Food: Does What I Eat Affect My Immune System?

Consciousness in action, and you are taking action into your consciousness by tuning into Contact Talk Radio. And on tunein.com, hang.fm, and UpSnap Mobile. Contact Talk Radio. Welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. This is a show about opening up the often mysterious world of how doctors think. The goal, to empower the listener to gain access to the best healthcare Good day and welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. And today, if you're listening live, it's March 18th, 2021. And we're in, at least in North America, we're about a year into dealing with COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2. And one of the things that we, we had some programs earlier on about, and I did a newsletter about, was specifically around COVID and nutrients and immunity, etc. But I've gotten a lot of questions. I think partly because people, you know, are trying to think beyond COVID, which is really good, or we're all just gonna, you know, lose our minds. But also just thinking You know, holistically about our bodies and how things work and all of that. Got an awful lot of follow-up questions, especially from the newsletter about COVID and nutrients too. Well, what, you know, that's specific to an acute illness or maybe helping with a chronic part of COVID which are really good, but are there general principles or rules, et cetera, for food, diet, nutrition, and our immune system just overall. And so today's topic, you know, I titled food and immunity, and does it really make a difference, you know, what you eat and your immune system, your immune function, and all of that. So I want to take a macro look at that, and obviously there'll be a little bit of crossover, but if we step back away from acute illnesses, so, you know, you could get You know, you could get a cold, you could get the regular flu, you could get COVID, you could get, you know, any number of other infectious things. A lot of times, and many, many people are not in their offices, which is, you know, probably great. But a lot of times, you know, this time of year, you get through the winter, early spring, people are together and you get one person in the office that gets something and it works its way through everybody. A lot of times what happens, and this of course has been different, You know, in the last year in many, many places, you'll get people who are, you know, parents or grandparents, and then they have the grandchild or the child brings home something that's cooked up at daycare or at school, they get it, and then, you know, they don't know they have it, they go spread it to everybody. So that's just sort of the normal order of things. And if you didn't have an immune system, most of those things would just kill you. So, you know, your immune system really does a couple of things. One, you don't even know a lot of the times. you've been exposed to that just don't happen to you, you know, which is great. I mean, that's the ultimate function of the immune system. But then the other thing is when you feel sick and you feel like, you know, whether it's, you know, some inflammation maybe in your sinuses or your throat or your lungs or your joints hurt or something like that, or you get a fever, etc., that's actually your immune system working. And what we talked about in a lot of other programs, so if you want, you can go back to your whatever pod burner you like. It'll look at the podcasts and take deep dives in these. But just to set the scene, the immune system works like an orchestra. I talk about it being orchestrated because unlike other systems where there's an anatomical basis for it, such as the digestive system, the immune system is everywhere and it kind of needs to be everywhere. And it has some organs associated with it, but a lot of cells and a lot of chemistry. And all of those cells and chemistry have to kind of work together, or you don't get a good immune output, meaning you don't, you know, weather the infection you had or get past, you know, something that someone shared with you infection-wise, or, you know, you get a cut and if your immune system didn't work, you could die, you die of sepsis. Now, of course, the first thing about the immune system is it's not perfect. And so even if everything is working well, you can still get sick. And I think that's sort of a misnomer people have sometimes, Well, if my immune system is working so well, why would I get sick? Well, there's a number of reasons, one of which is you might encounter something new infection-wise you'd never seen before. Okay. So one of the things with, you know, when they call like COVID-19 a novel virus, just means new to us. We haven't seen it before. Or if you look at maybe a flu virus that, you know, like H1N1 that came around in the '70s, then again in the early 2000s, it was the same virus, but it had mutated between both of those trips around, so it became new each time. That's kind of what viruses like to do. The other thing is, when you're a kid, the reason that you get a lot of childhood illnesses is adults may have seen a lot of these illnesses, but you haven't as a child. So there's a lot of things that are, you know, age-specific and exposure-specific, etc. So your immune system being active and you feeling sick is not always a bad thing. It doesn't feel good, obviously, but it means that it's working. It means you actually do have an immune system that's working. But a lot of people, I find, you know, I've had conversations with people over time, have this bigger question, which is, well, does it really, you know, I understand, I, you know, the food I eat turns into the micronutrients. So the macronutrients that are on my plate, Get digested and absorbed, turn into the micronutrients that run my body. You know, I get that. Does it really make a difference what I eat on the front end as far as the way that my immune system functions? So you could answer that question on a lot of different levels, but what I'm trying to choose today is to be as practical and focused as possible. And so the first thing that we want to think about is, well, if we're going with the theory that, you know, what we eat does turn into micronutrients that feed lots of things