How 'boosting' your immune system increases inflammation and 4 ways to support balance instead | Dr Giulia Enders

Welcome to Zoe Science and Nutrition where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. It's 3 a.m. and you're wide awake, streaming nose, sore throat and the distinct feeling that your body has let you down. But what if it hasn't? What if the sneezing, the runny nose, the fever, all of it is actually your body doing exactly what it should? And what if the symptoms we spend so much energy suppressing are in fact the whole point? That's the idea at the heart of Julia Ender's new book, Organspeak. Julia is a gastroenterologist and an author whose previous book, Gut, sold 8 million copies and helped convince the world that gut health was worth taking seriously. Now she's turned her attention to the whole body and the remarkable language it uses to communicate with us. Today she joins us to completely reshape how we think about illness, immunity and what it means to feel well. By the end of this episode you'll know whether to reach for a decongestant the next time you have a cold. Why boosting your immune system might be a very bad idea and which simple habits genuinely do keep your immune system in balance. Julia thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. So we have a tradition here at Zoe where we always start with a quick fire round of questions and we have these very strict rules. You can say yes or no or if you have to a one sentence answer. Okay. Does drinking coke increase your risk of rheumatoid arthritis? Yes it does. Is boosting your immune system a good idea? Not necessarily not. Does a runny nose help you recover from a cold? In a way yes it does. Can poor sleep harm your immune health? Yes definitely. And finally what's one fact about the immune system that just blows your mind? That it is actually comparable to consciousness and far more connected than AI networks are. It is in a way cellular intelligence at work and at its best. Whenever I get a cough or a cold I immediately feel like my body is letting me down. Like it's a failure, I'm failing and like my immune system is not doing what it should. And I was really struck that in your new book you're sort of completely reversing that way of thinking. You wrote a previous book that was called Gut. There was a huge hit there about I think eight million copies sold. But particularly for me I actually read that book at just the time that I met my co-founder Tim Spector. And at that point I knew nothing about the microbiome. I knew very little about the gut. And your book helped convince me basically that Tim was not mad, that the gut health was really important, the microbiome was really important and so this thing was really credible. What first drew you to this topic of gut health? It was at first a very personal experience. I had a skin disease and the doctor prescribed me corticosteroids creams and it would make it better for a little bit but then it just came back. And I thought to myself, well I'm in this body for I think another like 70, 80 years maybe and I know nothing about it. And this is a bit odd isn't it? I should know more. So I started reading and trying to find ways to get my skin healed back up again. And then during that time I read about the gut and I was completely blown away. It's so intelligent, it's so versatile and mediates so many important processes. So then I studied medicine and every time the gut came up I was there. I really listened and then I thought more people should know all these things. They're so helpful and also interesting and sometimes funny and well then that really tipped it off. And so clearly that took you all the way through. You became a doctor, you became a gastroenterologist. But in your latest book, Organspeak, you've sort of expanded other parts of the body. So you've sort of cheated on the gut a little bit here. What's inspired you to do that? It was the work in the hospital. After I finished my studies I went to work in a hospital specialized on gut disorders. And after a while I just had to come clear and face reality which you know meets you there in the hospital. Which was I'm not a good doctor if I only focus on the gut. I'm missing out on all these connections on all these other things that influence the gut. I realized after a while that there was a group of my patients with irritable bowel syndrome where they would sleep poorly and I would repeatedly hear this when I was questioning them in the beginning. And so I got into reading about the brain and sleep for example. And I realized oh there is a part of sleep that is really important for pain threshold. How much pain we feel. So this could influence it and also the gut homeostasis and how everything is repaired during the night. In the body everything is connected. And in research we always tried to like tidy it up and separate it all to have like good nice and clean results. But you can't do that in the hospital because you know they're the human is built back together again. So yeah and then there were other things like people coming in with belly eggs or even appendicitis more often when the air quality was poor in the city I was working in. And we had that often because we had lots of cruise ships coming in. It was Hamburg. So you know I started reading about the lung and air quality. And this is sort of like how it took off and things kept piling up and made me want to say something again like that felt with the first book. So how has that experience changed the way that you think about I guess health and disease. The way I see the body now I think is a bit more sophisticated. Sunday I started to have this respect for other things. Why are they put in this place. What are they especially good at. And how can I actually make use of that in my day to day life. And really have like a more cooperative and appreciative relationship to these