. They're always fighting for one and two, and they have the best doctors in the world. And many of these are my colleagues and they do an incredible job and they're kind and caring. However, they have the wrong map for the territory of disease. They're following the wrong map and they're not understanding what the root causes are disease or they're not understanding how the body's organized. They're not understanding how to restore health because traditional medicine is focused on identifying the symptoms that then they can collectively call a disease. Right. Psoriatic arthritis I'm going to tell you about in a minute. But like this is a condition of psoriasis with arthritis. It's common and they say, okay, I know what's wrong with you, why you have joint pain and why your skin's inflamed is because you have psoriatic arthritis. Well, that's just a name that we give to people who have those symptoms. What's the cause? So I had a patient who was a 50 year old business coach. She had multiple symptoms. Yes, she had psoriatic arthritis that was crippling. She had horrible skin lesions, horrible joint pain. She was on a drug called Stellara, costs about 50 grand a year. It's an immune suppressive drug. She also had depression, she was also overweight. She had prediabetes. She had terrible reflux and heartburn. She had terrible irritable bowel syndrome with bloating. She had migraine headaches. You know, she had all these problems. So she saw the neurologist for her migraines, the psychiatrist for her depression. She saw the endocrinologist for her prediabetes. She saw the gastroenterologist for her GI symptoms is for reflux and irritable bowel. And she saw the rheumatologist for psoriatic arthritis. So she saw the best doctors in each specialty, each of which gave her the cocktail of drugs that was the latest and best cocktail of drugs for her particular problem. She was marginally improved, kind of barely able to function, pretty miserable. Still, even despite all this care, the problem is no one asked, one, how are all these symptoms connected? And two, what's the root cause? I mean, it's not just random. She has migraines, prediabetes, irritable bowel reflux, psoriasis, depression and prediabetes. All those are connected. Now how are they connected? Well, from a functional medicine perspective, they're all diseases of inflammation. They're all diseases of inflammation. So then as a functional medicine doctor, my job is not to say, okay, great, she's got inflammation. Let me find the most powerful hammer I can use, the most powerful anti inflammatory. I can use drugs that suppress the immune system and see if we can calm her inflammation down. I ask a different set of questions, which is why? Why does she have inflammation? Now for from her perspective, she had a pretty classic story, which is horrible gut symptoms. And like I said earlier, we know that 60% of the immune system is in the gut. So when the gut is damaged, when it's not working, you get what we call a leaky gut, which means the food particles and poop and bacterial toxins leak into the body across that barrier. That should be basically like a coffee filter that doesn't let the grinds in and gets into the bloodstream right underneath the gut lining and the immune system. Now, 60% of the immune system is right under the gut. So for this patient, like, listen, she has a lot of gut symptoms. These are all inflammatory diseases. Is we know that a lot of inflammation comes from the gut, so let's just start there. So all I did for her was put her on, obviously, get rid of all the crap, all the processed food and sugar she was eating. And, and I put her on a whole foods anti inflammatory diet, an elimination diet. Got rid of gluten, dairy, sugar, processed food, also got rid of grains and beans for a short while to see if we can just repair her gut. And then I gave her an antibiotic to kill all the bad bugs that she had. Terrible bloating, distension, bacterial overgrowth. She also had terrible fungal overgrowth, and I gave her an antifungal. So I basically cleared out the gut. What happened after I did that? And I gave her some probiotics, I gave her fish oil, I gave her vitamin D, a multivitamin, not a ton of stuff. She came back six weeks later, and I did not tell her to stop any of her medication. I just wanted to see how she did, you know, staying on the course of her meds. Well, she came back and said, look, I stopped all my medication, my psoriasis is gone, my arthritis is gone, my migraines are gone, my depression's gone, I have no more reflux, I have no more irritable bowel, and I lost 20 pounds and my prediabetes is gone. That's not a miracle, friends. That's just following the principles of how the body works and is organized. And that's why we need a different approach. And that's why, you know, when you look at the conventional medical approach to autoimmunity, it just falls short. So in traditional medicine, we call it the name it, blame it and tame it game. You name the disease by saying, you know, you have psoriatic arthritis, right? We blame the name for the problem. I know why your joints hurt and you have skin rashes. It's because you have psoriatic arthritis. No, that's just the name of the disease. It's not the cause. And then we tame it with a drug. So it's the name it, blame it, tame it game. And the tame it is, you know, sometimes heavy duty drugs which cost a lot of money. You know, we're looking for a pill for every ill what's the treatment for this which that and doesn't really recognize that you have to deal with the root cause. And, and just because that patient who had psoriatic arthritis responded to that treatment doesn't mean that's the treatment I would use for every patient with that disease. Because one disease can have many causes like psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis. It can be caused by gluten or heavy metals or gut issues or many other things which we actually need to think about and diagnose individually. So this is really personalized.

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Traditional medicine doesn't look at the root cause. It doesn't support the immune system. It doesn't help you create health. It doesn't take, we don't really take time to listen to patients and we're not trained to really look at the root cause of what's going on. It's no fault of our own as traditional doctors. I mean I'm trained as one. And I didn't learn how to do this in medical school. I didn't learn how to think about the root cause of disease. I didn't learn how to think about how the body was organized properly as a system. I didn't learn about how to create health. Right. And you know, the average Visit is about 15 minutes. Patients talk about five minutes. I mean, it's not really a way to figure things out. And so it takes a long time sometimes to figure this out. It's like a puzzle, but it can be done. Now, according to a survey by the Autoimmune association, autoimmune patients on average see four different doctors over about three years before the diagnosis made. They're suffering. They know there's something wrong. They go to doctor after doctor they just don't get diagnosed. And also, misdiagnosis rates are high, about 80% because symptoms are vague or overlapping. And by the way, you know, all the classical definitions of autoimmune disease often don't fit patients. Right? We come up with these criteria, but people and their bodies are