like our immune system, the first thing you'd want to think about would be what is the immune system, you know, if it's not relegated to certain organs, which it's not because it's kind of all over, and then there's some organs involved. What, what way does it work? And what does it need to do these different jobs that it does? So the first thing to consider is the idea that the long, long, long ago, the immune system was divided up into nonspecific and specific functions of immunity. And generally there's some rules about what would be nonspecific and specific. And if you watch the study of immunology over time, you find that new research research maybe moves something to one side or the other of the line. So there are things, for example, that, you know, I was teaching students 20 years ago that were on one side of the line, and now they're mostly on the other side of the line. But for the most part, you kind of have these 2 big divisions. One is nonspecific and the other is specific immunity, and they're both fed fairly differently. Now they have some things in common, but They're, they're different. So there's a lot of the basic things that go into immunity that become important when you're looking sort of at your macronutrition, what, you know, the big things that go in. So in case that, you know, is odd terminology to you, macronutrients are literally the big things. It would be the amount and kind of fats and proteins, carbohydrates, hydration, you know, those are macros, right? Micro— Micronutrients are once our body breaks all that down, it's going to turn it into amino acids and fatty acids and triglycerides and vitamins, minerals, all of those things. And they become the micronutrients that actually do most of the business of running things. But it turns out your nonspecific immune system is somewhat dependent on certain things that are, are macro. So nonspecific includes things like barriers. So on the outside of us, if you're, if you're watching on the video version, I'm making a lot of hand signs. But if you're listening to the podcast, the outside of us is our skin is the largest part, and we can all see our skin. But what about areas that don't really have skin on them? So if you look past the edge of your lips, for example, into your mouth, it looks different inside there than it does on the outside of you, and it doesn't matter what your skin tone is or your pigmentation, your mucous membranes on the inside are different. And they're different by definition because they're built like your skin, but they're missing something, which is the outer layer of your skin that's more of a barrier. So one of the first things that keeps us from getting sick, probably most of the time, are these barriers. So if it's your skin, you know, let's say you look at the back of your hand or any other part of you where you have this skin that has whatever your color is, we call it keratinized skin. And so it's got an outer layer that's basically kind of sealed off, you could say. And then down below that is a layer that's very dynamic, and it's got new cells that are being pumped out and turned over and all of that. Well, in the mucous membranes, you look inside your mouth or in your digestive tract, etc., anywhere where there's mucosal surface, you have the exact same layout. down below, but it doesn't have that sealed part, the keratinized part. And that's good because if you think, if you eat food, for example, into your digestive tract and you didn't have a mucous membrane but you had a sealed keratinized membrane, you wouldn't absorb any of your nutrients very well. So it's good that, you know, that there's a bit different design there. But all of the— all those barriers, whether it's mucous membranes inside or skin on the outside, are basically the same at their base. It's what they do on the top that's different. So if I breathe or eat a microbe in that my body is not wanting to get into, into the inside, the barriers in the mucous membrane have ways of trapping it. If it touches my skin, as long as my skin's not been cut open or I don't have a rash or something, it's not going to get in through the barrier. So what would be a macronutrient thing that would be very important for the barriers? Well, it turns out there's a lot of them, but the first one is actually hydration. Hydration is extremely important for all these barriers, whether they're skin on the outside or mucous membranes on the inside. And we talked about this a lot early on in the, in the whole COVID immunity discussion. You know, most of the recommendations say stay hydrated. And that's been said forever when you're sick. You know, you can go, go back as long as you want, look at recommendations, you know, for when you're getting exposed to the cold or flu or whatever. The first thing usually is stay hydrated. Well, why in the world stay hydrated? Well, your skin is responsive to hydration. It's a little less noticeable unless you're really dehydrated. But if you've ever been real dehydrated, you'll see like the back of your hand, the skin will— Yeah. You'll pull it up and it'll tent up and it won't go back down. You're so dehydrated. But more critical for hydration are your mucous membranes, whether it's your eyes, ears, nose, throat, mouth, digestive system, etc. If they get dehydrated— we spoke about this a little bit with some of the COVID topics, but anything that's infectious— the mucous membrane that's covered by immune proteins in the mucus layer will get sort of spotty. It won't be nicely covered. And so I used to talk about that as something like, you know, like flypaper, these immune proteins that are, you know, they're covering your eye right now, your ears, nose, throat, digestive tract, et cetera. They're there on the mucus membrane and they, like flypaper, will trap microbes. Some are very specific in that they're looking for particular microbes and they'll stick to them and not let them in. And others are kind of general and they just don't let those things in. So that becomes very important, and dehydration actually weakens the barrier membranes. Now, obviously on your skin on the outside, yes, dehydration is an issue, but so is things like, you know, cutting yourself open or having rashes. Then you have an