What is Inflammation Doing to Your Body?| Dr. David Jockers

I'm Marcel Pick and we're going to be doing the Women to Women podcast. And today I have the pleasure, and I really mean that, of introducing Dr. David Jockers. I've been kind of following David for a number of years and we've been running in the same circle. So I'm thrilled to have you on today.

Well, thanks so much, Marcel. I always enjoy our conversations and everything that you're putting out. So thank you for having me.

Absolutely. So let me tell you a little bit about David. David is a functional nutritionist and corrective care chiropractor. My son's in chiropractic school, so I'm all the more impressed. And also is the author of Supercharge youe Brain, which is a really important piece of information, the complete guide to radically improve your mood, memory and mindset. And the supercharged recipe book. And your recipes are amazing, David. So people really should just look at that if they're not going to do anything else. He's also developed five revolutionary online programs with thousands of participants. And this is one of the things that I adore about the work that you do, is you're going to avail people the opportunity to get better because they can do it in their own homes. These programs include eGuides, recipe guides, meal plans and video instructions including the Sugar Detox, the Cancer Cleanse, Navigating the Ketogenic Diet, and the Digestive Health Restoration Program, and the autoimmune elimination program. Dr. Jackers is a sought after speaker around the country around issues around weight loss, brain health, leaky gut, thyroid function, natural detox and disease prevention and is currently. This is why we're talking about it today, offering his Chronic Inflammation Summit. David, we hear so much about inflammation now and it's kind of the buzzword. Why is it such a problem? And what is inflammation doing to our bodies?

Yeah, and most people have heard the word inflammation. Typically what we think about is pain. And inflammation is very much associated with pain. For example, if you sprain your ankle, your immune system starts to basically break down tissue in that area and we get swelling and it's all part of a process to prevent against infection. See, we know that infections actually have killed more people throughout the history of mankind than anything else. So what would happen is people will be outside working or they would be fighting or, or, you know, like in battle or, you know, come across a wild animal or something like that. They would get a big flesh wound and bacteria from the environment would get into their wound and then it would, they would. That bacteria Would spread, get into their lungs, cause pneumonia, or into their nervous system, cause meningitis or encephalitis or something like that, and kill them. And so because of that, our bodies, our immune systems have adapted over the years, and we've created this process of inflammation. Inflammation protects us from dying from an infection. So when we get a wound, our body says, okay, that now we're at risk for bacteria getting into our bloodstream and killing us. So we'll ramp up immune activity and create this, a whole inflammatory storm. And when it's a, like a trauma or some sort of an injury, short term, this is a good thing. It helps actually clean up, break down damaged cells and allows the production of new cells, right, to form. And it's all part of the healing process. Help. However, the issue we're dealing with today is really, you know, issues with our gut, particularly a condition called leaky gut, where our gut lining is only one cell wall. So you think about our skin, there's many different layers in our skin. And, you know, it takes a decent poke, right, to break through the skin and get to the blood. Well, with our gut, it's only one cell wall, right? And so it's held in by these tight junctions, but they're delicate in general. And so when we're constantly eating and eating foods that our body doesn't agree with, well, and we're not producing enough digestive juices, like stomach acid and things like that, we end up creating more stress in our gut lining. We end up creating tears in the gut lining. And now large, abnormal proteins, undigested food particles, bacteria, yeast, different things like that can slip in between these, you know, the damage in the, in our gut and, and get into our bloodstream and then our blood. And then our body says, okay, there's abnormal proteins in our blood. And when there's abnormal proteins, our body again, is concerned about infection. And so now it drives up inflammation. With a flesh wound, we heal it pretty quick, right? We scab over. You know, we. We've all had these wounds, right? We create a cut, you know, so we have a cut. We. We create a scar, right? A scar tissue in there, and it heals, and it kind of shuts down that inflammatory process fairly quickly. However, with our gut, it's constantly being disrupted. So we're turning on this message of inflammation. And for many people, it's going on 247 without a break. And that's really where the issue is. Inflammation. Short term, acute inflammation, very good, very healthy, very important part of the healing process. But Chronic inflammation that ends up wind up causing a lot of problems with that, because when inflammation is elevated for a long period of time, it ends up damaging our blood vessels. It ends up damaging all of our major organ systems, our brain, and we end up with chronic degenerative disease. And along the way we're suffering with a lot of different symptoms.