unique. Often doctors might describe their symptoms as vague or nonspecific. They might not take them seriously. They might say, well, it's sort of psychiatric, go see a psychiatrist or psychologist. For example, in one study of patients with lupus and related systemic autoimmune disease, about 50% were misdiagnosed as having mental health issues. Although by the way, inflammation can affect your brain, so it will affect your mood. Now, conventional medicine docs are trained to diagnose and prescribe. That's what we do. We just learned how to talk to patients, to ask a lot of questions, to figure out what the diagnosis is, to do the right test to figure out the diagnosis, and then we match the drug to the disease. But it doesn't tell you what's going on. Right? In autoimmunity, we prescribe mega dose of steroids, prednisone, methotrexate, painkillers we'll call anti NSAIDs or anti inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen. And we use really heavy duty biologic drugs like tnf alpha blockers which suppress the immune system. They can be life saving and work for people. I'm not dissing them, but I'd rather not use them if we can get to the root cause. Right? And they really help to, to sort of suppress immunity. But you also get high risk of cancer or an infection. Now they're not, they're really not long term solutions. The goal is to really heal and support the immune system, not suppress it. So let's kind of back up a little bit and talk about what exactly is autoimmune disease. Well, our immune system is designed to protect our bodies against pathogens like bacteria, viruses and other harmful invaders by kind of recognizing, attacking these foreign substances. And it does this through many different mechanisms. One of them is called the adaptive immune system, meaning it's a newer version of our immune system, not the ancient innate immune system, which is nonspecific, but it's adaptive, meaning it actually is specific to whatever the insult is. And it's a complex network of immune cells and antibodies that's designed to recognize and eliminate foreign molecules. So when you get the COVID vaccine, you get Covid antibodies, Right? Or when you get Covid, you get Covid antibodies that's your adaptive immune system going out and trying to attack the infection. Now, in a healthy immune response, there's a pretty clear distinction between what's foreign and your own cell. So your body doesn't attack itself, right? It's going after the COVID it's going after Lyme disease, going after a virus or strep or whatever it is. Right. But what happens in autoimmunity is that our immune system gets confused and normally our tolerance to the body's own tissues breaks down. And that leads to the immune system mounting a response against its own cells and tissues. It's basically attacking itself. It's almost like we're, we're body has turned our own army against itself, like a country turning its own army against itself. And that leads to inflammation, tissue damage, dysfunction of all sorts of different organs. As I said, about 50 million Americans have autoimmunity, making it the third most prevalent disease category after heart disease and cancer. And nearly 80% of those with autoimmune diseases are women. Now we don't completely know why. Maybe it's because antibody levels and autoimmunity spike after birth, maybe has something to do with pregnancy. Women have higher, maybe have higher stress levels, maybe they have higher antibodies than men related to this stress. And that can, and stress can be a factor. But there's a lot of reasons we don't understand that make women susceptible to autoimmune disease. Now ana, which is called antinuclear antibody, it's the antibody against the nucleus of our cells, right? Is the most common autoimmune antibody. And it's, it's scary because in the population it's doubled in the last 25 years. Markers have increased about 300% tripled in 12 to 19 year olds. What the hell is going on here? Right? I mean not, not supposed to have autoimmune disease, especially when you're, when you're a kid. Now I co founded a company called Function Health. I've talked about it before. It allows people to get their own lab test by bypassing their doctor and their insurance to become the CEO of their own health. And what's really been amazing, after testing about 40,000 people at this date of recording, we found that a full 30% of people tested. Almost a third of everybody tested. And this is a health forward population has a positive ANA or antinuclear antibody. Now some may not have full blown autoimmune disease, but they have something called pre autoimmunity. Just as there's pre diabetes or pre dementia or Pre hypertension. There is also something called pre autoimmunity, and it's because we're seeing these low level autoimmune antibodies increasing in the population. We've also seen celiac disease increase over the last 50 years about five fold. That's 500%. And it's been doubling every 15 years. This is kind of scary. Why? Because of our gut. But it really is because of the change in our, on our wheat breeding. It's changed in the, in the way we spray it with lyphosate. It affects our microbiome, other factors that affect our gut health, whether it's C sections, antibiotics, lack of breastfeeding, all that makes us predisposed to having celiac disease. Also, multiple sclerosis has increased 30% between 2013 and 22. So what is going on? We're going to get to that in a minute, but let's just kind of review there. There's over 80 different autoimmune disorders that are all treated by different specialists. So that's kind of partly why we're not really that organized thinking about this as one problem. I don't think about all autoimmune disease as different. Okay, you have lupus or you have ms, or you have Hashimoto's, or you have rheumatoid arthritis, or you have, you know, mixed connective tissue disease or whatever. The weird autoimmune disease you have is Sjogren syndrome, blah, blah, blah. I don't think of them as all separate issues. I think of them as an autoimmune disease as a collective, and then I understand how to navigate to get to the root cause of those. Now there are, there are many, many, many, many diseases. But, but you know, they're all like, as I said, treated by different specialists. So nobody's kind of looking at this as one problem and trying to solve it as a collective. Now, most common autoimmune diseases, you know, are things people know about now. Some are unique, some overlap, some have multiple autoimmune disease. I mean, I met a guy who had three different autoimmune diseases. He had pernicious anemia, he had rheumatoid arthritis, and he had celiac disease. But the truth is they were all just one problem and he was manifesting these as different diseases. So we just kind of give these labels, as I mentioned, all these diseases to people who share the same set of symptoms. But there may be different causes for any one of those conditions. Right? And traditional medicine treats them all the same. Like if there may be 10 cases of rheumatoid arthritis, but they all get the same treatment rather than treating the cause of each person's rheumatoid arthritis. And each of those 10 people might be different. The doctors give the same immune suppressing cocktail of medicine. Right. And by definition, that just doesn't help solve the problem. It suppresses the inflammation a little bit, but it doesn't actually solve