entree to get past the outer kind of sealed-off layer of your skin. The next part of your nonspecific immunity— so nonspecific basically is going to work no matter what. It doesn't really care who the, you know, who the invader is, your skin will keep stuff out if it can. It doesn't care who it is. There's also nonspecific sort of cell responses, and these are usually in your tissues. Remember I said that your immune system is everywhere, so inside of your tissues, you're going to have certain types of immune cells that will bump into other cellular material. And so let's say it's real peripheral, like, you know, under your skin, you got a sticker, you know, thorn or something. and there was, you know, some bacteria there. These nonspecific cells will bump into the bacteria, recognize it's not part of you, and some of them will directly engulf or eat that particular bacteria, or if there's a viral infection, it may eat or deactivate a whole group of cells or something of that nature. But again, these cells don't— they're surveillance cells, they don't really care who who it is, they just know that it's not part of you. So it's kind of part of the nonspecific area. The other part of that is this whole orchestration of, you know, well, how did all these cells talk to each other? It's all these chemicals, immune chemicals, things, you know, like cytokines or chemokines, and, you know, some hormones and some other things that all chemically speak to other parts. When you go from the The transition from nonspecific to specific immunity, you start to get to where micronutrients become incredibly necessary for the formation of these immune cells and then the communication that they have. Now, something that sometimes is, you know, either obvious or completely not obvious, so I'll just mention it. You look at your skin and your mucous membranes, Things like vitamin D, D like dog. Vitamin D is very important for lots of things. We know it's very important with immunity, and we talked about vitamin D and vitamin K and, you know, how these fat-soluble vitamins work. But vitamin D does a lot in the pathways that help to create the membranes of the body, whether it's skin or mucous membranes, etc. So among all the other things vitamin D does, it's actually very important that it's there enough for this. For the skin. And one of the ways we naturally make vitamin D in the body is when ultraviolet light activates certain pre-vitamin D hormones inside of our skin and gets them going to where the liver can turn them into more active forms— liver and kidneys. So vitamin D is sort of important to really everything in the immune system. But the other thing about these cells in the Communication is, yes, some are nonspecific and some go and talk to the specific immune system, and we've done whole shows on the B cells and antibodies and the T cells and the cytotoxic or killer T cells and all of that business, but that's when you get to the, the specific immunity or specific immune system. So rather than divide them up sort of artificially into you know, the ones that don't care who it is and the ones that do care who it is being nonspecific and specific, your micronutrients affect those guys a lot. Now, micronutrients are required not only to make those cells, so that would be things from your proteins like amino acids. Amino acids turn out to be very important in the formation of all of your cells, but your immune cells, whether it's the antibody-producing family or The cytotoxic, the T-cell family, they require a fairly large amount of amino acids. So that comes from protein. When you get protein malnourished, or if you have a maybe an incomplete amount of protein going in over time, you can actually have a decrease in, in not only cell counts, but the way that they work. So we don't always think about it that way because there's more You know, well-known things like certain vitamins or minerals that affect those guys. But if you're not making them to start with, that becomes a problem. Now, the other thing that's sort of a global nutritional need, and this goes to everything in your body because everything's affected, but all rapidly turning over cells, so whether it's your immune cells, your mucous membranes, we talked about your skin, et cetera, those are rapidly turning over. They're very dependent on a process called methylation. And that used to be something that people, you know, weren't terribly aware about. Now that people are more aware of the methyl donors, of methyl B12 and methylfolate, and people have heard of, you know, MTHFR mutations, you know, things of that nature, that's sort of been in the news a lot. Well, Well, the whole thing behind methylation is the reason it's so core, you know, kind of like having enough amino acids to make cells. The reason methylation is so core is it literally, it affects every cell when you get into cell turnover. But when you get to immune-affecting parts of your body, methylation becomes critically important because the cells and the places they come from that are, that are the formation of the majority of your immune system, and then the nonspecific things like your mucous membranes and your skin are bigger users of methyl donors. They require more methylation to make more, you know, DNA and nuclear material so they can turn over faster. Whereas there's other tissues in your body that turn over more slowly, so they still require it, but not as much. So methyl donors in, in the natural end of, you know, macro to micronutrients, are places that you would get, you know, B12 and folic acid. And so places we get B12 and folic acid— B12 can come from certainly animal-based foods. There are also a lot of foods that are fermented-type foods that have vitamin B12 in them. I think, you know, things like tempeh and other fermented foods is a lot more At least I'd note, maybe it's been around, it's been around forever because our, you know, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents ate them, but fermented foods used to be, well, this is a way that we can actually preserve food. So sort of a necessity. Well, now it's sort of made this renaissance comeback as a cool thing to do and eat is fermented food. Well, fermented foods turns out have a lot of, a lot of