organs. And this has made me I think more appreciative but also drastically changed what I think I am and what others are. I think it's also important to just see this miraculous crazy thing of being alive sometimes just let it shine through a little bit. That has done that to me. I love just hearing the enthusiasm but also you don't sound like a typical doctor. I feel like a typical doctor does like carve this up into pieces try and identify the one bit that's broken and then say OK this is the thing that we need to do in order to. That's important too. And I need to do that two at times but it took me some time to get to this other thinking. That's actually why it took me quite a while to write this book. I really had to learn a different way of thinking. Also a bit more associative I'd say. When we feel ill or not able to perform as we expected we often say things like my body's broken or I'm damaged. What's your view of that approach. It's almost always wrong even with horrible diseases and I'm not saying the body doesn't make mistakes. The body definitely doesn't make mistakes. It's human after all. But the way we often describe it is like it's broken or stupid or dumb or aggressive even with the immune system. You'll often hear in the doctor's office you know your immune cells are attacking your own body and it sounds in a way but stupid and aggressive and unnecessary. But what we know from research since the 90s is a very different picture. It's more that the immune system is trying to keep you safe all the time. And it's really all it's there for that's its whole purpose of existence and it does so eagerly. And sometimes for example when it experiences horrible cold or something happening or notices your body is really not doing well or other genetic factors also then it can go overboard a bit with that. It can be overprotective. They want to do their best but they're doing something that's not so beneficial. And that's happening a lot of the times when it comes to autoimmunity. And to see it like that is not only nice story. It's also accurate to the research we have. But it's also helpful to the way people see themselves and treat their body when they have this disease. Why does it matter? Why is there anything wrong with having this approach that says like my body is letting me down? Well let me give you just the example I had with this when I when I really understood this and I had a patient and we diagnosed her with a chronic inflammatory bowel disease. And she had been in our hospital a few years earlier where she had a really severe e-heck infection. So that's a toxic E. coli strain that is very dangerous. And she said, oh I have such bad luck it's always the gut and it's like acting up and doing all these horrible things. Of course she was sad. That's not a good diagnosis to get. And I went in there in the afternoon and I said I wanted to just talk to you about it again for a few minutes. You've had this really severe infection a few years ago and it is something that the immune cells see and witness and they do form a memory. And when they have been through something like this they are more likely to react with autoimmunity and maybe attack gut bacteria that aren't bad after all. Just because they've seen something so dreadful, so horrible almost going wrong. And now they're just being over careful. And while they're doing that they're attacking all these things that when they just look a bit funny they go off. So it is not convenient. It is not a good thing but it is them really now being overly you know attached to you and trying to secure you. And she had a bit of teary eyes and I think for her it was way better to learn it that way. And also when we look at all these additional therapies that are now being researched more and more when it comes to autoimmunity. Different diets, you know, relaxation techniques or you know all kinds of different things for autoimmunity. It's all like a to-do list if you don't see it from the right angle. But if you see it from the angle that the immune system is constantly checking out your body how you're doing and adjusting its aggressiveness according to that. Then all these things make sense because they give the signal and communicate to your immune cells, oh I'm actually doing good. Are you saying that your immune system is perhaps overprotective some of the time? It's checking on you and figuring out how aggressive it needs to be. And if in fact it's on more than it should be. And this is your example with these sort of autoimmune situations where it's sort of attacking something that isn't actually bad. If you can just somehow calm yourself down, like be more relaxed, then potentially you're sort of sending messages to your immune system that maybe it can also be a bit more relaxed and that can genuinely change the way in which it interacts with you know whatever's triggering it and setting off this sort of autoimmune response. Hi, Professor Tim Spector here. Have you heard about our documentary, The Gut Health Challenge? We challenged Sarah, Rob and Lucy to transform their health in just six weeks by improving their gut health. If you've ever wondered how Zoe works, this documentary reveals all. When our participants started, they struggled with everything from brain fog and sleep troubles and low energy. Can eating the Zoe way address these issues and improve their health markers in just six weeks? You'll get a behind the scenes look at Zoe and discover some great action or advice from Federica and Sarah. Follow their journey by searching Gut Health Challenge on YouTube. To be very clear, you cannot heal an autoimmune disease by just relaxing. That would be insane. There's always multiple causes and influences on diseases. Usually it's multi, multi factorial, you know, but one factor is also an interaction of the nervous system with the immune system. Those two communicate and we