THE IMMUNE SYSTEM RECOVERY PLAN | 4 STEPS | DR. SUSAN BLUM

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They're not just trackers. I'm gonna wear this and it's gonna help me do the right thing. Wellness force radio episode 109 with the author of the immune system recovery plan, Dr. Susan Bl.

So first is where does health come from? And so we know the immune system sort of develops and grows in the gut as an adult, and so we need good gut health. But in terms of the other stress and toxins and even food, when you start really looking at the literature and the research on autoimmunity, allergies, all the things that trigger dysfunction in the immune system, there's very good research looking at these things.

What's up, my friend? It's Josh Trent. And welcome back to to another episode. This is your weekly access to global experts in all things wellness, behavior change and new technologies. In this podcast, together we'll discover the connections between our emotions and healthy habits to live life well and enjoy the process. This podcast is brought to you by Perfect Supplements, a company who actually walks the talk with their values of pesticide free, non GMO real food supplements that fuel us for the wellness journey, save money, support the show, get more wellness in the process, head over to perfectsupplements.com wellnessforce Enter code wellnessforce to save 10% off your entire order. Hey, thanks for being here. If you've been listening to the show for a while or if you're brand new, shoot me a message today. Joshellnessforce.com, let me know what you're working on in your wellness, especially if last week's show made an impact for you. Our show titled what's Eating youg About Our Self Narrative for Body Image, I want to know. I've been getting a lot of email requests from the audience around habit formation and creating a new inner dialogue. It's definitely a path I want to explore a lot more of for wellness force in 2017 and as a segue to how we look at the body from our mind's eye. On today's show, we're talking about something that's often overlooked by most nutrition and lifestyle plans, and it's that deeper voice inside of our body that's connected to and speaks to us every day about our gut, health and our immune system. With Dr. Susan Blum. Specifically, what happens if over the course of life and stress and travel, we've developed an autoimmune disease over time. How do we fight back again from where we are today to regain some vibrant health and mental clarity and physical strength? If you've been trying to let go of weight for a long time, or if you felt constant fatigue after many months, there are some key action steps you can take beyond diet and exercise that will address the potential of an autoimmune disease that's blocking you. I was fortunate enough to come across Dr. Susan Blum's work after hearing about her on the Dr. Oz show and all over social media, because this is someone who's going to give us the academic and the personal experience of what it really takes to identify and work through an autoimmune disease. What I loved most about this episode and what I think the true mark of intelligence is for all of us is having the ability to take a really complicated topic like autoimmune disease and break it down into four actionable steps, which is what you're gonna learn today on the show from Dr. Blum. Using food as medicine, understanding our stress connection, improving gut health, and supporting and detoxifying the liver. She breaks down the key sections of her book, the Immune System Recovery Plan. And if you've been curious about functional medicine, which I know we've talked a lot about on the show in the past 10 episodes, to heal the mind. And this is going to be a great one for you as we take a peek behind the curtain of where many programs stop so we can understand these inner workings of how our immune system gives us energy and really is the thing that allows us to let go of the weight. This is one of my favorite shows we've had about autoimmune, and we're diving deep for one of my favorite quotes right now, which really sums up what you're about to hear from Dr. Blum. She says the number one most important influence on your gut microbiome is food. Vegetables and foods with fiber and vital nutrients feed the good bacteria and help it flourish. Think of your gut like a garden, and what you feed it will determine what grows in it. So you can either grow flowers with good food or weeds with bad food. Okay, let's get into this educational and Inspiring Conversation with Dr. Susan Blum. Be sure to stick around to the end of the show where she talks about her medical symptom questionnaire from the Blum center for Health. You can get that at the show notes page today. All right, let's step in with Dr. Susan Blum. Dr. Susan Blum is a world renowned physician talented author who writes both from the personal and clinical experience, and a dedicated mother who is passionate about identity and addressing the root causes of chronic illness through the groundbreaking whole body approach known as functional medicine. Together with her colleagues, she is helping to transform our healthcare system. Dr. Blum is a clinical professor in the Department of Preventative Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City and has been treating and preventing chronic disease for over a decade. She is the founder of the Blum center for Health in New York, advisor to the Institute of Functional Medicine and sits on the medical advisory board for the Dr. Oz Show. Dr. Blum, welcome to Wellness Force Radio.

Oh, thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

What an honor. We, we were talking for a few minutes before we recorded this show's Close to My Heart because I have multiple family members that have and have currently suffered with autoimmune illness. So what we talk about on this show is something that's affecting 24 million plus people and growing. So Dr. Blum, before we get into that and really unpacking what autoimmune illness is and how we can transcend that, there's so much about you online. You've been on, Dr. Oz. There's videos of you on YouTube. I meet millions of views, you know, millions of downloads. We I'm curious, what's something that is not online that most people don't know about you?

You know, I guess I would just say that I'm like everyone else. You know, I'm a woman, a mother, I'm a human being who really struggles in my own way to do everything that I want to do, you know, keeping balance. You know, I have the same struggles as everyone else. So even though I'm doing a million things, you know, I'm just like you. And I think that's something I like to share. I don't know. I'm a nature lover. I love my dog. Getting outside for me is oxygen. I guess that might be something just in terms of me on a personal note. But you, I have, I have a passion, I have a sense of urgency to keep going, to try to get the word out for everything that I want to share with people.

And I feel that in your work because you have a personal story that's connected to this. You know, we have over 100 autoimmune diseases and more. There's a lot of opinions, Dr. Blum, about why our population is struggling and why these diseases keep coming up and in your book, what I love so much is you take this complicated subject, which is the immune system, and you boil it down to four things we can do on a practical and pragmatic level, which is honestly the true mark of intelligence. Right. How do you take something really big and then push it down to something that can be explained to all? Let's talk about this. The first one is using food as medicine. Next is understanding our stress connection. And then, of course, gut health, which we've talked about with Dr. Perlmutter on the show. And then lastly, supporting the liver. Out of all your experience over a decade and more, why does it boil down to these four from a functional.