the problem. Things like rheumatoid arthritis is common. That's a really common. When you get joint pain, swelling and stiffness, you have certain abnormal antibodies that we classify. And it's. These are just descriptive classifications that we use in medicine that have nothing to do with causal analysis. Right. We basically diagnose by geography and symptom where is in your body and what's a symptom, not by mechanism and cause, which is what we do in functional medicine. Lupus is another really common one or systemic lupus erythematosis or sle. They have fatigue, joint pain, swelling. They might skin rashes, hair loss, kidney problems, mouth ulcers. Ms. We know is an autoimmune disease of the neurologic system. You get loss of myelin sheath, numbness, tingling, weakness in your limbs, maybe one side at a time, tremors, poor coordination. Lyme disease is not an autoimmune disease, but it can lead to autoimmune disease and that can, you know, be diagnosed as an acute disease with bullseye, rash or fever, chills, fatigue, body aches. But long term it can lead to arthritis, neurologic issues, brain Lyme. I mean, I think Kris Kristofferson had diagnosed his dementia, but it turned out he had neuro Lyme and also can cause facial palsy, neuropathy, cardiac symptoms, inflamed heart. So there's a lot of things that it can show up as an autoimmune. There's a lot of gut autoimmunity that's increasing. Inflammatory bowel disease. I had that one. It was not fun. Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis. You get diarrhea, abdominal pain, cramping, weight loss, fatigue, bloody stool, diarrhea, type 1 diabetes, another really pretty common autoimmune disease. Which by the way, I think 29% of people with type 1 diabetes also have celiac. And it's probably the gluten that's causing the problem. Right. That leads to frequent urination, thirst, weight loss, fatigue and so forth. And that's treatable with insulin. Not really easily curable. But you know, I've had some patients we really, if you get them early, can often help some of the damage that happens to the pancreas. One of the most common autoimmune diseases is called Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and this is a thyroid autoimmune disease. And you get fatigue, weight gain, cold, intolerance, dry skin, hair loss, constipation, depression, and it kind of slows down. And then there's all the skin autoimmune diseases like psoriasis and red patches of skin with thick, scaly silver scales, dry, cracked skin. It can bleed, itch, burn, it's nasty. You get pitted nails and thickened nails, and they can get even more progressive with psoriatic arthritis, with joint pain, stiffness, swelling, tenderness in the joints, and nail changes like psoriasis. So these are just descriptions of the symptoms. So if you have this collection of symptoms, you got this disease and that collection, you got that disease. And if you have these extra little antibodies in the blood, it means you have this or that disease. Well, that's kind of meaningless. We want to know cause, cause, cause, cause. The other thing we're seeing, by the way, is this really increasing number of autoimmune disease cases from long Covid, because the infection seems to create persistent inflammation and maybe the spike protein, this may be triggered an autoimmune response. We've seen this with other things like Epstein Barr virus. So I think we're seeing an increased uptick in autoimmunity because of COVID So what are the root causes of autoimmunity? You know, we heard me talking about, like, how traditional medicine gets it wrong and just does the name it, blame and tame it game and uses suppressive medication. But how do we navigate to the root cause of autoimmunity? Well, there is no single cause. And, and there may be many causes, even for. For one, like, remember Isabelle? She had yeast in her gut, she had dysbiosis, she had gluten, she had mercury. So we had to deal with all those things. You can't just treat one thing and expect the patient to get better. You have to deal with all the insults. So, and, and so typically, it's. It's this. It's dynamic interaction between your environment and your genes that makes you have some disturbance in your function. And, and that gene environment interaction is what makes people get sick. And some people are more susceptible than others. Now, there is kind of a theory, a little bit, about why, you know, why we're seeing so much autoimmune disease. And part of it has to do with our modern Life. You know, if you go to hunter gatherer tribes, if you look at indigenous cultures around the world and the Amazonian tribes, I mean, they don't have autoimmunity, they don't have allergy, they don't have peanut allergies, they don't have all this stuff because they live more close to nature. Their immune systems are having all kinds of infections and weird bugs. And then it gets busy. You know, when we, when we over hygiene our lives, you know, everything is washed and clean and sterilized. You know, we got like hand sanitizer and mouthwash and you name it, we're actually causing problems for ourselves. In fact, kids who grew up on farms have far less allergy and autoimmune disease because they're in the dirt, they're playing with animals, they're exposed to all these different insults, and their immune system develops in a way that doesn't make it attack itself. So let's talk about some of the main triggers of our, of our autoimmune epidemic. Our inflammatory diet. That's a big one. Ultra processed food, sugar, modern forms of wheat, modern forms of dairy are highly inflammatory. And these are probably the biggest drivers with ultra processed food. I read recently that if you're eating at the upper end of that, Americans eat about 67% on average, maybe up to 73% depending on the data. They eat about 22 pounds of food additives a year. Now that's a lot. This is stuff you would not have in your kitchen cupboard. And a lot of the ultra processed food has emulsifiers and thickeners which have been shown to cause leaky gut and damage the gut lining, which then causes a huge, huge problem. So when I think of some of the autoimmune disease, I always think gut first. Gut, gut, gut. Do they have a leaky gut? What's their microbiome? Do they have food sensitivities? Gluten is another one at the top of my list. So nobody gets out of my office alive without getting a celiac test, a full celiac panel, plus another test that looks at over 20 different wheat and gluten antigens. And I can really tell if their body is reacting and if they have a leaky gut. I also look for other food sensitivities and food reactions, not so much because they're, they're permanent allergies, but because they, they indicate that the body is, is having an immune response to different foods because of the leaky gut. So gut, gut, gut, gut, gut, our inflammatory diet, those are the Big ones. And then there's a bunch of other stuff. Environmental toxins can be a big one. Now, they call these autogens, in other words, autoimmune inducing toxins. And these can be mercury, and it can be lead. It can be petrochemical toxins, plastics. I mean, you heard about the microplastic problem. All these things that we're exposed to potentially dysregulate our immune system. And I've cured many patients by getting rid of heavy metals. I'm remembering one woman who had, for example, Crohn's disease, and she had lead toxicity. We got rid of lead, and her