Speaker 1:
Welcome to The Dr. Gundry Podcast, where Dr. Steven Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone. Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements, and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long, happy life.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
Want to supercharge your immune system? Well, first things first. Put down that glass of orange juice. It turns out it’s one of the worst things you can do. In this exciting episode, I’m debunking common myths surrounding immune health and sharing insider secrets to fortify your body’s defenses. Get ready to uncover my personal vitamin regimen for warding off those pesky seasonal bugs and discover the power-packed foods that will not only keep your gut happy, but also strengthen your immune system like never before.
All right, it’s that time of year and it’s time to talk about the best ways to support immune health. Now, what the heck does it mean to have good immune health? Well, believe it or not, our immune system is there primarily for two reasons. Number one, to protect you against foreign invaders. And for the most part, those foreign invaders are bacteria and viruses. Now, there’s all sorts of other very uncommon foreign invaders, but let’s keep it simple. And our immune system was basically designed to handle foreign invaders, bacteria, and viruses.
Now, the other thing our immune system was designed for was to recognize odd cells, and let’s call them cancer cells or even pre-malignant cells, recognize that these cells are odd and find a way of destroying that odd cell before it becomes a real problem for you. So bacteria and viruses, foreign invaders and odd-looking cells, let’s call them pre-cancer or even cancerous cells, those are the two things that your immune system was designed to tackle.
An easy way to think of the immune system is your white blood cells. That’s really simplistic and almost naive, but when I’m talking to my patients, white blood cells resonate because most of us get our white blood cell count measured. There are multiple types of white blood cells just as there are immune cells that we don’t routinely measure but we can count them. As a transplant surgeon and transplant immunologist, I was very interested in measuring the types of immune cells that normally aren’t counted in your blood count. But they’re all there for purpose. And each set of immune cells, and let’s just call them white blood cells, have different capabilities and actually different targets that they can go after.
The other part of the immune system is, so let’s call white blood cells basically the body guards or even the police force or the armed forces of your body. These are the armed soldiers who attack these things. But the other part of the immune system that particularly during cold and flu season that you hear about is the antibodies that are manufactured by your immune system to recognize foreign invaders as foreign and to call in the troops once these foreign invaders are recognized. Those antibodies are also produced by simplistically white blood cells in your body. So that’s why it’s important to have great immune health.
Now here’s the problem. First of all, I hope most people realize that aging is associated with worsening and worsening and worsening immune health. In other words, aging in and of itself is compatible with a fall off of your immune health. Now, as a transplant surgeon, I can tell you that we thought an older patient who needed a heart or a lung transplant was one of the best things that could ever happen to us and even to the patient because the older the patient was, the less immunosuppression drugs, as a general rule, we had to give that patient to make the immune system eat quiet down even more.
On the other hand, if I had a 4 or 5-year-old child who needed a heart transplant, I had to break out the heavy artillery to suppress the immune system because that child’s immune system was hyper-vigilant, hyper-revved up. We’ll give you an example. Early in our experience with infant heart transplant, we put hearts into newborn babies. And we actually did remarkably well and we really didn’t have to use a lot of immune suppression.
But early on in our experience, we would have a child who was on a nice dose of immunosuppressant, we could see that their heart was not being attacked, and then they’d come down with a cold and all of a sudden they’d come back into the clinic and we could see that their heart was being under attack. And we’d go, “Well, what the heck? We had this so nice.” Well, the cold activated their immune system. And their immune system, which was kind of leveled off on our particular level of drugs, broke through that immunosuppression. So we had to give some rescue therapy. So that just gives you an idea of how active a young person’s immune system, how vigilant it is. But an old person, we just thought that was the best thing that could possibly happen.
Let me give you a personal example that you may have seen on TV. The flu shot you see on TV, “Oh, go get your flu shot,” or “I got my flu shot,” it turns out that according to the CDC’s data, if you’re over the age of 65, a single dose of a current flu shot is only about 8% effective, only about 8% effective. So you may have seen in recent years that there’s a flu shot for older adults that basically four times as strong as the standard flu shot, and that gets you up to about a 32% effective.
Now, when I say effective, what does that mean? It means that literally your immune system is so weakened that it takes four times the usual amount of stimulus to even get a response, not even a good response from your immune system in producing antibodies against the flu virus. So that’s a perfect example that as we get older, you’re less and less able to respond to a challenge. Why do you think that you see literally every night, “If you’re 60 or over, you are at increased risk for RSV, respiratory syncytial virus”? Why do you see every night a commercial for, “If you are 50-year-old, the herpes, the shingles virus is in you and just waiting to get out. You can be really healthy, but shingles will get you”? What they’re telling you, which is quite frankly true is yeah, your immune system is really not up to snuff, even if you think you are really healthy.