these sorts of nutrients in them. So folic acid, was named for foliage, literally. When they first found folate, they knew it was there, but they hadn't isolated it. When they first isolated folic acid, it was isolated from a— I was told this by somebody who had an association with the place. I wasn't there. But there was a silo at this university. And they decided that spinach must be a place where there's a lot of this Mythical folic acid or this this nutrient they're looking for, and they kept basically reducing the spinach down and down and down until they isolated what became known as folate or folic acid. And there's different forms of folic acid, but it's another big methyl donor. Well, now what we know is if you look at things, of course, dark green things, spinach, yes, certainly. Broccoli, cabbage, the whole bunch of things in the world, but many of them are heavily colored, you know, plants. There are often all of the types of folic acid within the one plant product. So you look at vitamins and they might say they have, you know, methylfolate and folinic acid together or something. There's different forms. It turns out the plants actually already have all of that worked out. So if you're eating the plant, you're probably getting Good amount. Sometimes you need more though. So these methyl donors, B12, folic acid, become super important. I bring hydration and B12, folic acid up early because we often don't talk about them as much in relationship to nutrients and, you know, and immune function, but they're that important to the degree that almost 10 years ago now, I was involved in a study where we took people with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia who are more have more of a propensity for a lot of different problems, but especially chronic infections. And we found that a lot of— a very high percentage of the people in our study had genomic defects that slowed down their use of B12 and folic acid. And when we corrected that, a lot of those people actually started to get better. So it's a It's that important. Now, the other things that we hear more about, and I certainly talked about these in the, you know, COVID and nutrition thing, but just thinking globally about everyday foods, you need to think about your water-soluble nutrients. So remember, the fat-soluble nutrients are things we mentioned, vitamin D and K. We've talked before about vitamin A and vitamin E. So A, D, E, and K are your fat-soluble nutrients, as well as, you know, actual fats like phospholipids. And you hear about, you know, good fats like omega-3 fats, etc. Those are all, of course, fats as well. But your water-solubles, remember, there's a couple of things about them that are very important. One of them is that we have to eat them and consume them pretty much every day because they're water-soluble and they leave our body. We store little bits over You know, so it's not like your body has the stopwatch on and at 12:01 it releases all of the water-soluble nutrients. But generally speaking, if you were to stop having an intake of a water-soluble nutrient, in a number of days your body levels would go down. So we see this certainly with vitamin C. We've talked a lot about vitamin C, although humans don't make it. Other animals do make their own vitamin C, so we have to consume it. Well, things like— we'll take a common pair that are talked about and why they're commonly talked about. Things like vitamin C and zinc often are talked about together. Zinc's, you know, big. We hear a lot about that with COVID certainly, but zinc is just important all the way around. Well, there's a lot of nonspecific immune functions where these cells go and basically just kill a bad guy that comes in that require a lot of zinc and vitamin C working together to pull that off. And there's other minerals involved in that as well. But if you think about it and you're, let's say it's cold and flu season and you're being exposed to a lot of different things, or you have young children around you and they're bringing home something new every week, you know, from daycare or school, your body's constantly fighting stuff off. So guess what? Your requirement for nutritional support is going to go up during those times because you're fighting more. You may not know you're fighting, but you're actually fighting more when there's more of these bugs around. So generally speaking, you can think of the B vitamins, so like vitamin B1 and B2 and B3, we talked about B12, there's B5, 6, etc. So the B vitamins, vitamin C, and then all of your minerals, those are all water-soluble things that we tend to need to get from Our diet. Now, one of the things about your diet and these things is, and I know, I know why people think this way, just because it's sort of the way it's been promoted over the years. A lot of people will equate vitamin C with citrus fruits. And a lot of that actually goes back to the days of discovering that vitamin C was required so that, you know, sailors didn't get scurvy, right? So true vitamin C deficiency is called scurvy. It's a disease where your mucous membranes start to fall apart and you get sick, and there's a lot of bad things that come from that. And so on, you know, on the sailing ships, they, you know, back then they didn't know about a lot of micronutrition, and they just realized, well, if we feed people, you know, limes, lemons, oranges, etc., they don't get scurvy. So it must be something in there about that. Well, things to consider are, yes, those are one way to get vitamin C, but I've had people say, well, when I, you know, if I'm going to get exposed to people who are sick, you know, should I just like drink more orange juice? Well, you can certainly. Citrus fruits have a reasonable amount of vitamin C, but actually they're not the highest vitamin C foods. Because the internet is both good and bad, but because the internet has lots and lots of things on it that you can get immediately, if you just put in your search high vitamin, let's say C, or high zinc foods, or high whatever you're looking for, you'll immediately get, you know, 100 hits. What I would recommend that you do, because the point we're going to get to is if you don't like eating a particular food, it doesn't matter how many good nutrients