Medicine perspective and just to sort of put out there about functional medicine. So I think of it as really the new specialty on the block. It's really an emerging or emerged new medical specialty where we look for the root cause of illness. You know, functional medicine is about not just treating symptoms or trying to label someone with a disease in order to treat them, but to figure out where those triggers are. You know, we're looking at the roots of the body, the roots of where disease comes from, where symptoms come from, and what those imbalances might be, as the word function sort of indicates. So we're looking for where are things not functioning right? And, you know, instead of this black and white of disease, we're in that gray zone. So let's find the function and let's figure out what's not working. And so when you dig into the roots of an immune system and what can cause or trigger the malfunctioning of the immune system, which really autoimmune disease, a lot of people think it's an overactive immune system, but I like to help people understand it's more of a dysfunction. It's just not working right. It maybe is turning on when it's not supposed to and attacking yourself, but maybe it's turning on appropriately but not turning off when it's supposed to, you know, and so there's all sorts of things that can go wrong. And when you really study the literature and research, and this is conventional research and scientific research, and understand where the immune system develops in the body and what it needs to be healthy, if you look at the coin of what is health, what's a healthy immune system, we learn that, for example, the gut is home to 70% of the immune system. And I know we're going to dig into that. So in terms of me coming up with this food, stress, gut toxins thing, you know, when you read the research about autoimmunity. So first is, where does health come from? And so we know the immune system sort of develops and grows in the gut as an adult, and so we need good gut health. But in terms of the other stress and toxins and even food, when you start really looking at the literature and the research on autoimmunity, allergies, the things that trigger dysfunction in the immune system, there's very good research looking at these things. There's research looking at, you know, autoimmunity and people exposed to pesticides and certain toxins and metals in factories. You know, so people have been looking at this. People have been studying the mechanism of how that happens. And so for me, and so from functional medicine, it's just so exciting to then synthesize and put all that together. Because whereas in conventional or even in academic medicine, we might see those studies and say, okay, well, so toxins matter and they can harm the immune system. And okay, well, gut health matters, and that's important for helping the immune system. And, oh, okay, well, stress really matters. We see how that affects the immune system and even food and how it triggers food sensitivities. Okay, fine. But what functional medicine does and what I was able to put together, as you say, and I appreciate in a coherent way in the book, is we have an approach to treating those things, to repairing the gut and getting those toxins out of the body and how to manage stress and how to measure that and how to work with people with their stress and hormone system and how to work with food, functional medicines, nutritional medicine. So that while we might in academic and conventional medicine and research understand those connections were always there about what damages the immune system, what this whole new medicine and the whole sort of the future of medicine, the 21st century medicine, now functional medicine, is now we have the tools to actually or for people, how to fix those things.

And what's really unique about your background is you're medically trained, you have a traditional path, and then at some point, you veered. And we'll talk about a piece of your story that I loved, where you had this kind of gut check moment.

Yes.

But you decided that you wanted to be more preventive in your care rather than just treating the symptoms. And we've had Reed Davis on the show. I'm sure you're familiar with his work, where he talks about chaos that happens in the body when synergistic systems stop working and things stop supporting one another. You know, the first paper from the autoimmune registry.org was written in 1997, and back then there was only 9 million recorded cases of autoimmune. That's ballooned up to 24 million-plus. What are some of the commonalities as to why that's happened?

There's a whole list of things, I think, that have contributed to it, and it's really a fascinating sort of referendum on what's happened in our. Our society and our world and our culture in the past 50 years. So I guess, number one, I would say that in general, our gut health has deteriorated as a general population in society. And I think that there's all sorts of reasons for that. And they range from the microbiome of how well being born and C sections and the vaginal deliveries where, you know, the babies aren't getting the kind of developing healthy microbiome like they should. And there's a lot of research on how babies are born, but also the hygiene hypothesis that they need to eat dirt and not be so clean, you know, because then we tones the immune system and they get that exposure that they need to all those microbes.

Kids should play in the playground.

That kids should play in the playground. They should eat dirt, don't wash the vegetables, don't make everything so clean. Right. So there's how we develop when we're young, all the antibiotics that are used in kids, you know, the ear infections. And then why are we using all those ear infections? Why is everyone taking in all the antacids and the reflux and the gerd? And why do we have all these digestive symptoms? And I think that does still come back to our food supply and how our food supply has changed. That affects the gut in a very, very big. But it also has its own triggers for autoimmunity. Right. And so why is more autoimmunity than we talk about food, you know, and the food supply has completely changed, so. And a lot of people like to talk about gluten, and we could come back to that in a sec. But I want to talk more about other big things, like the way we raise our animals and the kinds of fat that we're eating and processed foods and GMOs which are been shown to damage the gut, the genetically modified organisms that are in now a lot of our soy and our corn and the pesticides, the amount of Roundup and this whole glyphosate thing, which is crazy that we could measure levels in every person of glyphosate in the United States. And that brings us over to toxins. I tell My patients that we're basically all living in a toxic soup. A lot of what we've done is a grand experiment on ourselves that we just are not going to know the effects of for another 50 years. Or maybe we're seeing now because even things like leaded gasoline, who knew and who knew that the coal factories would spew the mercury into the air that would then end up in the oceans and now we're up in our food supply and the mercury level and mercury triggering autoimmunity is very big. And all the silver fillings that everybody used 50 years ago, you know, all these things we've just done and we did not have a clue about the long term repercussions. And so we're all exposed to toxins. And I think that our gut health, our toxins and the stress environment we're living in and we're just different organisms than we were and we're living in a different environment.

And things are so different now in our modern industrialized society where we have incredible amounts of stress. You know, if we look back, whether you're Paleo or not, it doesn't matter. It's really what is our system, what is our parasympathetic and sympathetic branch designed for? It's designed for, you know, arduous bouts of stress, but then adequate rest. And what we have now in this current society is a constant drip of stress that happens all throughout the day. And you found out about this when you were going through medical school. This allowed you to learn about your Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

Yes.

So that's what I love about you, is that you're a medically trained physician. You also have an introspection as to alternative medicine and functional medicine and you have the background of healing. Hashimoto's thyroiditis. Can you take a breath with us and drop into that time, what that was like? I know you've talked about it before, but it's a very serious thing for a lot of people. So what was that like in that moment for you?

The Hashimoto's took me by surprise because I was actually after my second child I think. So I was already out of medical school and actually wasn't even close to a pregnancy. I was just healthy. I thought I was doing great. You know, I was exercising, I was a little tired, but I was not, you know, as, as young mothers or working young mothers. You know, you just push yourself through, you know, okay, I'm a little tired, but okay, I'm just getting up and going and I Look, I got through medical school and all that training, and we learn how to just keep going. It was very interesting, actually. My friend said to me, you know, your hands are yellow. And I thought, wow, that's really weird. My hands are yellow. And. And so I actually took myself to my primary care doctor because we all need our own doctor. And he ran a beta car, he ran my thyroid tests and turned out that I had Hashimoto's and I was a little hypothyroid. And. And apparently what I learned is that high beta carotene levels are a soft sign of low functioning thyroid because you need thyroid hormone to take your beta carotene and convert it into vitamin A in the body. And so I was struggling to convert my beta carotene. So I was in fact yellow, a little yellow. And so he diagnosed me and I was sort of blown away because I thought from a conventional perspective, I was doing everything healthy. You know, I mean, I thought I was doing everything right, but it turned out that, I mean, I was eating a lot of fish and it was right at the same time, parallel to that. So I then decided I need to figure out why I have this, because this doesn't make any sense to me. You know, I'm doing everything right from health habits. I'm eating what I think is healthy, I'm exercising. I was in good shape and I thought I was sleeping and, you know, my life was. I thought, okay. But it turned out, you know, sort of like an iceberg. I had all this stuff under the surface that I didn't know about, and I set about trying to sort it out.