Now, there’s a lot of ways that I got interested besides being a transplant immunologist. I was very interested in convincing the immune system not to be active and preventing the immune system from being active. But when I started looking into taking care of patients with autoimmune diseases, one of the things that was interesting in a number of patients through the years who have a chronic low white blood cell count. Normally a white blood cell count, in general, will be anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000. Let’s just use those numbers. So if anyone has less than a 4,000 white blood cell count, and 4,000 per high power field, then they’re often worked up for some kind of problem.
And I used to see, I still see, lots of patients who have white blood cell counts of say, 3000. And they’ve had workups, some of them have even had bone marrow biopsies and they never find anything. When I started looking at these people with tests for leaky gut, lo and behold, all these people with a low white blood cell count had evidence of leaky gut. All of these people had evidence of other inflammatory markers, whether it was HSCRP, whether it was IL16, whether it was IL6, tumor necrosis factor, all of these people had activation of their immune system. And as we started in the program and we-
Dr. Steven Gundry:
And as we started in the program and we saw that leaky gut was being repaired, lo and behold, we saw that people’s white blood cell counts were going up and up back into the normal range. Now, how could that be? Well, I propose to you that there’s so much of our immune system, all of our white blood cells, there’s 70 to 80% of all of your immune system is down in your gut, is lining your gut. Why? Because that’s where the invaders come from in the first place. They come through the wall of your gut and that’s where your armed forces need to be stationed. But what’s interesting is if you have ongoing attack, then you don’t have enough soldiers to put out into your bloodstream. They’re all busy defending the wall of your gut. Now this is called inflow aging or inflammatory aging, but it’s a part and parcel, in my opinion, and now others, that this is a result of intestinal permeability and leaky gut.
And as we saw people’s leaky gut resolve, lo and behold, their white blood cell counts return to normal. So in a season where our immune system is going to be attacked, we want to maximize the available troops that are available to take care of the problems that will show up. What are we going to do for our immune health? Well, let’s talk about the worst things for immune health. First of all, sugar and fructose. Now, fructose is unfortunately a real mischief-maker in suppressing mitochondrial function and fructose is hiding everywhere. First of all, table sugar is 50% fructose, so it’s half glucose and half fructose. The molecule is called sucrose, but it’s fifty-fifty glucose and fructose. So plain old table sugar is loaded with fructose, and fructose is a mitochondrial poison. And we’ll talk about our mitochondria in just a bit. Number two, high fructose corn syrup, which has even more fructose than regular table sugar is in virtually everything, and it’s there to hide in what you’re eating. Just remember, even if it doesn’t taste sweet, it’s probably in there.
A bagel has 12 teaspoons of sugar. A piece of bread has four teaspoons of sugar. That healthy wholewheat sandwich has eight teaspoons of sugar, and it’s not on the label. So these sorts of foods really should not be in your diet. Now, everybody thinks when it’s cold and flu season that you got to drink your orange juice to get your vitamin C. Well, sorry to say that orange juice dramatically suppresses your white blood cell function for six hours after you drink a glass of orange juice. This is in human volunteers. Why? Because of the sugar content. Sugar suppresses white cell function, so that’s the last thing you want to do.
How about other immune health myths? Now, I actually am a fan of zinc lozenges for a cold, and there are a number of companies that make zinc lozenges. There was an old joke that I can give you X, Y, and Z supplements for your cold and it will be over in seven days. If I don’t give you those supplements, it will be over in a week. There is a little bit of a good joke in that, but I’m going to tell you in a minute what I like to do, what I like my patients to do, and zinc is an option, but you can do too much zinc. I like to limit zinc to 30 to 50 milligrams per day on a routine basis and limit the time I’m taking zinc lozenges for about three days.
Now, everybody I hear says ginger is a great treatment for a cold and yet as you’ll learn in Gut Check that a great number of patients actually react to ginger with a food sensitivity. And quite frankly, this was a real surprise to me, but over and over again I see in my patient population sensitivity to ginger. All right, so what are some of the best things for immune health? So here are three things that I use to support my immune health. Now I’ve alluded to this, but you’ll want to not have your immune cells busy doing battle with things coming across your gut wall and you want to make sure your gut wall is sealed.