are in it, you're probably not going to eat it. So what you should do is sort of reverse engineer your diet in that respect and say, okay, if I, if I want to look for the B vitamins and vitamin C and zinc and selenium and all these things, where would I find them? And you can literally just start with vitamin C and say high vitamin C foods, go in and look. And if you don't want to read anything, Go to the images and they'll have these nice posters that you can pull up. And what you'll see is, yes, there's, you know, citrus fruits are in there, kiwis are big, a number of fruits, but there's a lot of vegetables that actually have a fairly large amount of vitamin C with them as well. So, you know, you'll see a lot of the green leafies and other vegetables in there that have plenty of vitamin C. So one of the things dietarily that really makes a lot of sense, if you have foods That are what we would call high nutrient value foods, they would be really good to include, um, because you're covering, you know, more bases with them. Now, like I said, you know, obviously there are things sometimes we have to, you know, learn to like to eat or add into our diet that we may not, you know, prefer or whatever. But generally speaking, you can kind of go and reverse engineer and say, what types of vegetables do I most like? And, you know, look for the ones that carry the most nutrient value or the mixtures of them you like. Which, you know, if you eat meat, which ones are, you know, good for high-density nutrition? Which ones are going to give me the kind of fats that my body needs, etc.? If you don't eat meat, you just want to be educated about what areas would I get the things that the meat would have brought in, such as proteins. There's a lot of protein-rich Legumes and other vegetables, etc. Where would I get vitamin B12? Because that tends to come more from meat. Again, the fermented foods help out with that. So the purpose of this is, you know, really to talk generally about diet because everyone has different ways that they, that they eat. Now, one of the things, and this is a doctor friend of mine that deals with a lot of people with metabolic syndrome, so trouble dealing with, you know, blood sugar and all of that, and they do a lot of work with dietitians. changes, one of the things that they always tell patients is, you know, you can make diet changes to help with your diabetes or your blood sugar control or whatever, but you want to keep in mind that any diet that you use can be made either more or less healthy. And that is incredibly critical to think about. So if you start with the way you normally eat, And as I say, reverse engineer it literally in 5 minutes doing some searches online about your, you know, the top 10 foods you eat. You'll find out what nutrients are and aren't in them. So you can start there and say, well, I tend to like to eat this way. And then it looks like, well, maybe I'm not getting a lot of, you know, B12, or I'm not getting, you know, a lot of vitamin C. What could I add that would be in the neighborhood of the way I like to eat that would, you know, put that in. And so that way you're starting with the things that are most resonant with you in the way that you eat. And as I said, you know, we all have to sometimes change things. There are things that I like to eat that I don't typically eat because they're just not good for me. And I have to recognize that. So, you know, it's a choice you can make and, you know, in the way human nature is, the more we feel in control of the choices we make around our And the motivation of knowing that it's probably good for you, or when those come together, you're more likely to keep eating in a way that's healthy. So when you're thinking about things, you need to think about, okay, the macronutrients you might have to shift for. For example, there may be certain disease states where your healthcare team wants you to eat, you know, a certain amount of protein, not Not a lot more, not a lot less. And so you have to look then at, you know, your protein sources, make sure you're getting in the ballpark, or they might, you know, want you to eat a certain amount of fats, uh, and, you know, not a lot more, not a lot less, or something of that nature. So in that respect, then what you want to do is you want to look for the healthiest choices within there. And one way to look for healthy choices is what, you know, take the example of protein, what protein source, whether it's from the vegetable or the animal kingdom, uh, would give me the most nutritional value? Yeah. what's going to have like a lot of nutrients in it, etc. Now, another thing that becomes important is when you're thinking about diet and eating, and, you know, everyone does, most people eat every day, is, and I truly believe that this is the way that nature is, and it's trying to, like, nature is sort of trying to call out to us creatures who eat the, you know, fruits and vegetables and whatever else we eat, you know, from nature. Color and taste has a lot to do with nutrition in many cases. Now, there are some colorful things in nature that are poisonous, obviously, so this doesn't always apply. But being that we live in modern times where we kind of know which, you know, which spices and which nuts and seeds and which herbs herbs, etc., are going to be healthy for us and which ones we need to avoid. We pretty much don't have to worry about that. You're generally not going to go to your local store and have to sift through the spice area when you're buying, you know, spices for your cooking and wonder if they're poisonous or not. They're generally not going to put poisonous spices into this, into the spice area. So thinking of it that way, since you're probably not out foraging You know, in wildcrafting. Some people do, but they usually know how to do it. Since you're probably getting food from somewhere that's sort of screened out the poisons, um, color is very important. And so when you're thinking of color, the first is on your macros. The more colorful a fruit or vegetable is, generally the more nutrition dense it is. Now, it's not always true. There are some things that are kind of, eh, and they actually have a fair amount of nutrition. Yeah. to them because of a lot of