So, David, one of the things that we also know is that people that have additional body fat, you know, maybe 20, 30, 40 pounds, for years when I was working with these people, we didn't have any indication that it was a problem. And now we know when you have body fat like that that produces inflammatory cytokines and the body works like additional body fat, especially around the belly, is like an endocrine organ. So it's one of the things that I talk about a lot. Can you talk a little bit more about that as well? Because that's really important for people to understand that notion.

Yeah, totally. So the visceral fat, where we start to develop this fat around our organ systems, the fat like you said, I mean, we used to think it was just storage, right? We're just storing energy there. But now we realize it's actually an endocrine organ, meaning that it's acting more like a hormone system, and it's producing these inflammatory cytokines. And the more of the more visceral fats. We have subcutaneous fat, which is kind of the fat on the outside part, like when you kind of pinch, like at your abdomen, you pinch it. That's your subcutaneous fat. But then underneath the abdominal wall where your muscles are, we can develop a lot of fat in there. And that's visceral fat. And that's the kind of fat that really is. Is spouting out inflammatory cytokines and driving up inflammation in general. And the major condition that causes that is insulin resistance. And so we know insulin is a storage hormone, and it's a fat storage hormone. It's a critical hormone because insulin's job is to take sugar out of the bloodst and put it into the cells. When we have high blood sugar, the sugar molecules themselves will combine to proteins, like enzymes in our body and create something called a sticky protein or an advanced glycation end product. Advanced glycation end product. The first letter of those words is age. So what do you think that does to us?

I had no idea.

What does it do? Accelerates the aging process. And what these things do, these ages, so highly reactive. So they. They react with all the endothelial linings in Our body, like our blood vessels, for example, and they create massive plaque. People think cholesterol is a problem. It's not. Cholesterol is like bandage. It's like glue trying to go in to try to bandage up areas that have been damaged by these. Age. And so age is going to like shrapnel going through the kidneys. They damage the kidneys, they damage the nerves. You think about somebody with uncontrolled diabetes, they end up with peripheral neuropathy, they end up with optic neuritis where they can't see, they can't feel their, their. They end up with a lot of different problems because these age really are destructive. So insulin prevents against this sort of glycation damage that, that occurs and it gets the sugar out of the bloodstream, puts into the cells. The problem is, and that's a beautiful thing when we're producing the right amount of insulin at the right times. But if we're constantly producing insulin all day long, because we're eating all day long and we're eating foods that are causing us to have to elevate our blood sugar and elevate our insulin levels, then we end up with a process called insulin resistance, where our cells now are no longer responding to the signal of insulin. And this is all part of the formation of visceral fat and inflammation. Inflammation ends up, you know, basically being the trigger for insulin resistance. And it becomes a vicious cycle where, you know, we're producing more and more insulin and we're producing more and more inflammation and we get worse and worse and worse levels of insulin resistance. And unfortunately, we go into the medical system and we want to get help for this. And what do they do? They prescribe things like, you know, more insulin. Right. They put us in a diet that unfortunately is not very good. Typically, a lot of these diets actually cause you to have to have higher blood sugar and promote more insulin. They're really not doing a good job from that perspective. Their medical treatment is really not good. And you know, the interesting thing is, and I know you've seen this in your clinic, Marcel, is that, you know, a lot of these conditions, insulin resistance, diabetes, for many individuals, like probably 90% of them, I mean, they can literally heal it in like as little as like three weeks, two weeks, right. Just by implementing anti inflammatory nutrition strategies, improving their sleep, doing things like intermittent fasting, key supplements, right, Exercise, some of these lifestyle strategies, you can heal a lot of these conditions quickly. Sometimes there's autoimmune elements that can be a little bit more tricky, may Take a little bit longer. But the vast majority of people can heal metabolic syndrome pretty quickly with lifestyle intervention.