So my first recommendation is stop swallowing razor blades and those razor blades are lectin-containing foods. So those are all the grains and pseudo grains. Those are all the non-properly prepared beans and legumes. I have nothing against beans and legumes if they’re pressure cooked. And the nightshade vegetables, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, potatoes, goji berries, and peanuts and cashews. That’s a good list to start with. We can seal your gut wall, but if you keep swallowing razor blades, you’ll just open it right back up. And again, we can see this in people’s blood work.
Number two, the University of California San Diego has one of the biggest vitamin D research units in the country. Their recommendation, published recommendations are that the average American should be taking 9,600 international units of vitamin D3 per day. That’s basically 10,000 international units per day during cold and flu season. I have all of my patients, including me, who were maintaining at 5,000 international units a day, double that dose to 10,000. We’ve never seen an issue. The University of California San Diego has never seen a case of vitamin D toxicity up to 40,000 international units per day chronically. So just going to 10,000 units will be just fine.
Some of you may remember the H1N1 flu virus of a few years ago, a very deadly flu. We had a young woman in our ICU in Palm Springs who was in her 20s and on a ventilator and literally dying from the H1N1 flu. Her lungs were white on the X-ray. We could barely keep her oxygen levels adequate to keep her alive. And I knew about IV vitamin C. I had never used it, but I knew the dosages and so I went to our pharmacy and I said, “I want to give this woman IV vitamin C in high dose. Can you make it for me?” They said, “Well, if you write the order, yes.” So I gave her a high dose intravenous vitamin C. Within 12 hours she completely turned around, were able to extubate her a couple of days later, she left the hospital. We stayed in touch for a number of years. She got married, she got pregnant. And I have an anecdote that in that one case, vitamin C intravenously was dramatically effective against that viral illness.
So what do I do? So as you know, I recommend taking a 1,000 milligrams of timed-release vitamin C twice a day. So I take a 1,000 milligrams of time release vitamin C four times a day. Never gotten diarrhea from it, never gotten loose bowels from it. So those are my two regimens. Kick your vitamin D level up to about 10,000 international units a day and make sure you’re taking timed-release vitamin C. Again, why timed-release? Because we’re going to get rid of it too quickly from a standard dose. If that’s really inconvenient for you, get yourself the chewable vitamin Cs that don’t have sugar in them, they make them, and chew a 500 or a 1,000 milligram vitamin C four times a day.
What else do I do? Well, I put mushroom extracts in my coffee every morning. I try to eat two cups of mushrooms at least a week. Why do I do that? Well, there’s more and more and more evidence that polysaccharides, polysaccharides refer to long chain of sugar molecules, complex long chain sugar molecules, and these happen to be in mushrooms, among other things. These complex sugar molecules are one of the favorite foods of your gut microbiome. Fascinating evidence that algae have lots of polysaccharides.
Dr. Steven Gundry:
[inaudible 00:22:01] have lots of polysaccharides, mushrooms have lots of polysaccharides, and so cook them please and please don’t, as you’ll learn in gut check, stay away from raw white button mushrooms. The brown mushrooms, the shiitake, all of those, portobello, are just fine. Kick your mushroom use up during this season. Now, postbiotics do a whole lot for your immune system and a more recent example on what there have been a lot of very interesting papers published is the postbiotic Urolithin A. Now, those of you who’ve watched my podcast know that I’m a huge fan of Urolithin A, and I’m a huge fan for a number of reasons, and we’ve had the head of research for timeline nutrition on our podcast, we’ve had the CEO on our podcast. I’m that impressed. I’m not an investor in Mitopure or in timeline nutrition, but I’m so impressed with this postbiotic.
Urolithin A does several really great things for your immune system. Number one, we should know that the power of your immune system, how white blood cells can actually arm themselves and do damage to invaders is because their mitochondria are really supercharged in producing ATP, which powers them to do this, and one of the sad things we’re now learning is the reason our immune system isn’t up to snuff as we get older is that our mitochondria become more and more dysfunctional. I’ve spent the last four books telling you how to power up your mitochondria and what we’ve done to damage them. So Urolithin A is one of the best ways that I know of, and there are many others, to power up your mitochondria, number one, by repairing your mitochondria, and number two, to actually make more mitochondria, mitogenesis, the more you have in your cells, the more power you make, and number three, there are some new papers that show that Urolithin a stimulates hemopoietic stem cell production, the cells that are made into your white blood cells.
