Balancing Your Immune System

Transcript of Dr. Grossman talks about how to equally and effectively defend your body against disease. You may view the YouTube video here.

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Welcome to the Age Gracefully Show with Dr. Michael Grossman, well known anti-aging stem cell and regenerative medicine specialist, bestselling author and founder of the OC Wellness Clinic in Irvine, California. Each week he shares the latest information to help you look and feel your best so you age gracefully. And here's your host, Dr. Michael Grossman.

Welcome, everybody. I'm Dr Michael Grossman. I'm an anti-aging physician, specializing in keeping people youthful, energetic and doing it in the most natural way possible. I've been doing this for a long time as a family physician since 1974. I have been practicing nutritional approaches to medicine and in the last 11-12 years since about 2000, well, 2003, I began doing a primarily nutritional anti-aging approach to medicine where I'm using many biochemical hormones and other natural approaches to creating health and well being. Today, I want to focus with you on balancing immune system. I remember when I was in medical school and I heard a discussion on the radio about that yeast could be a big problem in over going in people's intestinal tract, and that might be a big cause of ilness and disease. And I laughed at that. I think it was like a 1980 or so when I was introduced to this idea again, and it just didn't make any sense. I knew about yeast. Yeast is a harmless one-celled organism that goes on the skin that irritates the skin. But that's about it. Why? Why are these nutritional-health people thinking that this is a big danger for your overall health and well being, it made no sense to me. I was kind of bewildered by that. Well, after going to many causes and classes and getting a lot of additional seminar information, I came to understand that what was actually happening is that the yeast is not by itself of a virulent organism that invades your body and takes it over, but rather it just creates imbalances in your immune system. It irritates.

The immune system is 70% around the intestinal tract. So your tummy, your intestines, are the way the body knows what's going on in the environment. If in the environment, there's funny things happening and your body wants to know about it on a chemical level, it uses your intestinal tract. You eat the food, it goes into your intestinal tract and your body knows what's going on in the environment and on chemical level. A little bit through the skin, a little bit through the nose, but mostly through eating. And that's how the body knows, 'Okay, these are the chemicals. These are the pathogens. These are the problems in the environment. Let's build up an immune response to it.' So 70% of immune cells, the lymph glands are around your intestinal tract. So what that means is that the balance of things in your intestinal tract is critical to your immune balancing. And if you have an old overgrowth of yeast, which is pretty harmless, but it's an irritant and it irritates the lining of the intestinal tract, a variety of things happen. The body sends out immune cells, white blood cells, immunoglobulins to attack the yeast, and when it does that, it sets up a whole reaction of the intestinal tract, which is like if you get a pimple on your skin, it is very irritating, and in the intestinal tract, if it gets irritated, then things begin to leak through the intestinal tract that shouldn't be leaking through. And once you get that leaking process occurring, then you get a whole wave of things coming through your blood into your liver, and it sets up a whole immune response. And your body can get way overwhelmed with these immune responses, which can create all kinds of autoimmune diseases. All imbalances in the immune system. And yes, your doctor can give you chemotherapy agents which kill your immune system, bombs it out, kills it, sells it down. But you get severe consequences from that very intense kind of thing.

Sometimes with arthritis, it gets very severe Lupus and you're going to die, so, you take these chemotherapy agents, which can keep you alive, but it's not the best, most balanced way of doing it. We would rather balance out your immune system through natural means. One of the natural means- we want to create that inflammation to go down in your GI tract, your gastrointestinal tract. How do we do that? Maybe it's eliminating yeast. We can measure your stool and see how much yeast cells you have in there. We can measure immunoglobulins that relate to the east and see how much of knows you have in there. If you have it, we can treat the yeast with a variety of mechanisms, either herbs or nutrients or prescription medicines to kill these cells. One big arena is treating the yeast for people with immune imbalances. Now one of the other kind of things that we can treat if part of the infection going on in your gastrointestinal tract, is related to imbalance bacteria, we want to treat that. What causes imbalance bacteria? So many things. I mean, you take antibiotics, it kills the good and the bad bacteria and then some other bacteria just who aren't killed. They continue to grow and develop. It's big imbalances. When you don't eat enough natural fermented products, you can eat pickles and sauerkraut and yogurt and kefir. And all these naturally fermented products, which have naturally good bacteria, goes in your GI tract and they grow and they proliferate, and they create a better balance of bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract.