How many people do you think have that iceberg? In America, you know, 24 million cases plus are actually on record. But how many people have the iceberg?

Oh, probably three times that amount. And actually there's a group that I'm talking to now about studying that, about doing some screening, like studies to look at, you know, in an undiagnosed population who has markers already in the blood.

That is fascinating.

Yeah. Because I think that there's a lot. And I know my practice, there are. Because every new patient that comes in, whether they have autoimmunity or not, I always do thyroid antibodies and I always check them for an ana, which is another just screening test for autoimmunity. And so I go looking for it, you know, in everybody. But don't forget people that come to see me, three quarters of them are struggling with something, some chronic symptom that no one could figure or that they have a diagnosis. But they want treatment that gets to the root cause and doesn't just treat them with medication. And so I'm often looking for explanations. So I do a lot of that testing. A lot of people have what's called subclinical or maybe positive blood tests, and they don't know it, but that's really the absolute best time to turn the ship around, you know, and try to repair the immune system. Because you're not far down river yet. You know, we're still upstream, there's still.

A chance, and there's still some bandwidth to heal it before it gets even worse. Yeah, And I want to go back too, because your physician at that time, your primary said it's no big deal. Susan, why don't you just take thyroid hormone and everything will be okay. And that's what I think a lot of people are dealing with. Right. So by the time they get to you, have they already had that discussion with the primary care?

Yes, by the time they come to me or pick up my book, they've had the diagnosis. And it goes either of two ways. Some people just go, uh huh, okay, fine, you know, and they take the medicine, they don't think more about it, and they go along and then they, then they realize it's not quite helping them feel better.

Yeah.

And then they come find me. Or they're given that initial diagnosis and right away they think, okay, but I need to do more with this. I need to know more about it. I need to know what else I could do. I need to figure out what caused this. Because the problem is, for example, if we take mercury as an example, and I did have very high mercury levels, but my gut was a mess.

From the fish consumption or.

Oh, absolutely, from the fish consumption and.

Probably even worse now with Fukushima.

Well, that's another whole story.

That's a whole other podcast.

That's another whole podcast. Because that's not even just mercury. That's radioactive. Yeah. Compounds coming across the ocean. And, and when we talk about food, we can talk about this again. But, but you know, Michael Pollan, I think once one of his famous. I love all the quotes that he gives, but one of them is like, you're eating what the animal ate.

Yes.

And the problem with fish now is we have no idea what the fish are eating. They're in an ocean and our oceans have become toxic in some ways. And especially when you think of Fukushima and we just can't control it. We don't know what that animal's eating. Somebody. This was, I think A patient of mine who is friends with this oceanographer that, that's sort of the next Jacques Cousteau. And she said her friend will not eat fish anymore because she spends so much time in the oceans and she's so concerned about.

She's seen it with her eyes.

Yeah, she's seen it with her eyes. And that's just an example. So for me, yes. And so that's the under the iceberg thing. And so, for example, what I was trying to get to before was that you get diagnosed with Hashimoto's and even if you take your thyroid hormone, which I actually did, and I still take a little bit because my thyroid did get damaged from the early, you know, process. My Hashimoto's is gone, I have no more antibodies, but I still take thyroid hormone. Not much, but just a little bit because my thyroid was damaged. So I do want to clarify that part. But coming back to the mercury, you have the Hashimoto's and you take your thyroid hormone and you think you're improving what your labs say, right? The hormones look better, it's like hormone replacement. But you still have all that mercury in your body. You might artificially help your thyroid function better. That mercury is doing other things. It's giving you brain fog and making you tired and even potentially triggering other autoimmune diseases. And so not addressing the mercury is going to really affect your health in general. So ignoring the mercury and ignoring the causes of the Hashimoto's not only undermines your ability to recover from the Hashimoto's, but it puts you at risk of having more symptoms and having more illness unless you treat it.

You know, I was in the bank yesterday and randomly, I don't believe in things that are happening by chance too much. But this was a little bit like some kind of universal force. Introduced me to a friend from high school I hadn't seen for, for over 20 years almost, and she had Hashimoto's. And I told her that I was gonna be learning from you today. And she wanted me to ask you a specific question.

Oh, how funny is that? And this is from her from yesterday.

Exactly. And so the question that she wanted to ask was, out of all the things she's done, where she has addressed these four pillars, what's deeper than these four pillars that is most commonly kind of ignored? Knowing that we've taken care of the synergy between our food, our stress, our liver, our gut. Are there other things that can get in the way? And then I wanna talk about food.

So there's one last big piece that I talk about in the book, but not as an actual step and that's infections, something like the monovirus Epstein Barr virus. So sometimes people get like sudden Hashimoto's after getting mono or after having a virus. And so that actually can be a trigger for Hashimoto's. That can be a brewing thing underneath that. Unless you address that, it doesn't resolve. Now the reason I didn't do a whole section on treating infections is because my strong belief and the way I still work with people here is that for most people, and sometimes there's a few people that when the four steps don't work, and I know the gut is good and I know the toxins are out and I know they're eating in a way that's anti inflammatory and I know their stress system's okay and the antibodies are not budging, I go looking for viruses sometimes. But what I will say though is that if you're repairing those four steps. Let's just talk about viruses for a second. Since I opened that topic. Viruses. We don't have medicine for viruses. I mean there's acyclovir which treats, I mean we have one virus we have a medication for, but the rest of the hundreds of viruses that are in your body or that you can get sick from, we do not have antiviral medicine. And so how do we recover from a virus? Our immune system puts it in remission. I like to use the word remission because people know the word remission. For cancer it's the same thing because the virus lives in your body forever. And so it really does, but it goes dormant. And your immune system should be putting it in remission, making it go quite it so that it doesn't make you sick anymore. And that's sort of how you handle it. And the Epstein Barr monovirus is a perfect example because it hides deep in your cells and it should go quiet. And for some people it just doesn't. And the failure for that is a problem with the immune system. And so by repairing the immune system with using the food stress, gut and detox piece, right? And doing all those things and supporting your immune system with antioxidants and eating, which we'll talk about with food and maybe even some supplements, you can treat the virus. So ultimately the four steps are still the answer. The other thing that I will say to your friend and to anyone who's listening is sometimes the toxins are deeper and worse or your gut is more of an issue than you Realize and that sort of the quick fix. Look, I have a great heal my gut program online and you know, I try to help people do it themselves, but sometimes you might have something unusual, you might have a parasite, you might have yeast, or you might have. Have something else going on in your gut that you actually do need an integrative functional medicine practitioner to sort of help you sort out why you went through the book and you're still struggling because maybe there is still something else that we need to do testing to find, you know, or you need more detox sometimes like a 21 day detox program. That's great and that's a great place to start. But if we test your mercury, if we maybe you need to follow the mercury levels with somebody, you know, to make sure it's really all gone. And so I think that's just an important piece. And I get emails all the time, which I'm so grateful for, people thanking me for the book and how, how much they appreciate how it helped them. And I do know how it helps many people. But I do want to share and give encouragement that sometimes you have to go back and do another gut treatment or you need to go back and do another detox program and it might take more time than you think.