So it’s really a triple threat and this data has only come out in the last couple years. The other thing that I’ve talked about before is remarkably super old people who are thriving in their late 90s, early 100s actually have a set of bacteria in their gut that produce Urolithin A, whereas most of us mere mortals, only about 14 to 20% of us have the set of bacteria that make Urolithin A. Isn’t that interesting that these super old folks, they’re making Urolithin A and that’s helping their immune cell mitochondria to produce energy to be ready to respond to mischief? Now, that goes with cancer as well. Your immune system is responsible for looking for cancer cells and your immune system falls asleep on the job.
There’s now exciting evidence that giving Urolithin A to an animal model of colon cancer shows that the animals that were supplemented with Urolithin A had much smaller tumors than the control animals that weren’t given Urolithin A. That’s pretty doggone exciting. The other thing I’m excited about, if you like the mitochondrial dysfunction theory of cancer, and I’m a huge fan of the metabolic dysfunction theory of cancer, then making sure your mitochondria are healthy, are in a repair mode or taking care of themselves. If they’re damaged, then they’re able to do autophagy, which means self-heat to repair themselves, then that’s a really good thing to do, and that’s what Urolithin A does as well.
One last thing before we go. If your immune system is distracted by damaged cells, by senescent cells, then your immune system cannot be available for fighting off viruses, bacteria, and for seeking out cancer cells. What’s really exciting, and I’ve written the Energy Paradox, all about that, we forget at our peril that mitochondria, the little ATP-producing organelles in all of our cells, are in fact ancient engulfed bacteria, and the cell membrane of mitochondria is viewed by our immune system as a bacteria. Now, as long as the mitochondria is inside the cells, your immune system don’t see those mitochondria. But if the cell dies and doesn’t recycle, a condition called apoptosis, those damage mitochondria, and that’s why the cell is dying, the cell explodes and spews mitochondria walls all around, and we can actually see the immune system get activated as if it was under a bacterial attack.
So long story short, this is the time of year where we want a great functioning immune system. Your immune system is distracted by a leaky gut and the war that’s going on in your gut. Number two, your mitochondria are inefficient due to our toxic sugar overload and fructose overload and the more we get those components out of our diet, the more we stop swallowing razor blades, the more we get vitamin D and time release vitamin C in our diet, and quite frankly, the more we can produce Urolithin A through good bacteria or better yet take Urolithin A as a supplement, the better we’re going to get through not only this season but seasons to come.
There are foods that can actually support your immune system that I’ve talked about before, but there’s some really important foods that’ll destroy your immune system that you should know about. First up, we’ve learned that 80% of all of our immune system, all of our white cells are congregated down in our gut, down in our abdomen. Why? Because we’re learning on a day-to-day basis that most of the mischief that’s going to get into us comes through the wall of our gut from leaky gut. So if you are eating the typical American diet or even eating a healthy lectin-rich diet, you are, number one, going to have leaky gut, and number two, you are going to have most of your immune system activated and concentrated down where the trouble is coming.
Now, what that means is your immune system is basically distracted from other jobs it should be doing simultaneously, like checking in on your nose and your mouth, checking in on the airways of your lungs. It’s too distracted and most of the army is in the wrong place down in the gut. What I see in patients who have, for instance, low white blood cell counts, is always they have leaky gut and shockingly to their doctors, to their hematologists, when we repair their leaky gut, lo and behold, their white blood cell count returns into the normal range. All those white cells were kind of out of commission because they were battling the enemy down in the gut. That’s point number one.
Point number two, sugar suppresses the immune system. This was proven back in the 1950s by two time Nobel Prize winning laureate Linus Pauling, the vitamin C doctor, and what was shown in human volunteers that a glass of orange juice would suppress white blood cells from eating bacteria or eating viruses for up to six hours after a healthy volunteer drank a glass of orange juice. Now, imagine what would happen if you are the typical American who’s not all that healthy. The last thing you want to do when you’re catching a cold or feel something coming on is down that glass of orange juice. It’ll suppress your immune system, not help it. If sugar’s the big enemy of your immune system, then surely sugar-free foods or sugar-free drinks would be a whole lot healthier. Well, not so fast. Sadly, almost all sugar-free sweeteners have been shown to kill off or suppress the microbiome. Now, why is that so important? We now know that much of the-
Dr. Steven Gundry:
That’s so important. We now know that much of the information that the immune system gets about who are bad guys and who are good guys and who they should be worried about and who they should ignore comes from education from the gut microbiome. And we know that literally there’s a language of communication between our white blood cells and our gut microbiome. The gut microbiome in general, if it’s healthy, if it’s diverse, tells the immune system, hey guys, we got your back. We’re on everything that comes down the pike here. We’ll take care of things. You guys relax. You have better things to worry about. Go look for bad guys elsewhere. If you use artificial sweeteners or use diet drinks, you’re going to kill off a huge portion of your gut microbiome. In fact, a Duke University study showed that one packet of Splenda kills off 50% of your microbiome, one packet.