autoimmunity went away. Another one with rheumatoid arthritis had really high mercury again. Her mercury detoxification led to complete resolution of her symptoms. Now, that doesn't mean everybody with rheumatoid arthritis has mercury poisoning or Crohn's has lead poisoning. It. It. It's really about the individualization of the treatment because the body has only so many ways of seeing Ouch. And different insults can cause different manifestations depending on the person. There's also late infections, things like Lyme disease, Babesia or lyia, bartonella, viruses, parasites, weird things can cause. And autoimmune reactions. You have to look for those. Another big one is mold. 50% of buildings are water damaged, and mold exposure and mold reactions are common. They're often not diagnosed. They're not something we learn about in medical school. All that can drive autoimmunity. And, of course, stress, any kind of stress, psychological or physical stress, can affect your immunity and immune function. So all those are really important. And now. And now another one we got to deal with is Long Covid. Long Covid is driving another big spike in autoimmune disease. So functional medicine is really a methodology to get to the why. It's not a test or a treatment or a protocol. It's a way of thinking differently about the landscape of disease. It's a way of thinking about the body as an ecosystem, about medicine, of why, not what. It's not just naming the disease and treating with a drug. It's getting to the root cause. And while each autoimmune disease and condition has a unique set of characteristics that kind of define it, they all share one common underlying cause. Systemic inflammation and an overactive immune system that attacks your own body's tissues and organs, it's pretty much the same, whatever autoimmune disease you're talking about. Now, inflammation isn't always bad, obviously, right? Acute inflammation is your body's natural response to bad stuff like trauma or infection. If you sprain your ankle or if you get a cut or if you have a cold or a virus, your body has an immune system that's dying to go and create inflammation to deal with that, right? Maybe you've had sore throat or rashes or highs or a sprained ankle, but the inflammation should do its job and then go away, right? You don't stay with a red sore skin for a long time. If you, after you cut yourself, it heals and it resolves. Now in autoimmune diseases, chronic inflammation and a dysfunctional immune system can slowly kind of wreak havoc, leading to all sorts of debilitating illnesses and accelerate your age aging. Now, in functional medicine, or as I said, we are the medicine of why, we ask why the symptoms exist. And then we use comprehensive lab testing to understand what's happening beneath the surface to get to the root cause. Right tests, don't guess right. So what are the lab tests that I tend to use to look for autoimmunity? Well, there's some typical ones that even traditional doctors use like high sensitivity C reactive protein and erythrocyte sedimentation rate or ESR or SED rate. These are just non specific indicators that the body's inflamed. Also your white blood cell count, because if that goes up, that might be an issue. Red cell count can be affected. Vitamin D levels are really important. So these are traditional tests you can get on a regular blood work. Vitamin D, and it's low, is something that's really critical because having adequate vitamin D levels can have an important role in optimizing your immune system. And we know, for example, multiple sclerosis is much more common in northern latitudes where there's really rampant vitamin D deficiency and so vitamin D might pay a role there as well in autoimmunity. Then we look at some stuff that your traditional doctors don't look at. We look at your poop. I want to know what's going on in your gut. I want to see your gut microbiome test. I want to look at absorption. I want to look at inflammation. I want to look at short chain fatty acids. I want to look at special bacteria called akkermansia that play a role in regulating leaky gut and inflammation. I want to look at whether you have parasites or yeast or bacterial overgrowth or dysbiosis. I also want to do leaky gut testing to see whether or not you have a leaky gut. And there's many tests we can Use to do that. I'll look for hidden infections, right, Whether it's viruses, yeast, bacteria, parasites, long Covid Lyme, other tick infections. All these things are detectable through testing. In addition, I look for toxins, heavy metals, mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, aluminum. We can do this through blood work, but also through a urine heavy metal challenge test, again, something doctors don't usually do. That's where you take a chelating drug called dmsa and then you collect your urine for six hours and you see what's showing up. And if it's elevated, then you know, you might have a problem. We also look for mold toxins and mold antibodies to toxins and various other indicators of mold exposure. We look for food sensitivities. Maybe there's something you're eating that's triggering it. You know, maybe you have a true allergy, but maybe you also just have a leaky gut with high permeability. You have wheat gluten sensitivity, maybe there's cross reactive foods you're reacting to like dairy or corn or soy. And of course we also look at your auto antibodies. We want to see what's going on, your ana, your rheumatoid factor, things like anti CCP for rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren's antibodies, double stranded DNA for lupus, RNP for Raynaud's. We may look for other thyroid antibodies. Celiac panel, really important. I think everybody needs a full celiac panel. Now just so you know, when you go to the doctor and you say check me for celiac, they're going to just check one test called TTG and it's, it's just not enough. You need to do a full panel which includes deaminated gliadin, IgA and IgE, tissue transglutaminase, IgA and IgG. We might want to do genetic testing. And the good news is all these tests for autoimmune antibodies, for heavy metals, for tick infections, for vitamin D, blood counter rate, all these can be done through Function Health. Now some, some of these tests like stool, we're not there yet, but, but we're going to get there and we're gonna be able to have you be able to do a look at all these tests through Function Health. And you can just go to functionhealth.com, and, and you can, you can actually just be able to order your own test through the lab and you'll get a doctor who'll sign off obviously. But, but basically you'll be able to get access to this testing. So let's Kind of dig deeper into the root causes of autoimmune disease. We wanted to spend a little time talking about autogens or environmental toxins, maybe one of the leading causes of autoimmune disease. There's been a number of books written on this and there's just so much scientific evidence. You know, one of the main complaints that traditional doctors have around this stuff is where's the evidence? There's no evidence here. It's just evidence based medicine. We need to be practicing and there's no evidence for this. Well, B.S. you know, like just go on pubmed, the national library of medicine, which is all the medical literature that's been peer reviewed, it's, it's published, it's millions and millions and millions and millions of papers. And you