I'm thinking about when I was a kid, I had really bad case of mono. I was out of school for a month and I can remember having chronic sinusitis. I took more Augmentin than you could ever imagine and other antibiotics and I didn't know anything and my parents didn't know anything, anything about the knowledge of what that can do for dysbiosis and just crazy things happening in our gut.

Yes.

When we look at people that have been sick in their teens or in their early adult lives, how long will they have repercussions from taking multitudes of antibiotics or going through medications if they don't know? In other words, if you've taken something for years and you're not repairing the gut, will that eventually lead to that person having some type of autoimmune illness?

What happens? What are the sequels right after a young adult goes through all of that and even like something like taking acne medicine for two years, which I get a lot of, put them on doxycycline for two years, I'm like, oh no. I want to say it depends. So this is the. One of the great things about functional medicine is that everybody's different. So this is why I spend a lot of time with the story. So let me give you the factors that will influence whether or not you might have a good outcome from that or not. So good outcome from that. That, number one, what are you eating? And so the number one most important influence on your gut microbiome is food, vegetable food, you know, food with fiber and phytonutrients and you know, all the different colors. And especially, like I said, fiber feeds the good bacteria and helps it flourish. Okay, so you will feed your garden. Think of it like an inner garden. And what you feed the flowers is going to determine what grows and will determine whether weeds are going to grow or healthy, beautiful flowers. Right, so, so what have you been eating for the past 10 years since you had all those antibiotics? Right. Have you given the good flora a good chance to recover? And so that's one thing, eating sugar. So processed food with a lot of sugar and white flour products push the bacteria into a more inflammatory sort of pattern. The other animal food, too much animal food. And I think you can do paleo as long as you're eating animal. Only like 30% of your diet and you've got that 70% of your day is filled with plants. Plants. All right, so plant based diet is still king for encouraging the growth of good bacteria. Eating cultured foods. So if you say, and I ate a, I've been eating yogurt my whole life, you know, even during that time I was eating a lot of cultured foods. You have a better chance of recovering the gut if you took probiotics. Stress will push the gut microbes out of balance. And so if you took a lot of antibiotics and you, for the past 10 years you've had hair raising stress that you haven't balanced in some way. That's not going to help in any way. Right. Because that'll push the microbiome microbes into a more unfriendly kind of pattern. You see where I'm going with this?

Absolutely. Let's go back too, because when you mentioned probiotics, there is so many brands out there and some people are lactose intolerant. I did my 23andMe test and I found out that I do have the genotype from myheritage as not being able to digest lactase.

Yes.

And so I can't do any kind of lactase. What do you recommend for people for patients that come in that can't have dairy? How do they grow that flora? What do you recommend to them?

And actually, I want to clarify. I did say yogurt and generally most of my patients don't eat dairy. So I'm actually a big non dairy person. And part of that is it's not just about lactose. There's casein in whey that people tend to be have food sensitivities to. And it causes a lot of that chronic sinus, like you had all that sinusitis, right, Congestion and reflux and drip. But it also can increase yeast in the gut and it also causes a lot of bloating and gut symptoms. So I tend to take people off dairy, but there's plenty of other cultured options. So there's cultured coconut milk. You know, I have people do a lot of coconut yogurt or kefir. So you can do other non dairy cultures there. The other thing that you really can do, especially if you took antibiotics for a period of time or while you're taking antibiotics and certainly for if you're a person who needs to take a course of antibiotics, I mean, three to six months of taking a probiotic every day afterwards. And I think that the most key factors in choosing a good probiotic and people say, oh, do those really work? Yes. You know, I just. My second book on arthritis, it's called Healing Arthritis, is coming out in October. And I just. For the book and for a talk I just gave last weekend, I reviewed all of the studies on probiotics and you know, to see the strains and which ones work. And they work. They are great for your immune system. Not only do probiotics affect the local microbes, but probiotics change the whole inflammation throughout your whole body. They're really, really important. Taking, I'm talking about actually taking a probiotic and there are strains that you want to do. A broad spectrum of as many strains as possible is the bottom line. And so you look for something that has 8, 9, 10 strains in it and that way you'll sort of COVID all your bases. But most of them, and they're all the lactobacillus and bifida strains. So there's something to be said for probiotics not just for helping repair your gut after you take antibiotics and to protect your gut from the antibiotics, but also for helping support your immune system. Really, really, really good studies on this.

Let's connect this between food and gut. And I want to go right to gut health after this because I feel like we're going there anyways. And what I heard from you is that 30% of clean sources of animal protein that could be meat, not sourced from CAFOs. We know that these cows eat corn, and that's not what cows are supposed to eat. They're supposed to eat grass, which affects the CLA profile and everything else.

Yeah.

So eating clean foods. And when we look at fish, maybe there has to be something where you can really just find a fish provider that you can trust. And it goes the same thing for chicken or fowl or any other kind of animal food source you're eating.

That's right.

You eat what the animal ate. And I love that you said that earlier. Now, transitioning that to gut health, you talked about the probiotics, which I love. I will link that in the show notes. What about the gut? If you have autoimmune, does it mean that you automatically have a leaky gut? Yes, that's the flat answer. Then if you have autoimmune, you have leaky gut.