Imagine doing that several times a day like I used to do. No wonder I was sick all the time. So you got to keep your microbiome healthy and in good population, and you don’t want to kill it off with an artificial sweetener. That would be crazy if you really wanted to support your immune system. Okay, so with that in mind, let’s just name three of the worst foods for your immune system. Number one, healthy whole grains. Now, you see it everywhere. Whole grains support your health, not so. First of all, let’s take a piece of whole grain bread or a whole grain cracker. Have you ever seen any whole grains in that bread or the cracker? No, of course not. They’ve been ground up and whenever we grind up a whole grain, we also grind up the fats in that grain, which go rancid very quickly.
So these products have to have antioxidants to stop the oxidation of that product. Now, the antioxidants that are used in these products, as I’ve written about in my books, are not only endocrine disruptors, but also great for suppressing your microbiome in your gut. So rather than supporting your microbiome, it’s worse, but it gets even worse. Raisin bran, for instance, that’s a whole grain cereal, that’s full of bran. That ought to be a great thing. Sadly, a cup of raisin bran is going to have up to 20 teaspoons of sugar in a cup of raisin bran. Now you add a cup of milk to that and you’re looking at this giant sugar bomb that you’re having as a healthy breakfast because it’s whole grain goodness. And it’s no wonder when I see patients in my clinics that are doing this that everything is thrown off and they’re always coming down with infection of the week.
So stop eating whole grains, particularly whole grains that have been ground up and still labeled whole grains. Dairy is right up there as number two. Two reasons. Number one, it’s full of sugar. Number two, almost all dairy milk in this country is casein A-one containing dairy from Holstein cows, the black and white cow. Casein A-one is a really good lectin-like protein for causing leaky gut. So if leaky gut is what’s distracting your immune system down into the gut from the business of guarding you, and it’s loaded with sugar, which would suppress your functioning immune system, it’s a one-two punch. Dairy is out in terms of milk. Number three, a fruit smoothie. Now, I used to joke with my patients that lets take a trip down to the San Diego Zoo and look in all the cages and let’s see if anybody has a juicer or a smoothie machine in any of the cages.
And of course, we have a good laugh and realize that of course, you wouldn’t give juices to a great ape. You wouldn’t have a smoothie prepared for an orangutan. You would in season give them apples or oranges and they would eat them whole. When they’re whole, they have a lot of fiber, at least they used to, and so they could tolerate these foods. But if you juice the fruit or pulverize the fruit, you now have released those bound sugar molecules for instant absorption. So if you wanted to suppress your immune system, have a glass of juice, have a fruit smoothie. And a lot of things we’re doing for health is absolutely suppressing our immune system.
Question of the week comes from @BlackMac9539 on my YouTube video, what I buy at Costco. Dr. Gundry’s protein and oil picks. They said, “I’ve heard refrigerating olive oil helps it not go rancid as fast. I buy the big plastic bottle EVOO and transfer it to brown canning jars and keep it in the fridge. Is this a good thing to do?” Well, that’s a great question. First of all, please don’t buy the plastic jugs of extra virgin olive oil at Costco, buy the glass bottles are smaller. Sadly, the minute you start opening a bottle of olive oil, it starts to go rancid. But great question, stay away from the plastic bottles.
Now, it’s time of the review of the week. The review of the week comes @SuperWonderBar on YouTube. They said, “Thank you so much. I have always been unsure of what to buy and what not to buy for canned fish, meats and olive oil. You made my grocery shopping at Costco so much easier. PS, I do like your olive oil, myself and my husband, take a half a tablespoon of your oil every day.” Well, thanks SuperWonderBar. There are ways to get good quality products at numerous stores, including Costco, and the object of the game is to keep your health maximized at a minimum amount of cost. And that’s why I do this, because I’m Dr. Gundry and I’m always looking out for you.
Speaker 1:
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also the Dr. Gundry Podcast YouTube channel, where we have tens of thousands of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long, vital life. Let’s do this to-