factors. An example of this would be like fermented foods like sauerkraut. It doesn't look like much, but actually has a fair amount of vitamin C and a lot of other nutrients in it. But if you're looking at, you know, stuff before it's cooked or, you know, prepared, things that have more color have more polyphenols in them, the things from the plant kingdom, more vitamins, more minerals, etc. So when you're looking, color is good, generally speaking, as long as it's something that, you know, you know, it's not harmful to eat. The other thing though that's important, and this actually does make a difference with immunity over time, are spices and herbs. And we've done whole programs on spices and herbs, but spices and herbs bring a lot of color, but they also bring flavor. And one of the things is, gosh, it's probably a year ago now, that I did this. I did a podcast on, you know, spices and herbs and combinations that are used in, you know, around the world in different, you know, parts of the world. And we all know that, you know, some of us maybe grew up with, you know, certain types of spices that were used repeatedly, but not a lot of others that we maybe learned about when we traveled or went to different types of restaurants or something like that. So some people, for example, You know, may have grown up eating mixtures like garam masala, and other people grew up eating spice mixtures like chili spices, and other people had, you know, curry, the different types of curry, and others had, you know, wildly different things. One of the things that came from that program, and if you just look back in the podcast, search for herbs and spices or nutrients from cooking, you'll find that The punchline of that really was when you look at the nutritional value of these spice mixes that are common to different geographic areas, and I think I used the example of say you know like garam masala versus chili spices versus some of the curries versus some other stuff. They all, even though their flavor profile might be wildly different. They all have very similar constituents that are very immune supportive and very nutrient dense. Now, generally speaking, you're not just eating the spice, you're using it to, you know, augment the way the food tastes or whatever you're doing with it, but it actually does provide a lot of micronutrient addition and a lot of things that are very dense in the spice or herb world, such as these plant chemicals chemicals, the polyphenols, etc., that are very good for you. So you do want to think about color, color, taste, all of those things. They do make, you know, a lot of difference to what you're doing. Now, other specific things that get involved that sometimes do or don't get talked about when it comes to nutrients and immunity. The next thing, so, you know, we talked about our barrier functions and hydration and, you know, the methyl donors and vitamin D and K and all that, very important. We talked about amino acids that come from the proteins that we eat in just making the immune cells. And we talked about the immune cells themselves and the chemistry involved. That's really a very broad nutrition involved in the chemistry around our immune cells. And the thing to keep in mind there is a lot of that are these water-soluble things, which is why they have to keep going into you. But the other things then come, you kind of think of, you know, the immune system working in layers. Well, when you get past the defense layer, which works on, you know, a little more linear basic sort of chemistry, then you start to get into the more complex immune interaction with maybe, you know, the, the surveillance cell that just ate the, you know, bacteria goes and shows it to the specific immune system that makes your T cells and your B cells and all that stuff. And you're going to make antibodies and you're going to set up killer T cells, all those guys. Well, then you start to get into a lot more chemistry that goes on. So you use a lot of these water-soluble nutrients, a lot of other things start to come into play, which come into balance. And we talked about balance before, and at least in the last 12 months, balance has come up a lot as the, the example of not having balance is what you hear about with COVID the cytokine storm or cytokine release syndrome. That's where you get an immune reaction that is supposed to go kind of up and down, and it just keeps going up. And so then you get very inflamed, and in cytokine release syndrome, you can, you can actually die from that because too much inflammatory immunity. Well, it turns out that in order to keep the immune system— because we want it to go up, and, you know, we might need to develop some fever, we might need to release some chemicals that don't feel good temporarily to make our immune system aware that there's invaders, that's great. We just don't want to keep going up, okay, because that's not the way it's set up to work. Well, it turns out a lot of what comes into that sort of second and third phase where the immune system goes up and down kind of like a sine wave is the idea that we need other— and these are all mostly water-soluble things too— in and around all of our normal cells and tissues to sort of blunt the upswing of the immune system when it's hit its peak, its pitch. And so that gets into things like glutathione. We've talked about that. Again, vitamin C comes in, zinc, magnesium, a lot of B vitamins get into the act. One fat-soluble vitamin gets in the act that hangs out in your cell membranes, vitamin E, like Edward. Vitamin E. word, vitamin E, and a number of other things get involved. But then you start to get into not just what's going on acutely right now in and around all my cells with this immune response, then you start to get to organs that need to respond and do things. So you have things like your adrenal glands that get involved in producing the corticoid family of steroids to help this immune system going up and down to modulate well, very, Very important there. Your bone marrow, your bone marrow where a lot of the cellular component of the immune system comes from, you know, that's where our blood is made. It's also where the progenitor cells for your, you know, your white cells and your B and T cells