And you know what? And we have this whole debate, you know, here at Blum center for Health, there's a team of six of us that see patients. You know, we're all clinicians and our policy, all of our. Us, you know, we're hands down, we've all come to this agreement. I mean, I. I've, of course, trained a lot of who's here, but we've all in an agreement that everybody gets a stool test with autoimmunity who comes in here, whether they have symptoms or not. So whether you have gas and bloating, your poop might be fine, you might not have reflux. And you say, I have absolutely no symptoms. I don't care. You're getting a stool test. Most of the time, the stool test comes back and there's something going on. And the names we give these things are something like. It's called dysbiosis. D. Yeah, biosis. Dysbiosis. And I. Just for the listener, I would just think of dysbiosis as weeds in the garden. You know, it could be yeast, it could be bad bacteria that are known to trigger inflammation throughout the body. It could be parasites. You know, there's all sorts of things that could become weeds in the garden, and we need to identify and treat those weeds. And so most of our autoimmune people end up with some sort of a gut treatment, which I. To treat dysbiosis and leaky gut. And actually, before we talk about dysbiosis treatment, let me swing back to leaky gut. So leaky gut, which your audience clearly knows about, especially if Dr. Perlmutter was on at one point, because leaky gut, leaky brain.

It's a clear connection.

Leaky gut just means an increased intestinal Permeability, the gut lining, the intestinal lining, which is supposed to be a barrier, right? It's not supposed to let what's in the gut, what we call the gut lumen, the inside of the gut pipe. It's not supposed to let any of that stuff into your bloodstream unless your cells let them in active. Under conditions which we'll talk about, the gates become open and leaky. And so we call it. That's why it's called leaky gut, because the gut's quote, unquote leaky, but technically it's an increase in permeability of the intestinal lining and all sorts of things get into the bloodstream. And actually, one of the mechanisms for rheumatoid arthritis, which is really, really well studied and well laid out, is that they're called bacterial cell wall proteins, the actual components of the cell wall of your microbes in your gut get into the bloodstream and get into the joints and trigger inflammation. And so the good bacteria, even that are in your gut, that shouldn't, can leak out of your gut and into your body. And so you want to have a really healthy gut lining that forms a really good barrier. And so what are the things that can cause it to leak and become leaky? Certainly the microbes are really important. And that's why good bacteria, those hundred trillion good bacteria are so critical because they actually make things and just by their actions, by being there, and the things they secrete keep the intestinal lining intact, they protect it. So they're your protectors of the lining. So the bacteria are really important. And so when you can get, when you get weeds in the garden, which can be all the things I talked about, harmful bacteria, yeast or parasites, it can increase the leakiness, it can cause damage to the lining and cause a leaky gut. The other things that are really important to think about, and I was just at this great conference this last weekend called the Cassi Conference, which is sponsored by Designs for Health, a supplement company. But it's called Clinical and Scientific Insights. And there was this brilliant researcher, her name is Dr. Stephanie Seneff, and she talked about glyphosate. And I don't know if glyphosate is Roundup. And it's really, really scary to think about what glyphosate does to the gut integrity. And it comes in and it just damages the tight junctions.

Can you tell us exactly what glyphosate is? We mentioned this with Dr. John Gray, but I'd love for you to go over it again.

Glyphosate is Roundup. It's the active chemical pesticide that's in Roundup. Now, Roundup is a. It's a pesticide made by Monsanto. And this is, you know, for those of you out there who are familiar with the whole boycotting Monsanto and like the whole sort of grassroots movement anti Monsanto, it's because Monsanto came up with a brilliant. Whoever came up with this idea was just the absolute most brilliant person from their view. What they did was they genetically engineered seeds. These are the genetically modified seeds. Corn and soy, mostly. It started with. And that's what's taken over our whole agricultural belt in the middle of the country. Corn and soy are made from genetically modified seeds. And what does the genetic modification do? It makes those plants resistant to Roundup. So Monsanto says, okay, here are your seeds and here's the Roundup, because you could grow these plants, grow the soy, and you could flood that field with Roundup because they won't die, but all the weeds will because they can tolerate the Roundup because of the gmo. And so you have this soy that's not only genetically modified and sort of the last man standing in the field because the field has been sprayed with Roundup. Imagine how much Roundup is doused on those plants, right? Because they're resistant. So they're all. It's. It's used in. In excess. And so our food supply has become really tainted with Roundup, which is glyphosate and corn and soy. And so some people, and I do believe this, and. And apparently wheat. So wheat. And that's another whole topic is, you know, what's the problem with wheat? And why do we have all the wheat sensitivity? There's wheat sensitivity and there's gluten sensitivity. Some people are actually okay with gluten, but they can't eat wheat because wheat. They dump a lot of Roundup on the wheat right before they harvest it. It's right at the last minute, they pour Roundup all over. And so wheat is very contaminated with glyphosate as well, some people believe. And there's a lot of research in this now and studies that are being published, looking at. Is it actually the glyphosate that's making people feel sick, you know, when they eat corn and soy and wheat? And in fact, when I do my elimination diet with everybody that comes in and I take them off gluten, dairy, soy, corn and eggs, the soy in the corn is partly. Not necessarily because I think they're going to have soy or corn sensitivity. But soy and corn have crept into our food supply in an unbelievable way. Like every box you might read in processed food, it's got sort of corn starch or corn syrup or corn this, and it's got soy protein isolate or soy this or soy that. And so it's in everything. And when you ask somebody to start reading the labels and observing all the places that soy and corn are just in their food supply, they come back and they're shocked, you know, because they can't believe how much they really are being exposed to or that they're really getting. You know, when they clean up their diet and they feel better, these are.

Hidden pieces that most people don't know about. I mean, there's corn in ketchup.

That's right.

You know, high fructose corn syrup. And these are on a very microscopic level. So the glass glyphosate particles, they irritate that gut lighting. They kind of perforate holes in. They preferate holes in this screen. Your body might be a house. And then, you know, your screen door gets holes in it. And guess who comes in? All the insects, all the bugs. And so this leaky gut, Once people are on a protocol to heal if they're doing the right things, how long does that take, Dr. Blum, for someone to heal leaky gut?

It always does depend. And you know, the person sitting before me and the person listening at this very moment, in this time, they are a combination of their genetics, their whole life that came before the healthy habits, the exposures, the toxin load, everything that's happened over all these years, and their healthy habits they have right now, you know, and then what's caused everything to go out of balance. And so it's hard to know. It's not one size fits all because we need to figure out how severe it is. And actually, that's why I, in my book, I did all these assessments and questionnaires because I was trying to give people tools to try to get a sense of, you know, how bad is this for me and as a way to judge how long you might need treatment. So I like to say that, I mean, I'll give you the range, it depends on how sick you are. Six months to two years.

And that's pretty much realistic based on everyone that I've heard of in our space. And something that I dealt with was a parasite. I came back from Hawaii six years ago and I had blastocyst hominis. And I had to go on this eight month protocol to Heal it.

Oh, gosh. Yep.

Eventually what happened is I retested and it was gone. But I did the retest. And my next question to you in regards to this, this food to gut connection, I want to leave time for us to talk about stress and detoxifying the liver, but there's a connection between testing protocol and treatment and then giving yourself the space to heal.