Everybody has a whole variety of bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract, but what the balance is, is critical because certain bacteria are irritants and other bacteria like the lactobacillus and acidophilus are ones that are soothing to the gastrointestinal tract. In addition, when you're breaking down your food with enzymes, you need to have good bacteria and to create L-glutamine. And you need to have fiber to create a L-glutamine, because the lining tract requires the L-glutamine for its energy. Most of your cells in your body get energy from the food you eat. Your gastrointestinal tract lining gets energy from the breakdown of food from that's lining intestinal tract. The breakdown of the food means that if you have enough fiber, the bacteria break down the fiber and create the L-glutamine, which is the energy that goes into the lining of the gastrointestinal tract. If you don't have enough of this L-glutamine available for the lining of your gastrointestinal tract, what happens is that the villi, the villi are these little finger like projections in your intestinal tract that allow you to absorb the food. The villi should have a surface area that's like the size of a tennis court; it's a huge surface area. And that allows you to absorb your food properly. But when you don't have the L-glutamine and the right bacteria and the fiber, the villi shrink, they shrivel up and they disappear and they get very tiny. And then no matter what you eat, you can't absorb the food. People who have been on a severe fast, you can't just give them a lot of food to eat. You think you're going to help them, they're probably going to die. You have to give them soup and broth and, little by little, nurture the intestinal tract back into some semblance of health where they can actually absorb food again.

So for those who have imbalances in the gastrointestinal tract, we need to nurture your gastrointestinal tract. And one of the things we do is to give you L-glutamine to bring it back to health and it's an easy thing, it's just a nutrient. We combine it with a variety of other nutrients and other herbs that also are required by the gastrointestinal tract to bring it back into health. So those are some of the things that we do when we're when we're thinking of, 'What are we going to do to balance out your immune system?' Now the other things we could think about. If you're having a lot of gas and bloating and/or diarrhea or constipation, that's not just an annoyance. That's not just a irritation. It's a serious problem. You're imbalancing out your gastrointestinal tract. You need to have healthy digestion. If you're making enough enzymes in hydrochloric acid, you're not having gas and bloating, and that's very important. If you are, we need to supplement so that you can digest your food and get the nutrients you need to come inside your body. If you're having alternating diarrhea, constipation, that's not normal. That's not just a irritation or annoyance. It's a serious imbalance in your gastrointestinal tract. It could be related to many things. Sometimes it's related to the food you eat. Sometimes it's food sensitivities. Sometimes it's as we talked about imbalances and bacteria or other things... digestive enzymes. But it's not just an annoyance. We need to deal with that. We need to find the things that will allow you to have normal bowel movements frequently relates to eating more of fiber. There are two kinds of fiber: there's soluble and insoluble. With soluble fibers, made from fruit kind of things and insoluble fiber is made more from plants and grains. Both of them are important. You want to have both kinds of fiber. So how much fiber do you need? It really depends. It varies a lot depending upon what you're eating. But it is very hard to take too much fiber as long as you're not doing it all in one time.

So those are a variety of things to think about here. So, in terms of, 'You know what you're going to do to have a healthy, gastrointestinal tract to balance out your immune system,' there are so many different approaches and it's something that I do a lot of to help you to achieve a better balance in your immune system. And this is not just an annoyance. This is really very important for your longevity in your health and the balance of the overall physiology. And each person is a little distinct in terms of what they need and what really works for them. And I'm happy to work with people. It's like playing detective, and I enjoy. That's like a little chess game. How do we create that will better balance for your own physiology so that you could feel vibrant. You can feel energetic, and it's my pleasure to work with you. You're welcome to come and visit me in my office, which is next to Orange County airport. You can visit ocwellness.com which is my website. There's a lot of information that would be really helpful, and you're welcome to call my office at 9492220232 and talk... be happy to help you and give you more information about what's possible in the youthful, vibrant, energetic, in a natural way. So thanks so much for listening. Looking forward to speaking to you again. Bye now.

Thank you for watching the Age Gracefully Show with Dr. Michael Grossman. Join us next week for another informative discussion to help you age gracefully. Be sure to visit us at ocwellness.com.

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