Absolutely. And one of the things I'd like to kind of mention here also is there are women, believe it or not, who are doing all the right things. They're eating, they're counting their calories, they're exercising on a regular basis, and they are insulin resistant. And as soon as that happens, the body goes into lockdown. And no matter what you do, you're not going to lose weight. I know you're very much into keto. I use keto quite a lot, especially for insulin resistance. It's amazing how I can turn it around. I don't think everyone does well on keto, but I think in this case it is a game changer for sure.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, keto is basically a diet where you're eating food, but you're producing a lot less insulin as long as you're not having, like, a food sensitivity to anything. Because, you know, even if you were to, let's say, eat eggs, eggs don't have any sugar in them. Okay. So they, you know, theoretically are not going to elevate blood sugar. You're going to get very mild, very, very low insulin response eating an egg. But if you have a food sensitivity to the egg, then you're actually creating more inflammation, you're driving up stress hormone. Blood sugar is going up, and then insulin is going to go up. So, you know, in general, in theory, a ketogenic diet is a very low insulin diet. You really don't need much insulin, and therefore it's going to bring down inflammation. It's going to help improve your insulin sensitivity.

Absolutely. So somebody's asking the question, huh? How do I know if I have inflammation? What are some of the signs of inflammation? You know, how do they know? Because we want to get people educated here. How can they know for themselves?

Yeah. So different signs and symptoms, pain in your body. If you're experiencing pain and it wasn't like just an acute trauma, maybe that you just recently had, but it's been kind of an ongoing thing that's a sign of inflammation in your system. If you're having brain fog, mood disorders, we used to think things like depression and anxiety were neurotransmitter imbalances. You've probably heard that term chemical imbalances. But if we really look upstream at what's happening, the root cause of that is actually inflammation in the brain. And that's leading to basically an area, basically kind of like insulin resistance, where our Brain's not responding to the production of certain neurotransmitters, so it's actually an inflammatory issue. So if you're noticing these kind of mood issues, fatigue throughout the day, weight loss, resistance, that's another common one that people are noticing. Hair loss, skin issues like eczema, psoriasis, acne, these are all issues. Digestive issues, if you're having bloating, cramping.

If you're having constipation, diarrhea, these are all associated with inflammation. If you're having a lot of trouble during your menstrual cycle, okay, lots of cramping, excessive cramping, a little bit of discomfort, not a big deal. But if it' syou're noticing really significant cramping, bloating, lots of pain, heavy bleeding, that's a sign of inflammation affecting your ovaries, your uterus. I mean, you're an expert in that area. So, yeah, those are all, you know, classic signs of inflammation in your system.

And if we were going to really compartmentalize this and say, well, what are the three root causes of this? What would you say they were? David?

Yeah, I would say, you know, number one would be insulin resistance. Again, high blood sugar, so bad. So a diet and a lifestyle, I should say, because again, like you said, some people are actually eating a good diet, but they're not sleeping well, they're stressed out, and so they're creating this condition of insulin resistance. So I would say number one is insulin resistance. And that has really got to be addressed, and it needs to be addressed by optimizing sleep habits, nutrition habits, stress management. Right. Good movement strategies. Those are all really important. Number two is going to be leaky gut, like I talked about. So gut issues. There's also a condition called dysbiosis, where you have an abnormal balance of the microbes in your gut that kind of goes hand in hand with leaky gut. So those work together, and that's going to drive up inflammation. Number three is going to be toxins. So we're exposed to so many different toxins in the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the food that we eat. And if we don't have good drainage and detoxification systems working, if those things are backed up, we're going to accumulate those toxins, and those toxins are going to drive up inflammation in our body. So we really got to address all three of those areas. Again, insulin resistance, gut health, and then our ability to get rid of or eliminate, minimize our exposure to toxins and then eliminate the toxins that are in our system.

David, one of my kind of pet peeves in our world is that we don't talk enough about our toxicity around emotions.

Yeah.

And my thing is that we kind of. We oftentimes pass over it. Even in the functional medicine world, I don't think we dig deep enough into that, even including a spiritual relationship. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. Can we talk a little bit about that and your connection with your thoughts about inflammation as it's connected in that way?