Yes.

What does that look like for people that are experiencing all these different symptoms? Is it always going to be intestinal permeability? Could it be something where maybe they're just taking in phytoestrogens from microwaving food and plastic? There's so many different things that contribute to this. What are the other connecting factors? What are the other commonalities as to why people might, might have brain fog and these symptoms of autoimmune? Is there a sweeping test where someone can get a spectrum to see if they have any autoimmune or is there only specific tests for them to know?

So, unfortunately, there probably isn't a sweeping test. There's just a lot of specific tests. There's only one test that's maybe the most general out of them all, which is the ana, which is the antinuclear antibody. That is just a screening test for what they're called systemic autoimmune diseases like lupus and trouble programs and scleroderma and systemic sclerosis and some of the generalized systemic autoimmune diseases. And you can screen that with an ana. But if you think about autoimmunity, where you're making an immune reaction against your tissues, you can imagine that you can make antibodies to any tissues in the body. And so there really, there really isn't. There really isn't a defining way to evaluate do you have an autoimmune disease? I would say that I always check, like I said, Hashimoto's. But I would say that in the hands of an expert, experienced rheumatologist even, and this is where somebody can go to a conventional doc, depending on your symptoms, if you have a general issue like brain fog, that one is going to be nonspecific. And the rheumatologist or other doctor like me won't necessarily have a specific autoimmune test to look for. But if you go in and you also have dry eyes and dry mouth, then maybe we'll specifically run Sjogren's. Or if you have muscle pain or joint pain, then we'll do the test for rheumatoid arthritis. If you have arthritis, you know, or Muscle pain. And then we can look at antibodies to muscles and other inflammations, markers that could show sort of muscle damage, you know, and so you do specific tests. So I would say as a detective, in some ways you just have to be, if there are specific symptoms, then with detective work you can actually do those tests. And I think that that's from an autoimmune perspective to make a diagnosis. But I want to point out that you don't need a diagnosis to repair your immune system. And I would really invite people to think of it like inflammation, like all these things that brain fog and all these other symptoms that you might have are symptoms sign of inflammation. And while these four foundations we talk about in terms of repairing the immune system, you can also say here are the four steps to reducing inflammation in your body. Because it is right the food, stress, gut toxin, detox, it's all, that's how you lower inflammation in your body and that's also how you repair your immune system. But your immune system is the trigger for a lot of inflammation. So you see, it's sort of the same ish thing. So to feel better, you don't need a diagnosis. In some ways getting the diagnosis, it is validating and it is helpful in the conventional world and so even in my world. So sometimes it's good to have a marker you're following per se, but the goal is to feel better.

It is no surprise if we're on point in taking care of our emotional health. It makes it so much easier to let go of old weight and have more energy throughout the day. But believe me when I say it's hard to treat other people well and think good thoughts if we're walking around hangry. One of the best ways to support our body's energy systems and help cure that satiety and satiation, AKA hangry, is to add in collagen to your waters, shakes and foods. Over the past year I've been using powdered collagen from perfect supplements in my morning coffees, waters and post workout shakes to get some organic proteins I can feel good about eating. You know by now healthy cows eat grass and these sick cows from CAFOs eat corn. So beyond the healing powers of collagen for digestion and joint health, this 100% pasture raised organic hydrolyzed collagen has 20 grams of protein in two scoops which helps curb appetite and increase satiety and satiety from ethical harvesting you can actually feel good about. Collagen from grass fed cows has five times as much Omega 3s and twice as much CLA as found in grain fed beef. And best of all, you can sleep well at night knowing you're supporting the change we need for this broken food system. Get a box of single serve packets for on the go grass fed collagen or purchase it as part of the WellnessForce discounted bundle by clicking over to perfectsupplements.com WellnessForce and be sure to enter code WellnessForce to save 10% off your your already discounted package. I love that you said that because there's so much information out there and what you're talking about with these pillars of health, these four pillars of health. Do those first. I think people try to tend to find an advanced complication and what supplement should I take and what should I do? It's like, hey, get some good sleep, eat quality food that's aligned with the information in your book. Make sure you're managing your gut. And there's specific tests that you talk about in that book. I really want to dive into stress because I think no one that we know has little amounts of stress. I mean, stress is something that everyone suffers from, really.

Yes.

I loved what you wrote in the book. Actually. You started the chapter by saying the phrases I'm stressed and I'm so stressed out are used like badges of honor, proving that our lives are full and busy. But stress isn't something to take lightly. It's referred to as much more than an emotion. It actually creates a series of physiological events inside the body. And how often these events occur and how long they last have a huge impact on health, specifically autoimmune disease. Dr. Blum, we all know about cortisol. It's not new information, but chronic stress going back to how our body's really designed. What does this mean to us, this stress component with autoimmune?

I appreciate you reading that. You know, one of the things I do is I'm on the faculty with the center for Mind Body Medicine and I've been doing that for almost 20 years. And so I'm a Mind body medicine gal. I really get it. And so what I will say is that whole thing about the badge of honor, not only that, but we all know it. You know, I know know, everyone knows we know stress is doing this to us. You know, oh yeah, okay, I'm stressed. The fact is, you got to really take it to heart. You got to really believe it's having an effect on you so that you can take steps to change that. So the way I like to also explain is think of it as there are stressors around you. But stress is actually the way your body's responding. It's how you're taking it into your body. And you do have control over that. I think as we get older and, or if you end up with a chronic illness, you learn this because the wear and tear of the stress hormones really can get to you. So when you talk about cortisol, Coming back to your question, I want to invite people to remember there are two stress systems. One is a hormonal and that's that famous cortisol. And it's released by the adrenal cortex, the outer part of the adrenal gland. But there's also adrenaline and we forget about that. And adrenaline, the word adrenals. Adrenaline comes from the word adrenals. It's on the inside of the adrenal gland and, and that's the nervous system, that's the hard wiring. Fight or flight. So meaning, you know, adrenaline. You have palpitations, your heart races, your sweat, you know, it's this whole adrenaline rush, an acute stress. The word acute just means, let's say a sudden stress or something short lived. You have this like stressor and you miss your train, you're running, you know, and something happens or you get bad news and what happens right away and you have this stress response. Or it could be something good. You're getting up to give a talk, you know, and you're getting ready and you're, you're trying to remember your lines, you know. But there's release of cortisol and adrenaline and both of these things have a huge physiological effect on the body. But nature gave us this stress response because we need it, it's good for us. It prepares the body to meet a challenge. The issue is that, you know, like zebras, like a lion chases them and then the zebra ends up and the zebra gets away. And then the zebras in the field, there's an actual physiologic, it shutters, it actually makes the shape shaking sort of thing. And then it just goes about grazing and it forgot about the lion. We don't forget about the lions. The humans rethink and rethink and ruminate and remember and guided imagery could be good or bad. You know, having worries and thinking about something bad that happened is like a negative guided imagery. You know, you're remembering it in your brain and it's giving you the same reaction in your body like when it happened. And so humans remember and they worry about the future and they dwell in the past, past and it creates a perpetual on switch which then damages the body. And it damages it in two ways. It damages it, number one, direct effect on the immune system. And so anybody can tell you that after a period of prolonged stress, they got sick. How many times have you heard that?