know the fruits to good medical research. And there are these studies with relaxation techniques, stress influencing the course of autoimmune diseases. So it is one factor that we can influence, but there's also other factors. Like as I said, maybe a viral disease has tipped it off in the beginning or you're genetically more likely to develop autoimmunity because you lack certain signals or structures or have a little less of cells that calm the immune system down. Usually. So there's always multiple factors, but one of them is also your body being in a good state and your immune system noticing that. I think that's fascinating because I feel like I was brought up thinking that is all crazy California and woo woo to think that like your mental attitude could have any impact on your body. I was definitely brought up with a very big divide between like the mind and the rest of your body. I think most of us were. And this is just what happens when research has the luxury of being more differentiated. A lot of research that I look at now is, you know, suddenly there's a gut liver access. There's a liver brain access. There's immune system brain access. There's, you know, all these accesses that are now being called that they're basically just saying, Oh, now we have the luxury to see all these finer connections and influences as well. It's also paradigm shift because we've had this time of, you know, separating everything and science and we had to because everything was so, you know, before that, medieval times and everything being a bit more like a story time or, you know, mystical. And then we said, No, let's separate it and be very rational and to, in order to research it, we have to really divide it up and look at the single singular pieces. And I think now we're actually doing an interesting step. We're now connecting those pieces that we were so eager of separating in the first place. I find this an interesting time in medicine. My wife says I'm a terrible patient. Whenever I am sick, I catastrophize. I'm like, I'm going to be sick wherever it's terrible. I also complain immensely about the fact that my body is letting me down. Why am I feeling like this? I can't do everything I want, which I think is learned behavior from my upbringing. What should I be doing instead? The nice thing about being sick or well, it's not nice thing, but it's the good to know thing, I would say, is that all these things you're experiencing for the most part don't come from the germ that's infecting you. The sore throat, the runny nose, the cough, the fever even, the microbe or the virus doesn't do that. It's not coming from the infection? No, because it would really like to live there unnoticed. And that would be the best case for it if no one bothered and it could just be there and do its thing. But who bothers is our immune system. It's saying, oh, I don't like the way this special microbe is treating myself. I'm against that. I don't think it's a good match. So we should divide this up here. And in that case, it'll start popping some of the throat cells to get those out that have the virus in and then protecting the cells around to not get the virus from the virus spreading. It'll induce little wounds during that. And it'll make the nerve cells more sensible with all the inflammation. So that's where your sore throat comes from. Or also the runny nose is a mechanism where when there's an infection or a bacteria or a virus noticed in the cells, the immune system will trigger the blood vessels to become porous. And through these porous cells, suddenly the fluids from the bloodstream enter the tissue. And that's good because the immune cells can come with that. They can go to the place where the infection is happening through those pores and they get there, get to the trouble spot. But also all the liquids that are coming out of the blood are then creating this swelling and runny nose. And the runny nose will expel whatever is there. Just like diarrhea does expel a bad germ or coughing does expel viruses in a load so that you don't all have to fight them. You're just getting rid of them, have fewer of them after. Medviva is also aware of the immune system really driving up its own temperature of the body with the help of the brain to then have the virus or bacteria feel uncomfortable with this change temperature. And also tell other immune systems cells that are further away or we're activating this higher temperature mode so we might all get a bit engaged here. So if these symptoms of let's start with the cold maybe if the centers of the cold are like my immune system doing its job right, should I be taking any medicines that might interrupt this? This is debated and there's data on multiple aspects. And for the very first question was just should I take something like anti-inflammatory drugs when I have a cold? Some research say don't because it might prolong the cold for another 24 hours. An estimate and others say oh do because it doesn't really change anything but you'll just feel better. Some things are really good idea for example decongestant nasal spray because they'll actually when it gets too bad with the nose and you can't breathe and eat and sleep then really take some before it spreads to the ears because the ears go through the same channel and if it's all swollen up they can't really air and clean out and so then they'll have a problem soon. So the decongestant nasal spray if you use it right and not too much don't overdo it don't take it too long then it's a really good thing to do when you're being sick. But when it comes for example to things that tone down the gut when you have diarrhea like loparomids for example is the usual thing you take on travels or something then you should really think twice because as I said diarrhea will expel the germs out and help the gut to get rid of them so they don't infect any more cells or less at least and