type in anything, petrochemicals and autoimmune disease, mercury and autoimmune disease, environmental toxins and autoimmune disease, and you'll come up with thousands of scientific papers that document the biology of this. Because doctors don't learn in medical school doesn't mean it's not true. I didn't learn about nutrition, I didn't learn about the microbiome, I didn't really learn about how to take care of mitochondria, I didn't learn about gut dysbiosis, I didn't learn about insulin resistance and how to treat that in medical school. It doesn't mean those things aren't real. In fact, those are the major drivers of most disease. Now the bad news about environmental toxins is that there's been over 80,000, maybe more chemicals introduced into commerce and our environment since the early 1900s. And most of those have not been tested. Right. There's about 700 new chemicals added to the u. S. Toxic substance control act inventory every year. Okay. According to the EPA, there's 3.3. Now get this, 3.3 billion with a b. Billion pounds of toxic chemicals released every year into the environment. And these things are often toxic at microscopic levels, at parts per million or parts per billion. And we're talking about billions of pounds, not little microscopic doses. Globally, there's 22,000 metric tons of mercury emitted in the air from coal burning and cement plants. The average American who consumes 60% of their diet from ultra processed food, like I said, consumes 22 pounds of food additives, which many have been linked to autoimmune diseases, things like emulsifiers and thickeners. Now what are the toxins we're frequently exposed to? Well, lead, mercury, arsenic, aluminum, plastics, persistent organic Pollutants, pesticides, things like herbicides, glyphosate. There's even environmental toxins from pesticides that have been banned for years that are still in the environment, like ddt. There's although endocrine disrupting chemicals. These are metabolically disrupting chemicals. They affect autoimmune disease, but they also can lead to an endocrine cancers like BPA, phthalates, PCBs. And this is what's in the lining of cans on your credit card receipts. I mean, the. Oh my God. The environmental industry and food industry spent $192 million to stop an act called the Dark act, denying Americans the right to know. We kind of euphemistically called that about getting GMO foods labeled just to label them. There's also a lot of sol we're using in our household products. Benzene, trichloroethylene, carbon tetrachloride. Of course there's air pollution. If you live in environmental areas with mold in your house and mycotoxins, maybe we have to look at that. So the truth is we haven't evolved really to deal with all these insults and all these toxins and our immune system just can't keep up and they got kind of overloaded. Now, not everybody gets sick from these things, but many of us are genetically susceptible. And those are the vulnerable people. Those are the canary and the coal mine people. So how do environmental toxins cause autoimmunity? Right. What's the mechanism? They create oxidative stress because they're just poisons. And they create a depletion of our antioxidant reserves, which then creates inflammation. Because oxygen stress leads to inflammation, it can alter the gut microbiome. So these toxins can be direct toxins to the gut and they can cause a leaky gut. And that's what I had when I had mercury poisoning. I had severely. Now, according to a review paper, it was done by Dr. Dadis Kazarian. He looked at toxins and how they may be linked to autoimmunity. And he. There's many mechanisms he described. It's a detailed paper. I'm not going to go into it fully, but he basically said that autoimmunity can be negatively impacted by problems with methylation through epigenetic mechanisms, through various gene expression patterns that are affected by toxins. And we see this in monozygotic twins. Those are identical twins. They have the same DNA, but they have different phenotypes. So you have the same genes, but you have different expression of those genes. Your phenotype is the expression of your genes. Now research shows that the concordance rate of developing autoimmune disease in identical twins is 50%. Which means that it's common, right? You have similar genetics, but in half the twins who have autoimmune disease, they don't. The other half doesn't get the autoimmune disease, right? So it's not just the genetics, right? So something they've been exposed to uniquely. Now toxins also bind to receptors in our tissues and change how our, our immune cells or T cells behave and function. And that causes immune dysregulation. Toxins also bind to the nucleic acids in our DNA, right? The base pairs, they produce antinuclear antibodies and protein misfolding that our immune system doesn't recognize and react to. So in other words, when you're, your genes are not properly expressed, your genes are making proteins. If those proteins are funky and weird looking that our body isn't used to, it's going to what's that? And start attacking it. Also infections, as we mentioned. So when you're exposed to something like a virus, a bacteria, pathogen, even gluten, which is a foreign molecule, these contain proteins other than human proteins, right? The immune system goes, hey, that's not me. And they generate an immune response against that foreign material. But because there's similarity between the pathogens, antigens, little, you know, kind of identifiers let's call antigens are like the little fingerprints of the bugs and our body's own proteins, right? Then our, our own immune cells, our T cells and B cells can target and attack the host's own cells and make antibodies against them because they're mistaken as foreign. It's called molecular mimicry, right? Your body is trying to attack a virus, but that protein in the virus looks like a protein that's maybe on one of your organs. And so you start attacking your organ, right? It's called molecular mimicry. For example, Ms. Is one of these, these diseases. There are certain viral infections like Epstein Barr virus, measles, Chlamydia pneumonia. A virus called HHV6 may trigger Ms. In some people, right? They, they mimic the myelin protein, which is that coating of, that insulates all your nerves. Now the immune system attacks the myelin sheath because it's think it's attacking the bug, but that causes damage to the myelin and that leads to these weird neurologic symptoms. There's also a concept called bystander activation. Now this occurs when infections or inflammation activates a wide range of immune cells that are not antigen specific and they target bystander tissues. So healthy tissues that are not involved in the initial damage. So for example, type 1 diabetes, the immune system is destroying the insulin producing beta cells in the pancreas. And viral infections like rotavirus, enterovirus and influenza A, they can cause local inflammation, the pancreas, and that then causes bystander activation of T cells that then aren't specific to the beta cells in the pancreas that make insulin, but they cause their destruction. So, you know, the inflammation of the pancreas is from virus. The body's trying to deal with that, but then it attacks the pancreas by accident and then the pancreas cells to make insulin die, and then you get type 1 diabetes. So it's not sort of can happen like that. And also genetic susceptibility. There