come from, et cetera. All of that gets involved with the bone marrow, is very dynamic. So it's one of those things that requires, you know, a lot of methyl donors, B12 and folate, and a ton of other nutrients. So it's working all the time. Yeah. And when you're getting sick or fighting things off, etc., it is a very dynamic place, your bone marrow is. Then also there's the monitoring and filtration organs. So you've got like your lymphatic system that— I always think of the lymphatics sort of like the outside excess drainage area. So outside your cells, whatever fluid doesn't go back into the venous side of your circulation, Gets sucked up by the lymphatics, percolates through, goes to a lymph node, which is why if you've got bugs you're fighting, say, in, you know, in your head and neck, and they percolate to a lymph node in your throat, you'll get a swollen lymph node. That's part of the reason for that. And that's part of talking to your immune system. Well, your lymph nodes, for example, are very dependent on all of these nutrients, especially the water-soluble ones. Yeah. Then you've got bigger organs that get into the act, like your spleen and your liver. Now, your spleen and your liver occupy, uh, kind of the opposite sides of the upper part of your abdomen, right under the edge of your ribs. So if you go on one side, there's your spleen, which is about the size of your fist, maybe a little larger or smaller depending. And on the other side, there's your liver, which takes up quite a bit bit larger space. But the way they get involved is they have an action of looking for microbial contaminants and these immune clusters and things that get in there. And also either doing direct immune activity or telling your immune system to keep going, that we need more immune function, we got a bad problem here. So for example, your spleen, People will get a swollen spleen sometimes when they have certain viral infections that are very, very active. Certain infections, you know, can make your liver swollen and tender. And that's where— that's when you go to the doctor and you're sick, why would they poke around your abdomen if you've got a sore throat or something? Well, a lot of it is looking for that to make sure, you know, you don't have a big swollen spleen or your liver's not tender. There's something else they should probably be looking for. Yeah. For. So if you think about it, you've got your bone marrow, which is very, very involved. And as just the— so the bone marrow is inside of, you know, the bone, obviously. Most people have seen it or seen pictures or something. When you're first born and you're little, you have a lot more marrow that's actually involved in making making blood cells and immunity and stuff. And then as you grow up and get bigger and older, the active, all the red marrow, the active marrow that does all this stuff is relegated to particular places. It still takes up quite a bit of territory for the bone marrow, but there's a lot of the marrow that's not that active. But if you look at it, there's a lot of places inside of certain bony areas that are super active. So you've got this big compartment called marrow that's active when you're, you know, working on your immunity. Even if nothing's going on, it's pretty dynamic. You got your liver, you got your spleen, you have the lymphatic system with the lymph nodes. And then you've got all of the— there's a lot of immune cells in the digestive tract, etc. So you think about that and you think, gee, that's like covering a lot of territory in the human body. And these are water-soluble nutrients, I must need to replenish them. Well, you would be correct if you thought that. So I say all that to partly just to talk about, well, you know, the immunity is a body-wide function, everybody gets involved, but also to say it's not just a small amount of area that you're trying to feed. So if you're looking at Um, you know, water-soluble nutrients for the most part, you know, with the exception of, we've talked about vitamin D and A and stuff like that, but water-soluble things that are here today and gone tomorrow. Uh, and you're talking about feeding cells and tissues and processes that are in most of your body. Uh, you better have some nutrient-dense foods going into you. So when you're thinking about that, this is why it becomes so important to look at your diet kind from the top down and first look at, you know, what kind of macronutrients are you putting in? Where do your fats come from? Where do your proteins come from that are going to make amino acids? Where do your carbohydrates and fiber and polyphenols and all that come from? And what's that doing to you downstream? If that is taken care of, you will have less need for augmenting your nutrients on the other end. Now, it used to be, and it's always been just common sense that we should get as many of our nutrients as we can from the food we eat and the liquids we consume. And so it's always been, you know, that's the first advice is eat your nutrients if you possibly can. But nowadays, even You know, the Harvard Health Letter and, you know, some pretty well-known places will say, you know, if you don't think you're getting enough, you might want to take, you know, a multivitamin or something of that nature. The way that I kind of look at it is even if you're doing really, really well on nutrients coming in, you know, through your diet, which is great, that's your main goal. Most people need some what you call kind of background insurance for nutrient intake. One way to do that is, you know, some sort of high-quality vitamin and mineral combo that just, you know, it's not a lot of anything, but it's a little of everything. And if you're going to do supplementing, that's probably a good place to start because it covers more of the bases. Now, if you go to the newsletter about COVID and nutrients, or you go to any of the past podcasts, you'll notice that, you know, because that's talking about an acute infectious process, I talk about a lot of supplements that are in addition To all of that, and in addition to what you eat. Well, that's for a short period of time to help your body deal with the infectious load that's coming in. Chronically, long-term, we want to get as much as we