Well, for sure. So if you are thinking thoughts where, you know, you're not living up to your. Like, for example, if you're frustrated about your life, if you are, you know, just chronically, you know, depressed, or if you are, you know, just feeling hopeless or just stressed on a regular basis, like you're being pressured in certain areas or you're fearful of things, that's all going to drive up a part of your nervous system called your sympathetic nervous system. And your sympathetic nervous system is all about fight or flight. And so in order to, you know, fight something or to run, you need elevated blood sugar. So you're going to release hormones like cortisol and epinephrine that bring up your blood sugar. However, if you're just sitting at home but you're stressed out, or if you're sitting in your car and you're in traffic and you're stressed out, you're not in a. You're not. You're not going to get up and run. So your blood sugar now goes up and you're not actually using it in your skeletal muscles. So what happens then is insulin goes up, right? And you kind of, again, you're starting to create inflammation. You're creating insulin resistance because you're stressed out. So we really need to develop resiliency, emotional resiliency, where, you know, we start to address and really starts with awareness, like, where are our thoughts? You know, what's going on in our mind, in our heart, and where is our mind taking us? And then just being aware of that, saying, okay, you know what? I'm feeling stressed about this right now. Taking a moment, taking some deep breaths. Okay, you can just do some simple deep breaths, and that can really help. There's also tapping strategies like Emotional Freedom Technique, where, you know, you're basically, you're breathing and you're tapping and you're saying certain things, and that can be really helpful. And then just starting to understand your own, in a sense, your own autobiographical science sketch. Right? So all of us have had trauma from early in life. And that trauma has left an imprint on our physiology. And now our subconscious is going to try to protect us from reliving that trauma. So let's say you felt rejected. Like for example, my wife and I talk about this all the time. Because her biggest trauma early in life was she didn't know her father, right? Like her father didn't spend any time with her. Her mom was 18 years old when she had her, you know, and so she always felt rejected by her father. Now she has actually a decent relationship with him. But she's constantly fearful of rejection and any sort of signs, like somebody just doesn't acknowledge her the way that she wants to be. She takes it like really personally, right? And she has to catch herself and be aware of that. For me, my parents went bankrupt when I was little. I watched my mom cry because our she had to give up her jeep. So she was in tears. So I thought. And so my parents, of course growing up, we didn't have money. I was always told we couldn't get anything. So I have fears around financial scarcity. So whenever something happens and I start thinking, oh my gosh, my money's running out, or I'm at risk here, I always have to remind myself, okay, you know what, that's just a program designed to keep, to protect me and it's served me to some level. But you know what, I don't need to fall into that. I'm in a good place in my life now. I don't need to be thinking these kinds of thoughts and I need to just have good balance. And really our faith plays a big role in this. So I remind myself that God fully provides for all of my needs, right? Even if all my money got taken away, my business, everything, God is still with me and he's for me and I can still walk with him. And so I'm constantly reminding myself, our personal self talk is so big in these areas. So understanding where your traumas are, where your insecurities may lie, because it's not like you just get rid of those things, they're going to be there. But if you're aware of them and you have like an offense where once you start feeling that and experiencing that, you start to address it with the words that you speak to, doing deep breathing, doing tapping, praying, we start doing that, speaking scripture or you know, positive things over yourself.

You know, that really gives you, that really gives you victory over those things. And with each victory, each time you experience that and then you go through that process and you have victory over.

Becomes easier and easier to deal with. Right. I know like for me at this stage, fortunately, thank God, I really feel like I've developed that level of mental emotional resilience where things are happening but I'm not reactive. Instead.

And I'm not perfect. I may react and be frustrated about something for 30 seconds, but I catch myself and I don't let it drag on. I'm able to calm my physiology, calm my emotional response and then that allows my creative mind, my conscious mind to come in and I'm able to start to create a game plan for how to deal with that, address that, start to speak powerful words of victory over it. And great things happen when, when we're able to reset our system like that.

What I love about what you're saying David, is that we have the ability to reframe our thinking. And I think that's where people get stuck is they get kind of the amygdala, the primitive brain kind of takes over and they go down this bunny hole. Is just understanding that once you have the awareness, we all have that kind of trauma. We all have it. You know, my parents were holocaust survivors. I mean, trust me. But it's reminding ourselves that we don't have to go down that pathway and we can change our lives. That will then decrease inflammation.

Yes.

So David, tell me a little bit about some kind of nutritional strategies that you recommend. We talked a little bit about keto, that's kind of, I'm sure, one of the ways that you do it. But also anti inflammatory supplements. What are some that you are your go tos.