are certainly genetic susceptibilities and genes that predispose people to autoimmune disease. For sure that's true. For example, celiac, 35% of the population has a gene for celiac, but that doesn't mean they're going to get it right. Only 1% of people have full blown celiac. Probably 20% have, have non celiac gluten sensitivity. That's 1 in 5. It's a lot of people. And, and so it doesn't mean you're going to get the problem. It just means you're more likely to if you're not careful or you don't take care of your system. Right. So these genes influence the immune system's regulation, the development immune cells. So another big cause. And I think this is really where I start, this is where we start in functional medicine. It's relatively easy to do and it's, it's inexpensive and it can, can have profound effects. Is addressing the leaky gut. Now, what is leaky gut we've talked about in the podcast. But basically think of your gut lining, particularly small intestine. If you spread it out flat, it would be the size of a tennis court. It's comprised of many things, but the cells that line the gut is just one cell thick. There's one cell between you and a sewer. Think about it. You got one cell that's protecting you between you and all the poop and food. Now those cells are stuck together like Legos, right? Or when you're a kid, you play red rover and you all stick your arms together and you kind of try to bust through people. Well, those arms are like the tight junctions between the cells and hopefully nothing gets through except food that you want to get through, gets through the cells. So when you get leaky gut, that really leads to disruption of this barrier that protects you from the outside world and all these foreign proteins. And then you get autoimmunity. And it's one of the biggest factors. Now, a lot of things can cause that. You can get overgrowth of bad bugs, you can get parasites, yeast, bad bacteria. You can not enough good bugs, especially Lactobacillus akkermansia we mentioned really important that helps maintain the gut barrier integrity, bifidobacteria. And you get this thing called dysbiosis, which is just imbalances in the gut flora. And you have to have a healthy gut if you want to be healthy, healthy. Now, these bad bacteria release toxins. They're called endotoxins, also known as lipopolysaccharides or lps. And these are located inside the cell walls of these gram negative bacteria. Now, when these LPSs cross over a leaky gut, they can induce intestinal inflammation, or by themselves, if you have too many bad bacteria, they can actually cause a leaky gut and a barrier dysfunction and weaken those tight junctions, right, the Lego connections between the cells. And that can lead to passage of food and proteins into the blood. Also, is this something else which is really common that causes a leaky gut called zonulin. Now, zonulin you probably never heard about, but it's a peptide, a small little protein that controls these tight junctions. And when zon levels are high, it causes a leaky gut. And guess what causes high zonulin? Well, wheat, gluten and cholera, too. But most people don't have cholera. And zolulin modulates the permeability of these tight junctions between the cell walls of the digestive tract. Now, we can actually measure zoning levels in the stool. We can measure them even in the blood, and we can see if your zoning levels are high. And this was discovered in 2000 by a colleague of mine, Dr. Alessio Fasano, who's been on the podcast to talk about celiac and gluten. And when he was at University of Maryland, he discovered this during the acute phase of celiac disease. And so we now know that probably wheat and gluten are one of the main causes of leaky gut and autoimmunity. And so, like I said, if someone comes in with an autoimmune disease, I'm thinking gluten until proven otherwise, guilty until proven otherwise. So I really do a deep dive into that and make sure, they don't have that gluten related inflammation. It may not just be only gluten, maybe many, many things that are also driving them. Now, leaky gut causes systemic inflammation and autoimmunity. So what causes a leaky gut? We've gone over some of that, but we, we basically have a gut busting. Life is the truth, right? We take lots of drugs, anti inflammatory drugs like Advil, antibiotics, acid blocking drugs like Prilosec, steroids, birth control pills, all these things disrupt the gut. And then we get food sensitivities. Dairy and gluten are probably no top two things that drive leaky gut for many people. Lectins for some people. These are proteins found on many plants and vegetables, beans, some grains, nightshades. I mentioned also gums and emulsifiers and processed food, you know, xanthan gum, guar gum and carrageenan. And many of these emulsifiers and thickeners, even if they're from natural products like, like seaweed, can also cause damage to the gut and cause leaky gut. I mentioned toxins also cause a leaky gut. That's what happened to me. I had mercury poisoning, bacterial toxins and environmental toxins. Stress, all these things can, can cause autoimmune disease. So let's talk a little bit more about stress now. There was a really amazing study I read in jama, the journal of the American Medical association, where they basically took people who had rheumatoid arthritis and asthma, two inflammatory diseases, and they had them journal every day, 20 minutes, just. But not like, oh, today I went to the store and had visited my friend or watched this movie. It's more around what is going on in their life at a deeper level, what do they feel? What are their emotions, how are they processing? What are they thinking, you know, what's really going on underneath. And when they found when they journaled 20 minutes a day and kind of process the stress, their objective biomarkers got better, their antibodies got better, their symptoms got better, their pulmonary function got better, Simply by journaling 20 minutes a day as a way of reducing stress. And it's not the only way, obviously. But with stress we know is a primary driver of autoimmune disease. It may not be a full cause, but it certainly makes things a lot worse. What happens when you have stress? Well, your body releases cortisol and then cortisol affects your gut. So you can get a leaky gut from chronic stress, from cortisol. It can also change your gut bacteria, literally your, your gut microbiome is listening to your thoughts, literally listening to your thoughts. So if you have good thoughts, you actually help the good bugs. If you have bad thoughts, they actually hurt the gut bacteria. No joke here. It's pretty cool, actually. So you're, you know, every cell in your body, your gut microbiome, everything is listening to your thoughts, your beliefs, your way of seeing the world, your way of seeing yourself and all that really matters. And it can be modified. Chronic stress also, also alters your immune system. Why do you get stressed when you're sick? It's because stress causes your immune system to weaken, maybe disrupts your gut barrier, or maybe it's trips the gut lining. There was a study where they looked at stress scores in a group of people, and basically they gave them a stress rating. And then they injected cold viruses in their nose. And they found that not everybody who had the cold virus literally injected right into their nose got sick. Only the ones who had high stress scores got