Sure. People that travel, people that are going through big work changes. Absolutely right.

So there's a suppression that happens on the immune system and directly. And actually I wouldn't even call it a suppression. What happens is correct. Cortisol shifts your immune cells from becoming. I use the military as an analogy a lot, you know, in terms of explaining how the immune system works. So think about the army and the Navy. So normally you have like the army, which is like hand to hand combat cells. And then the Navy, they fire rockets, let's say. And so what the immune, the cortisol shifts your immune system to being all rockets. And the hand to hand combat army, they get the suppressed. So they suppress one part of your military and up the other one. So you start getting an overproduction of antibodies, but you get suppression of your natural killers, which is what fights your viruses. So it's dysfunction. That's why I like to say don't think of it like a blanket suppression. It's actually overactive one wing while the other side gets suppressed. And that's why then you end up with more viruses. But you can have an overactivity of antibody production, which is what you see in things like lupus and other autoimmune diseases. So there's this direct cortisol effect. But the other thing I want to point out, which I think was so fascinating when I did all the research for that book, was that the fight or flight, the hard wiring of your adrenaline system is wired into your gut and cortisol secreted into your gut. And so there's a direct effect of stress on gut health. And it'll change your microbiome, it'll increase leaky gut, which secondarily then downstream affects autoimmunity. I have to say, and I'm glad I am going to have this opportunity to say this right now, is that in all the years I've been doing this, been 15 years now or so, that I'm deep into functional medicine and practicing medicine this way. My mantra these days, what I'm focusing on is I call it finish what you start. Because here's the thing, you know, everybody, we can go online, even in my book, I give you, you know, here's the four steps and do them in a three month program and you know, and actually the book's being re released now. It was re released last month, but I added a three month guide into the book to do the whole four steps, consecutive three months. And so you can do that and you do that and let's say you feel better, but you have to finish what you start and that's lifestyle. Because if you get stressed out or you allow stress to really come in and stay in in a chronic on switch way without any, you know, relief and balance, you're going to knock your gut back out of balance again.

Wow, this is fascinating because as a mind body physician, there is a clear connection between the wiring of our gut gut to our emotional load that we're under. I had no idea. I mean I knew that our immune system and we knew about serotonin and things that are like controlled through the gut in that way. But the connection you talked about, the hard wiring of our stress response to our gut autonomic nervous system, that is unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

I want to save just a minute here because the liver is a big organ. It's the last piece of your book. Let's go into this because I think stress is something we've talked about a lot on the show and there's no blanket answer for stress.

There's not. I wanted to just make that case that food and stress for long term. So you start and you reboot and you follow the steps in the book. But then you have to finish what you start and you maintain and grow health from the inside out by lifestyle and that's sleep and stress management. We'll just call it that term, even though I don't love that term. And what you're eating. Okay, let's talk about detox.

Now from your practice, do you believe that detoxes are something that everyone should be doing at specific phases in their life and if so, under what condition? What does that look when like, like to really detox the liver.

There are a few points really helpful that I want to make. First one, I would invite people to think about toxins in your body as the concept of toxin load. Don't worry about which toxin it is. Is it a pesticide? Is it a plastic, Is it a mercury? Think of it as your body gets filled up, right? We have exposure and at this moment in time, what's your toxin load like? How much exposure have you had throughout your life? And it's a net. How much toxins you have in your body right now is a net net of, well, your genetic ability to clear it out, your total exposure of what came before and then how well you've kept up with your liver. And this is where I'm going to help tell you about how to get toxins out, right? And who needs it? Your liver. Nature gave you an organ to filter and remove, process. It's like a conveyor belt. It converts toxins and prepares them for excretion into the bile and into the gut. And so the liver is a processing factory for all your toxins. But the liver needs a lot of nutrients. It needs antioxidants, it needs B vitamins, it needs greens, it needs all those fiber and the fiber in the gut to pull it then out. It needs amino acids from protein, it needs omegas, it needs everything. It needs all those colors. Antioxidants are really key. And so the liver has been working really hard to keep up with. We are all exposed to toxins. So let's say you're an average person and in your history, you can't think of anything extra that you've had on top of the usual. I don't know what the toxin load is because I don't know what you've been eating all these years to feed your liver and help it clear the toxins out. So you see where I'm going. There's a bag between stress in the system and how well you've been recovering stress and recovery, stress and recovery, stressing how much toxin exposure and how well you've done getting it out. So at this moment, you sort of have to take stock. And one of the ways we get an idea about toxin load is we. Oh, God. And I put this up on my Facebook Live page and I can give this to you for your audience if you want.

Please.

There's something called a medical symptom questionnaire. It's a PDF. I can give it to you and you can put it up. You can take a questionnaire. You do these simple. And it gives you an idea. If you score really high, it means your chances are have a high toxin load because it asks all these questions about your symptoms that could be related to toxicity. If you score high on the msq, then you need to do a detox. And so that's the simple. That'll be an easy way to answer that question for people. But coming back, so how do you know if you have toxins? I guess that's what I was trying to answer is that based upon your symptoms is one way based upon your history of understanding. And again, I give all those, like, assessments in the book, which you probably remember seeing, like you know, did you have a lot of pesticide exposure when you were younger? Did you, were you an artist?

What kind of a home did you live in?

