LIFESTYLE IMMUNE SUPPORT: Preparing for Cold & Flu Season

Good day and welcome to Medicine Health. I'm Dr. Paul, and today we're going through preparing for cold and flu season and some things that you can do that you probably have control over in your life that you can do to help your body be prepared, help it be a small target. Our first section is going to be what I term lifestyle intervention. So these are things that probably your grandma told you were good for you and She would have been right, and they are things that can be quite helpful with keeping your immune system a little more spunky and involved in the fight, keeping you a little more resistant, making you a smaller target. And so that's the goal here. So the first thing I want to talk about under the idea of lifestyle enhancements would be sleep. And when you think about sleep, of course, we all know we usually don't feel that good if we don't get enough sleep. And enough sleep is different for different people. Certainly, there's people that can get by with less, and some people need more. Bottom line is you need to be having a good amount of sleep, but also good quality of sleep. You need to be going, you know, into all of the proper parts of deep sleep and REM sleep and all of that. And during sleep, your body actually has some regenerative things happen. So things like certain parts of your immune system can become regenerated, or they can sort of renew themselves overnight. Your liver does a lot of dumping of things that it doesn't need and needs to get rid of overnight. And on and on, let alone your brain function being better. So there's a lot of things that collude together in the world of immunity, immune resistance, and sleep, where that comes from. So when we're thinking about these things and we're talking about lifestyle interventions, I want to keep in mind that, you know, we're looking at cold and flu season coming up. Everybody is saying, well, you know, it could be a bad cold and flu season. I don't remember a single cold and flu season in 6 decades I've been around them that they haven't said, oh, it might be a bad cold. You could always say that. It's sort of like, well, you know, it might rain in the next week or something like that. And right now, you know, with COVID and all the other stuff going on, they say, well, you know, we're having increases in, you know, RSV and it could be bad. We could have multiple things hitting us. So this not being about specifically any particular bug, but cold and flu season being a time when we all get exposed to stuff, You want to keep in mind these lifestyle interventions are important just to make you a smaller target, make you more resistant. Now, can you do all these things perfectly and still get a cold or the flu or something? Sure, sure you can. But it doesn't mean that you shouldn't try if you want. I mean, you do whatever you want, but it doesn't mean if you're trying to do everything you can, you shouldn't do something. Now, so sleep is the first thing we talked about. There's a lot of regenerative things that happen during sleep. way beyond your mind. Of course, our mind feels it when we don't sleep appropriately, but our whole body can. And our immune system actually has some regenerative activity during the sleep cycles. The next area that we can do to be a little bit more resistant, or maybe a lot, is movement. And so you might think of movement as exercise, and if you do, that's fine. The idea with movement, really, if we boil it down to the basics is going to be we want to keep the skeletal muscle, the muscle that moves our body around and holds us up, we want to keep that active and working, and so we have more muscle metabolism and we have a lower amount of fat and insulin metabolism. Now, if we're working out a reasonable amount and we're eating correctly, etc., we might have some fat breakdown, which is a good kind of metabolism to have, But what we don't want is the pro-fat metabolism, the part that is stimulated by insulin biology and creates inflammation and all of that. It takes a lot of resources away from the immune system. So moving your body. And as we've talked about, and you can go back in the videos if you want or the recordings and look for all the movement as medicine things that we've done. But the bottom line there is that the more you move the core muscles, so think of your legs as some of the biggest contributors, then your arms kind of can get into react, and then your core muscles in your body. The more we move those, the more we have the signals sent out from muscle saying this is a resistant body. This is a body that is involved in repair and maintenance. And when we're involved in repair and maintenance, our immune biochemistry is such that it is also being vigilant for and helping with invaders. So foreign invaders like cold, flu, COVID, whatever. The other thing that we get when we move the large muscles is we get more circulation, and more circulation actually pumps more of our venous blood back through the liver, and the spleen gets to see more blood, etc. So we have a lot of immune cell contact with our blood, which is what we want. So if, for example, there's something that's come in through the respiratory system, it gets into one of the nodes, the lymph nodes, and the body has sampled it, and then that works its way through either directly in the lymph node, we may have some immune cells turning on and telling the rest of the immune system there's a problem, or it may work its way through the lymph and those signals through the lymph, and then they get into the venous system, and then that needs to get pumped around. those sort of signals can be seen faster the more active we are. So movement becomes very important as well. The other thing that becomes very important is, and it goes right along with the sort of muscle as medicine and this yin and yang of muscle metabolism versus insulin and fat metabolism, but the next really is our dietary control over that. So we can have muscular action and muscle control over those things, but also then We can look at our diet and we can set our diet up in a way that does the best job that it can at keeping our insulin production as level as possible. Now, we all know that without insulin we would die, and that would happen, so like a type 1 diabetic doesn't get insulin, they will die, and so insulin's not a bad thing, it's just in excess beyond what our body actually needs, which is easy to do for most people. not type 1 diabetics, but certainly most of the rest of us, and if you have certain genes, a lot easier for the rest of us, it's easy to have more insulinogenic or high glycemic food in our diet that would trigger insulin response than we really need, and so then the insulin can go around and it feeds into the fat metabolism and inflammatory biology, and that actually sucks away energy from the immune system. So So you can look at the glycemic index, you can also look at the insulin index, these are both online, easy to find, and you can look at the foods, especially foods