sick. You know this. If you're stressed, you tend to get sick. And more. So how do we actually fix this problem? Where do we start? I mean, in functional medicine. Dealing with autoimmune disease is really one of our core strengths. It's what we do at the ultra Wellness Center. I encourage people, if you're struggling to come see us, we can help you. I think it's one of those conditions that really is incredibly amenable to functional medicine. And you have to look at all the variables and you have to do all the diagnostics we talked about. There may be even other things I didn't talk about, go deeper. But where we start typically is fixing the gut. As I mentioned, 60% of your immune system is in your gut. It's where you get leaky gut. It's where you're connected to the outside world in a lot of foreign molecules. And so working on gut and working on your diet really, really helps. And sometimes that's all it takes. I mean, I. I had a woman who had ulcerative colitis. She was 32 years old. She was told she had to have her colon taken out because none of the drugs were working. Not the steroids, not the chemo drugs, not the TNF alpha blockers that cost $50,000 a year. Nothing was working. Now, she was not someone who believed in functional medicine. She was sent there by her uncle and as a last resort before she took her colon out. And I said, look, you don't have to believe what I'm doing. You don't have to believe what I'm saying. But here's basically the theory and here's what I suggest you do for six weeks and then let's check back in. And so all we did was put her in a simple gut repair program, basically take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff. I'm going to tell you what we did, but it was pretty simple. Six weeks later she came back and she says, I'm cured, I'm off all medications, my balance are normal, I don't have ulcerative colitis, and I can keep my colon. How amazing is that? And I can tell you, I can think right off the top of my head of at least five or six people who are about to their colon removed when everything else failed. And we fixed them pretty quick. So the first step is really to get your, your, your gut healed. And that involves what we call the 5R program of functional medicine. And it's basically just a mnemonic for remembering how to heal the gut. And also it's important to support your, your, your detoxification system. So, first step is get rid of the bad stuff. This is just what functional medicine is. It's a, it's a, it's a medical detective system that makes you identify what are all the bad things and you can't just do one of them, right? And what are all the good things and you can't just give one of them, right? So if breathing is good. Well, if all you do is breathe, you die, right? Or if, or if you have multiple things that are bad. Let's say you have mercury and gluten and you have, you know, Lyme disease. You can't just treat one and expect to get better. You got to treat all of them. So this is how we practice in functional medicine. So get rid of the bad stuff. What are the common triggers in the gut for inflammation? We just, just do a full elimination diet. Gluten, dairy, corn, soy, eggs, ultra processed food, refined flour, all grains. We take out beans because they can be problematic. We take out refined sugar, caffeine, alcohol. And I, and I created actually a program for this because I was doing this with my patients and I wanted something easy and not to explain things every time. And I wrote a book called the 10 Day Detox Diet. Now you can do it for 10 days, you can do it for 10 weeks, you can do it for 10 months, you can do it for 10 years. It's very safe to do. But, but actually reminds me of this story. I wanted to do this with a group of junior high school students and the, and the parents and staff of the school were saying, well, should we get permission from the parents to put these kids on this healthy diet? And I'm like, well, do you get permission to feed them french fries and coke and burgers and processed food? No, that's killing them. But eating vegetables, fruit and chicken, fish and healthy foods and nuts and seeds, all the world, that's going to kill them, Right? It was pretty funny. So you want to do a comprehensive elimination diet, and I think the 10 day detox is the most straightforward one to do. There is another one called the autoimmune paleo diet, which means taking away all that I just mentioned, plus nightshades and eggs and nuts and seeds. So not everybody has to be that extreme. But it's important to just do an elimination diet. Gluten would be again, the number 1, 2, 3. And by the way, you can't just have a little like, oh, I'm just going to be gluten free during the week, but I'm going to have like pizza on the weekend. Well, it doesn't work like that. If you have one little thumbnail of gluten in three months, you're starting from zero. Nightshades, again, are not a real issue for most people. Tomatoes, eggplants, peppers. But they can be a problem. So I encourage you to try my 10 day detox diet. It's really similar to the autoimmune paleo diet. It's easier, but it's less restrictive. And, and then you kind of do that ideally for four to six weeks, even the 10 day detox for four to six weeks, and then you gradually reintroduce foods. Right? So we say, well, I've been off all this time, I'm gonna try gluten, so I'm gonna try some pasta a couple times a day. And you see, oh my God, I don't feel good. My joints hurt, my rash came back, my stomach hurts. And then, you know, your body's reacting to it. That's. And that's all described in the book. And research shows that it works. It's not just, you know, Dr. Hyman's idea. It's not just some crazy functional medicine whack job approach. In 2023, there was a review published in the Journal of the American Nutrition association that looked at the impact of the paleo diet on autoimmune disease, particularly thyroid disease, Graves and Hashimoto's. And they looked at eight different studies and all studies showed improvement and two showed complete resolution of symptoms. Now I have two close friends who've had Graves disease, which is an autoimmune thyroid condition, where they tell you to basically take your thyroid and nuke it. They give you a radioactive compound, iodine, that basically kills your thyroid so it doesn't produce too much and then you have to be on thyroid replacement your whole life. Well, they were able to fix it without taking out the, the thyroid by a nuclear bomb basically. Now from this study they, they study researchers wrote, it was concluded that foods of ancestral nature, along with the addition of specific supplements, food components, exercise, mindfulness meditation and the exclusion of modern day foods can have a considerable impact on thyroid antibodies and hormones. Right. Very impressive. We see antibodies go away. This is not something you see with traditional medicine. The next thing you want to do is remove the bad bugs. So you got rid of the bad foods. What about the bad bugs? So you want to treat any infections that are going in there like bacterial overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, parasites, all that stuff. Get rid of that stuff, viral infections, you might need to be treating. Lyme disease, you might need to be treating. So you kind of have to work with all that. But, but even just doing the 10 day detox alone, a lot of people will get better. Cleveland