Yeah, there's all sorts of ways you can sort of get. Do you eat fish? You know, my sushi eating businessman in the city, I live outside New York. You know, I was measuring mercury levels of 75 in their blood. I mean, it was crazy. So each person will have their own history. And so I believe though that everybody, regardless of whether you know or think you have a big exposure or you have a lot of symptoms, here at Blum center we all do like a liver detox once a year. Because I think it's protection, it's prevention, we all have exposure. I try to have a bubble when I'm at home, but I can't live in a bubble. I travel, I eat in restaurants, I'm getting glyphosate browned up. I can't help it because I can't eat organic everywhere. So I think supporting your liver, I think one of the best things we can do to both treat and reverse chronic illness is not only maintain a healthy gut, but make sure you're always supporting your liver detox system. And you do that by eating a lot of. Like I said, food is the first, first. But periodically doing a liver support program and all that means is taking some supplements. You know, it's a period of. We do 21 day programs here, you know, and you can find them online. Plenty of people do them. My colleagues and I all do detox programs. And it just means for a period of time you go on a special detox food plan and you take some liver support supplements and you just sort of reboot the liver. You know, you sort of. It's a way of just lowering the toxin load and just unloading and tuning up the liver to just, it's a tune up to help your liver do a better job. And I do believe we all need that probably every year. If you have a high toxin load or you do the msq, which I'm gonna give you. And just for your own information, it's in my book too, actually I have an MSQ in there, the medical symptom Questionnaire. If you do the MSQ and you score high, then you actually need to potentially do them every three months or so or even do I leave people on liver support supplements for people really high toxic and loads I do three months at a time. Even so supporting your liver so that you detox and working with food, you know, and really getting those nutrients in. But don't. But remember this is where the gut comes in. You could be eating all those great foods but if you're not digesting, absorbing and assimilating your nutrients, you're going to be net behind and you won't be detoxing.

Thank you so much for mentioning this. And we'll definitely link that MSQ in there. The last round of the show. This is where we get to know you on a personal level. This is seven fast questions for seven real answers. Are you ready?

I'm ready.

If you were consulted by the NIH and Washington about how to change the health epidemics in our country, what would be an initiative or a couple that you might lead to change our health paradigm?

Well, you know, I don't know where to start whether it be gut or detox, but I guess I would say to focus some research on support detoxification probably because there's so much gut right now that everyone's on the gut bandwagon, you know. And I think we need to put more research into understanding the toxins in our environment and how they're affecting us.

What foods are a go to for you when you do travel?

I just traveled so. I know. So I bring with me grapefruit, avocado and I make at home a really great, it's just a seed bar and it's just all different seeds, sesame, sunflower and pumpkin with just a little bit of maple syrup sticking them together but you cook it and they're this brittle and so I bring that in a big thing to nibble on as my snack.

What makes you laugh the most in life? I mean what around you, either people or things really cracks you up the.

Most, you know, probably my dog, I have to say she's just like the craziest. She does like really crazy things and, and I have, we have right now three cats living at home with us because my son and his fiance is living are living with us. They have two cats and so probably my animal menagerie at home.

What's one of the biggest lessons you learned as a mom when you were trying to encourage your family to eat healthy?

I'll lead by example.

What's one of the best pieces of advice you ever received when it came to avoiding overwhelm when you were starting your business and writing a book and taking care of your health?

Just to keep practicing, you know, my self care. Just keep practicing, just make it a priority. Don't lose my meditation, don't lose my focus. And actually probably it's also Just about being clear, making sure to check in with myself to make sure that I'm being true to who I am.

What does that look like for you? That's a great answer.

Making sure to be true who I am. What that means is I believe that, that inside all of us, we have our own North Star to help guide us. And that's what we call our higher Self, our intuition, you know, however we want to think about that. And that's, for me, what Mind Body practices do. That's what my morning meditation does. I meditate every morning, and it's my way of breathing and being still and quieting my mind, feeling quiet enough to hear what my intuition is telling me or wants to tell me. I check in with myself. And so I do believe that we all have the answers within us for all of the challenges that we have. And it's up to us to practice techniques, or this is the Mind Body piece, right? To practice. To have some sort of daily practice where we can be quiet and we can be still and not focus on the past, not dwell on the future, but be here in this moment. And in this moment, we can check in with our own self, our higher self, our inner voice, whatever we want to call that. And so as long as I still maintain that practice and maintain true to what my own North Star is, that's been the best advice for me.

What would you say your North Star is in this moment? I mean, in this stage of your.

Life, just whenever anything comes up for you and you're trying to understand how to make a decision with each thing that happens or any quandary I have, or should I. Should I hire this person? Should I? Well, I'm doing a lot of things right now, and so should I accept. Somebody asked me to write a chapter, you know, in something that they're in a book they're making, and is it too much for me right now? You know, so I'll meditate and I'll just sit with that and I'll just sort of see if that feels right, if that feels like I'm taking on too much or if I'm. You know, because we all have decisions every day. And how do you make decisions? I think that's really one of the most important things that we all have to navigate in life is making decisions that are true to our purpose and to ourselves. And so how do you make decisions? So that's actually, for me, I think, what's allowed me to be successful and has grounded me in going forward and creating all these businesses that I'm doing. Gosh. I opened a food business. It's called Organic Farmer. We do, you know, we make cold pressed juices and it's in the building next door to me. And you know, it's just because I'm inspired and I want to do things, but I have to be mindful of my own energy and staying in balance. And so that's the best advice, you know, is just stay true to yourself. And to do that, you have to practice some quieting techniques so you can check in with yourself every day.

And I think anyone who heard your explanation about the North Star can definitely feel the calmness. I know I did. My last question for you. What is wellness at this stage in your life? Everything you've been through, all the people you help, how would you define wellness?

You know, wellness is really mind, body, spirit. You know, it's, it's really everything. It's not just your body. It's balancing mind, body and spirit. And it's, it's happiness too. I don't know, it's knowing who you are, you know, learning who you are, finding happiness, happiness and balancing mind, body, spirit. The body is not separate from those things. And I do feel we. Wellness is charting a path towards health with a positive outlook and looking towards health and living your life to the fullest and not just the absence of disease.

Thank you so much, Dr. Blum, for coming on the show. We went in so many fun directions. You can learn more about her work@wellnessforce.com Dr.Blum also, immune system recovery plans available everywhere, but books are sold on Amazon and audible. Do you think we missed anything? When we talk about autoimmune and someone who's feeling inspired, where should they go? I mean, obviously we're going to link the book, they're going to read the book. But where else can they go as a some like weekly or daily motivational source for information?

Certainly I put out a newsletter every week, so we have a lot of material going out. So go to my website, blumhealthmd.com and sign up for the newsletter. I have a weekly Facebook live actually, which is really fun and I started catching cataloging them all on a YouTube page. Come to my Facebook page and come visit me every Tuesday, one o' clock Eastern Coast Time. I do lunchtime with Dr. Blum one o' clock Tuesdays and we have a lot of fun. And last week I talked about detox, but I've been going through every autoimmune disease and I answer questions and people can actually Ask me what you'd like me to talk about the following week. So it's very interactive and I'm doing it every week.

Thanks so much for your work and doing what you do in our wellness space because the healing that you're putting out there is so needed right now. So thank you so much, Dr. Blum for coming on the show and thank.

You for having me. This was so much fun.

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