that contain carbohydrates you're going to eat, and you can minimize either the glycemic or insulinogenic load. The other thing is that you can eat things that have multiple avenues towards benefit, so some of those avenues might be eating brightly colored plants that have a lot of fiber, but they also have a lot of polyphenols, bioflavonoids, a lot of other chemicals in them that are good for you, and also some nutrients. And so taking those in can help with a base of nutrition that your body would need. We'll talk about supplementation in a different video, but a base of nutrition from colorful plant material, then you can have a decent balance of proteins and fats and kind of keep your intake balanced but also keep your insulin triggering as low as possible. The other thing is if we have enough caloric intake through our macronutrients, so the proteins, fats, and carbs, and we have enough for our requirements but not more than we need, we're also less likely to trigger excess inflammatory chemistry in the body as well. So we've talked about hygienic things, stuff your grandma would have told you about, sleep, Your movement as medicine, also known as exercise, and your diet. The next thing would be more of a long-term thing, but hey, you know, we're hopefully all going to live longer than just a few months. And so this is something we can all work on. This is something, you know, I've worked on, on and off for a long time. And that is just maintaining a healthy weight for your body. And so the healthy weight for your body is determined by your body. It's a very individualized thing, so I'm not going to sit here and tell you you have to, you know, be a certain weight or look a certain way or anything like that. A lot of it has to do with your size, also to do with your frame size. It can have to do with some genetic factors and also how much muscle mass you have, because if you have a large amount of muscle mass, you can look like you weigh more than, say, standard for height and weight, but if it's all muscle, you have a lot of margin on the front side. If on the other hand you weigh a lot for your height and weight standards and it's all fat, you're just going to have a lot of that fat inflammatory biology going on in the body and that's going to be a negative for you. So anything you do to turn this shit— now, as we always talk about with movement as medicine and everything, we have to be careful that, you know, we can't make ourselves, you know, lose a whole bunch of weight in a couple of days, that's, you know, without surgical intervention, that's just not going to happen, and it's better if you don't need surgical intervention in most cases, but if you're trying to do it just by shifting your, you know, movement, exercise, diet, all of that, especially you might need some, you know, specific help, etc., and you get the right counsel, you can start to lose weight, and so this is a long-game thing, this is about being healthier, so it's not losing weight can be helpful for our heart, our whole cardiovascular system, can be helpful for other inflammatory diseases, be helpful for a million things. Well, your immune system is a big thing about getting to an optimum weight. So we're not talking about being a beanpole or being overly skinny or anything like that, unless that's your normal body habitus, and then great, that's the way your body is. But if that's not you, you just want to be to an optimal weight that your, your body has a good mixture of muscle and a minor amount of fat, which is a real healthy thing for your body. And then the last hygienic thing, which we got a couple of minutes here for, so that's good. I'll have a couple of minutes to knock this out, is toxicity through lifestyle. So we're not talking really about detox, it's just more of detox lifestyle things. So One of the things is to decrease exposures, and we've had lots of audio and video in the past on the channel about decreasing exposure for toxicity, so you can go back and search those. But the bottom line is the less processed foods you eat, the less foods that come in a package that you eat generally, the less foods that— especially if you go to the Environmental Working Group's Dirty Dozen, you don't eat anything on that list that's not organic— the less exposure you have. The other thing is, is that the other stuff we talked about, like moving your body around and recycling your blood more every day— so the more I move, the more I recycle my blood through, as I said, the liver and the spleen and all the other organs— the more we actually will naturally sort of detoxify things through the process. And then if our diet is rich in things that are not inflammatory, and it has a lot of those good flavonoids and colorful parts of plants and has decent protein and fat amounts in it that are clean, we're again going to be promoting kind of a natural detox the way that your body would naturally do it. The other thing that's kind of cool, and I just spoke on this at the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, it's a wonderful medical education group in environmental medicine, obviously. In that group, what I was talking about was GI tract toxicity and how we can lower it. One of the things that I came across then is that we have a lot of the foods that we think of that are really good for us as far as a prebiotic, so probiotics are very good for you, that's usually something you would take in a supplement or you might get a little bit in some yogurt or something, but prebiotics are foods that just help the natural flora in your GI tract do the right thing. So many of the prebiotic foods such as cabbage and asparagus and all of those things you look up, it also turns out that they have a lot of natural binding substances in them, and what that does is, in addition to the vitamins and minerals and amino acids and then the polyphenols, flavonoids, and all that other chemistry that these foods have that are prebiotic, they also feed the probiotics that you already have in your body, the good ones, and then sort of leaving behind, they have some natural binding chemistry in them that gets cleaved off when you digest them, and that will help if, let's say, your liver decides to get rid of a little bit of some chemicals, environmental chemicals, those binders can help you eliminate them easier. Now of course you need to have regular bowel movements, you need to be well hydrated, all of that stuff, but basically speaking, all of those foods that are quote unquote good for you, that are prebiotic, that do all these other things, they also have a detoxification help. Now, 2 things. One, there's no medical advice being given here. I'm giving you information, and check all this out with your healthcare practitioner. Also remember to like, share, subscribe, do the notifications, because we kind of got moved over somewhere where not a lot of people are seeing the videos. And also share if, if you can. drainow.com if you want anything else, but we're going to take a break here and we'll come back with a new section.