Clinic I gave a lecture when I was first working there and this patient came up to me, was listening to lecture, he said, Dr. Hyman, I did the 10 day detox and my rheumatoid arthritis went away in 10 days. Is that possible? I'm like, yeah, it's possible. Because if it was caused by something you're eating, you're going to take away the thing that's causing your body to be inflamed and it works. That doesn't mean that everybody's going to get better in 10 days. It just means that for him it worked also. The next step is get rid of environmental toxins, contaminants, clean up your home. You know, get an air filter, get a water filter, buy toxin free skin care products, household cleaning products. You know, you can, you can get all that stuff at Thrive Markets, a great source for that and you can learn about what's safe in Environmental Working Group Joe ewg.org the second is replace what's missing, right? Address nutritional deficiencies, right? Which is important. High quality multivitamin mineral supplement. You know, you could take Phyto Multi Biomedagenics or Multi td. But also for your gut, you might need to replace things that are missing like digestive enzymes because a lot of people have, have issues around digestive enzymes. So there's immune Nutrients that help. Also you might be needing to replace like omega 3 fats. I like omega 3 rejuvenate 2 a day which is fish oil and just transparency. I'm an investor and advisor. It's a company founded by one of my main mentors, Jeffrey Bland. Also take, you know, take vitamin D. Really important for regulating your immune system as I mentioned. And then you want to you know, re inoculate which is really important because you want to put back healthy bacteria. That's the next R which is to re inoculate. And you want to take probiotics that help reintroduce healthy bacteria into your ecosystem. You can try my gut food which I develop for my own colitis. It's like a multivitamin for the gut. It's got prebiotics, probiotics and polyphenols. You can go to gutfood.com, eat probiotic foods, things like sauerkraut, kimchi, misho and so forth. You can take other probiotics. There's a lot of them out there that are really great. You also want to make sure you're, you're actually repairing the gut lining. Really important. So that's by obviously eating real food, anti inflammatory foods, eating rainbow colored foods. All the polyphenols are, are incredibly important. Prebiotic fibers from lots of colorful plant foods like are all pretty important. And probiotic foods are obviously you know, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, you know for yogurt. Although I would recommend goat or sheep prebiotic foods. You can have jicama and artichokes, asparagus and juice, some artichokes. There's a lot of really wonderful prebiotic foods only if you're careful. If you have bad bugs in your gut you can get into problems and you want to eat, you know lots, lots of these colorful phytochemically rich foods. And the berries are great. Certain things like akkermansia, love pomegranate, cranberry, green tea, you know, make sure you have plenty of non starchy veggies. Bone broth is great to heal the gut. Glutamine, collagen, lots of great things in their amino acids you might want to supplement with collagen or glutamine. Enough protein actually to heal your gut too from, from healthy sources. So pasture raised, hormone free chicken, omega 3 eggs, low mercury fish, grass fed meats, you know, certain protein powders can be helpful. Goat weight can be tolerated. But I encourage you to be careful of dairy when they're first starting out. Lots of good fats omega 3 is really important. And lots of good monounsaturated fats from olive oil. Things like almonds, macadamia nuts, olives. If you're going to use milk, I would use non dairy milk. Milks, unsweetened, unflavored, without emulsifiers. Lots of herbs and spices are great. Turmeric, rosemary, cilantro, cinnamon, all help the gut. And then you want to also do replenish, which is you replenish your nervous system, your body. You want proper hydration, like lots of water with electrolytes, manage stress, yoga, meditation, breath work, all of that is so important. Journaling, like I mentioned earlier of that study, we've studied lots of studies on meditation and inflammation and it really works. It really changes your gene expression. It really helps. So learn to do some practice with yoga, tai chi, meditation, guided imagery. I use this app I like Newcom where I basically go to this beta alpha wave state in the brain with binaural beats. 20 minutes I put on my power nap and I'm back. It's great. We knew that can really lower inflammation in your body. It can. And it can help regulate your blood sugar, your metabolism. Exercise also important, you know, just make sure you move your body is really key. Also getting in rhythm is important. You know, when our bodies are out of rhythm, they're out of kilter. So try to get your body in a nice cycle of going to bed and waking up at the same time. Get sunlight first thing in the morning in your eyes. It helps reset your circadian clock. Don't eat before bed. Practice good sleep hygiene. You know, just make sure you're having good sleep because sleep also is important for regulating inflammation. I like an Epsom salt bath. It works every time for me. Hot water bottles you will like or maybe cuddling your spouse, that's good. Also avoid meds that screw up your sleep, like sedatives, which may work initially but they can really disrupt normal sleep rhythm. Antihistamine, stimulants, CO meds, steroids, headache medications with caffeine also mess up sleep. You can take magnesium at night, you can take gaba, melatonin. You also do some, you know, guided meditation or imagery. Guided imagery at night, which is fine. Also really build a support system. You need people, right? You need friends, community. But also you need to find a healthcare provider, ideally a functional medicine doctor who's going to listen to you and be in your corner to help you manage, you know, the process of healing and build a long term strategy. Remember, your doctor works for you you know, you don't work for your doctor, so you need to see them as a partner. And again, I encourage people if they're really struggling with autoimmunities. Ultra Wellness center is a great place to come. We have a great team of doctors. We probably have over 100 years plus of functional medicine experience together. We've all been working together for 25 years, and it's just a great team. Pelvis is beautiful here in the Berkshires. Also, you need a nutritionist potentially to help you with looking at your diet and optimizing that and doing all that. No, you know, just building connection is important. So I have so many podcasts on this topic, so many books I've written. Just know when you have an autoimmune disease, you don't have to suffer. You don't have to have suppressive medications for life. There are ways out. Now, some people may need them, and they are a lifesaver for some. But for most of these patients who suffer from autoimmune disease, there is another way. And I want you to have it. I want you to learn about it. So we've come to the end of another episode of Health Hacks. I hope you enjoyed it, and I'm sure you're going to share with your friends and family who might be dealing with autoimmunity. And tune in next time for another enlightening episode of Health Hacks.