Yeah, for sure. Well, you know, diet, diet is, you know, really where we start. I'm also a big fan of doing some intermittent fasting. I think that's a really powerful thing. Even if it's just 12 hours between your last meal and your first meal, which we call the spirit simple fast. And I have a whole book, Fasting Transformation where I really go through how to utilize that partial fasting strategies. I really think that's the most powerful healing strategy known to mankind is actually taking away right before, you know, necessarily adding. And so there's ways of going about that. I talk a lot about that. My blog and my books. When it comes to supplements for inflammation, I'm a really big fan of curcumin is a really great one. And resveratrol, these are just powerful polyphenols that are known to help reduce inflammation in the system. So a couple that I take on a regular basis are curcumin, which is the active ingredient in turmeric. Right. And you can also get turmeric, which actually has like over 300 different bioactive compounds. Curcumin is most well studied. I really like resveratrol. Really good for endothelial linings, like, like blood vessels, gut lining, also your skin health. Resveratrol tends to be really good as far as that goes. Quercetin is another one. Quercetin we find in like for example, onions, kind of the skin of onions, apples, things like that. And then resveratrols in the skin of blueberries, grapes, you know, they think about it from red wine, but really to get clinical doses, you really need supplementation for that. So those are great. Proteolytic enzymes are another really good one. In fact, I recently sprained my ankle, I'm coaching my kid, my son's soccer team and I accidentally stepped wrong and sprained my ankle. And I just took huge doses of these proteolytic enzymes. And it was like two days later I was running. And normally that would have probably been the level of injury I had, probably would have been like four or five days. And so I was taking huge doses of proteolytic enzymes. They break down these circulating proteins like C reactive protein, cytokines. Right. Different things like that. So they're getting in there, getting into your bloodstream and you have to take these away from meals, otherwise they act more like a digestive enzyme. But they get into your bloodstream, they actually start to actually break down these inflammatory proteins. So they stop inflammation right there. I find them to be really helpful for people are dealing with injuries, swelling, pain, pain, types of syndromes. Proteolytic enzymes are great autoimmunity, really good for breaking down the antibodies. So, so those are great. Fish oil can be good or high quality. Omega threes can be good. Glutathione boosting agents like N acetylcysteine, acetylated glutathione, liposomal glutathione or alpha lipoic acid. Also good for keeping inflammation down and under control. So those are great. Vitamin D for sure. You know, if you're vitamin D deficient, you are going to have higher levels of inflammation in your system. You're going to be more easily agitated by inflammation. So optimizing your vitamin D typically, typically I like to see that between 50 and 100 nanograms per milliliter. Okay. And if you are dealing with chronic inflammatory conditions, there's actually research out there shows that getting it up in that kind of 70, 80, 90 range can be really Helpful for keeping inflammation under control. So those would be my top ones. And then of course, probiotics or something to help support the gut. Probiotics tend to be fairly well tolerated by most people, but you might have to experiment to find the right type of probiotic for you. Some people respond well to the food based probiotics like Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus strains. Some people respond better to Saccharomyces boulardii, which is a beneficial yeast. Other people respond better to the soil or the spore forming Bacillus strains. And then, you know, some people do great when they get a combination of all of those. Right. So I look at four different categories of probiotics and depending on the individual, most people will do well on all of those. You may notice that you feel a little bit better on one as opposed to the other or a combination. But if you have a real sensitive gut, you might just try one of each of those categories at a time and see which one you feel the best with.

So you have a summit coming up. Tell us a little bit more about that and how can people get to know you a bit better and what are some of the best ways to kind of learn about the amazing work that you're doing?

Yeah, the Chronic Inflammation Summit is really a labor of love. You know, I interviewed some of the top experts in the world, including yourself. We talked about all different areas of inflammation. Inflammation in the skin, inflammation in the brain, thyroid inflammation, hormonal inflammation, gut inflammation. You know, we really covered the gamut and really deep dives into inflammation in these different areas and the best strategies, supplements and tools that you can be utilizing to help get inflammation under control. I really, you know, inflammation is at the roots. No matter what you're dealing with, no matter what your health challenges are or if you're just trying to prevent, you know, obviously if you're trying to optimize your health, you have to have a positive inflammatory process. You know, we, we don't want to shut down inflammation altogether. Right. But we want to modulate it, which is really about balancing it and creating a healthy inflammatory process. And we go through all the details in the summit. So I think you got your, the listeners will get a lot of value.

Out of that and they can connect up by going to what, David?

Yeah, I mean, you can look up the Chronic Inflammation Summit. Yeah. And then of course, you know, if you're looking for more information from me on my website, drjockers.com and you know, I'm on all the social media, YouTube, podcast and, you know, Instagram, Facebook. Just Dr. David Jockers.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Lots of rich information here to help people get healthier as they get older. Since we need all the help we can get.