can from diet and then, you know, supplement or augment as we need. It shouldn't be the other way around. You shouldn't be supplementing and then hoping your diet, you know, fills in the balance. Now, other things that come up As we got a few minutes left here, I wanted to bring up— see a lot of discussion about, especially around COVID, because, you know, if you're listening in the future, you know, look up COVID. It was, it's been wild. But if you're listening currently, you know, there's a lot of people, if you're looking on social media, you're looking in newsletters and things of that nature, A lot of talk about, well, people who have a higher BMI, they're heavier, you know, don't do as well with COVID People with diabetes don't do as well with COVID People with, you know, cardiovascular disease, and just generally true, those are statistics that are real. But when it comes to immunity and diet and nutrients going in, the more other things you have going on is— so this doesn't have to relate to COVID directly, but any immune challenge, the more other things you have going on, big things like blood sugar control issues, including diabetes, being heavier than average, you know, high BMI, cardiovascular disease, things that affect more of your body, maybe inflammatory conditions of your digestive tract, et cetera. Those— the way you want to think about them is they're things we can work on in different ways, but we have to start where we're at. So if you already are a type 2 diabetes person and your BMI is higher than it ought to be, yes, you can work on getting your BMI down, you're changing your diet and all that. But you have to think about, we have to do the best we can with the underlying disease we have while we're we work on that. Those things just make the effort you need to put into, you know, feeding and caring for your immune system more important. And it might mean you need a little bit more, maybe specific help or maybe specific nutrition. Now with things like higher BMI and diabetes, one of the things that's in common with those that make us not as you know, easy to fight off infections or, you know, might have more complications is when your BMI, your, you know, your body mass index is elevated, especially if there's, you know, a higher fat percentage and/or you have, say, diabetes, you're more inflamed. If you're more inflamed to start with and then you get sick, there's the pro-inflammatory part of getting an infection. That's when things can get kind of uncontrolled, and then you develop, you know, blood clots and other things of that nature. So the best advice is to do everything that you can to work on your under, whether it's cardiovascular or digestive system disease or diabetes, you know, high BMI, etc. Do the best you can to work on that stuff, a lot of which does have to do with your diet. But make sure that you're getting enough of the micronutrients to feed your system. While your system is having to deal with all of the stressors and the inflammatory problems that come along. So to go back through and break it down, you want to remember that there's general things that you need to keep in mind, like staying hydrated, which is very hard for some people to do, but, you know, keep an empty glass if you have to that you fill up and drink throughout the day. Sleep. We didn't really talk about sleep, but sleep is actually very crucial to your immune function. Moving your body around. So these are just basic things that you can be doing. Your mental-emotional state actually gets involved. And then you want to think about digesting. If you're going to eat good foods and they don't turn into the right micronutrients, it's sort of not worthwhile. So remember, we've talked about digestion, but having Sometime where you slow down while you're eating so your autonomic nervous system helps you to digest the food. That's really, really important. And then your macronutrients that turn into micronutrients. Look up what you eat, see what nutrients are there. Look at, you know, am I eating an appropriate amount of fat and protein, or do I need maybe some more protein so I've got enough amino acids to come in? A lot of people, you know, we tend in different directions. I see some people, they just naturally, you look at their diet overall and they're getting good micronutrients and stuff, but they're just not getting enough protein or, you know, maybe not enough fat or something of that nature. So look at that. But like I said, start with what you like to eat and what you commonly eat. You can look up those common foods, what nutrients are in them, and then trim away the things that are going to be pro-inflammatory. Yeah. You know, things, you know, like extra fats that you don't need can be pro-inflammatory. You know, alcohol and other, you know, sugary drinks and all of that stuff, you know, those are sort of things that, that, that can be marginalized in your diet, and you'll wind up with a more nutrient-dense diet. But the biggest thing is, is that the nutrients have to go in because we don't store most of these up. Most are water soluble, and without the nutrients going in on a regular basis, we don't mount the immune response we need every day that actually keeps us alive. Now, I mentioned the, and we'll have a new newsletter coming out pretty soon about all this. But if you go to, there's a new website I have to make it easier for people to find things. It's DRA Now. So DRA. D-R-A-N-O-W, Dr. A Now, dranow.com. You can go there and we have the catalog of newsletters. We're going to put different blog posts up. We have things about the books and we have things about other things that I've written and resources that are up there. And there's a portal to the podcast and all the media and stuff. People have been asking if I could, because I have the professional website, but this is just for anybody, easy way to get into the gateway for Dr. Andersen info. So dranow.com, so dranow.com, new website, check that out. It's got a lot of information. But we are out of time for today. I'm Dr. Paul Andersen with Medicine and Health and Doc— from Dr. Andersen. That's me still. And I'll see you all on the radio next week. Thanks. You've been listening to Medicine and Health with your host, Dr.