when you then take something that just stops the motion of the gut and just lets everything brew and lay around then that's not a good idea and we have data showing that it elevates your risk of post-infection irritable bowel syndrome and also like having a bit more pain and like trouble after an infection. So if you really need to take it because you just have to get on that plane or you're starting to be dehydrated and it gets really bad then go ahead but if it's not so necessary and you could just really have your gut you know sorted out for half a day or a day in the hotel room then you might want to go with that for example and it's a mix out of both for anti-carf medicine because in the very beginning carf is similar to diarrhea where it really gets out some of the viruses and germs by coughing them out but later on it oftentimes will fuse into a more like irritated carf where just the immune cells and the cells in the airways are so sensitive every piece of dry air or little particle that you breathe in will then irritate them and make you cough unnecessarily and in that case you can then grab the medicine you know I would you know put it in these categories. I'd like to ask about the painkillers because that was less clear to me so let's say I'm thinking about taking paracetamol Tylenol yeah what on balance is that likely to do? And since the data is not really clear on that I think everyone can still pick their choice and also depending maybe on how bad it is if it's so bad that for example you can't really sleep and sleep is very important for healing or you just have to like get through the day then I'd say go ahead. Often you have this like paracetamol ibuprofen is sort of like your twin drugs you can take are you as relaxed with the ibuprofen as you are with the paracetamol? It's a freedom of choice I would say at this point I don't have a preferred one to to advise and people usually have one so they say I react better to that and that and then I would always go with this. I was thinking back to what you're saying before about like rethinking the immune system. I tend to think of the immune system as being sort of permanently at war like it's constantly fighting against all these things in our environment in order to keep ourselves safe like is that the right way to think about it with like all our latest understanding of what's going on? Well yes and no there is this part of the immune system that really has to do all these things to keep unwanted microbes and stuff out but then it's also in a way kind of old-fashioned to be honest because we've had this research about like invaders and killer cells and so on in like times of the first and second world war heavily influenced by the war lingo and partly it fits what's happening there but for some other parts and actually quite large parts it's not and we have known like for a few decades now that the immune system is also really trying to keep us safe through other routes than just war and fighting. It is keeping us safe through for example cooperating with good microbes which is a very important part because if they take up a lot of room there's not so much room left for bedrooms to land you know it is saving a lot of energy by not initiating unnecessary inflammatory reactions by tolerating and just you know nurturing tolerance in order to have just microbes sitting there that don't do anything bad but they are okay maybe sometimes they're a bit funky but that's not a problem and all of this it can only do because it constantly asks us how we're doing gets to know us all the time is curious and learning and builds a memory and you know has all these experiences and immune system in our old age is educated and very different than one in the younger ages where it will just inflame and have a fever right away and then in an older age it'll say oh I know this buck I don't even care to you know inflame anything or have a fever it's gone. In your book you use this term the micro cloak can you explain what this micro cloak is and what you mean by that? Well then what is a cloak the fun thing is you can change a cloak right you can take it off and then you can put another one on and if it's raining you might want to use a waterproof one and if it's really light out you might want to lose a very light nice one or something you know and this is the cool thing about bacteria and what actually our relationship with them is because that's let's be real from like those millions billions of bacteria that are out there very few make us sick with viruses it's the same thing each time we breathe we'll breathe in hundreds thousands of viruses and they won't do anything to us because they just really don't care to infect us to get the full picture you would have to say they must have other jobs and it can't be their main job to make us sick and really it isn't and when you look at bacteria their main job numerically speaking just mathematically is really borrowing some of their unique features like giving them to us for free in you know exchange for maybe living on us for a couple of minutes hours or years and that is a nice thing because we can interchange them like a cloak as I said if we go to another country and there's suddenly a weird new food that we're eating oftentimes on that food sitting ready to digest some of the fiber or particles are already bacteria and while we digest we keep them as for as long as we need them and when we go back to our country then you know after a while they're gone because we don't need them anymore and this happens also on the skin where there's bacteria and microbes that will produce antibiotics that will then fight other bacteria trying to get into their space so this is what I mean by clock we have all these microbes sitting us and micromanaging our surfaces I love hearing you talk about that to what extent is that just randomly happening and to what extent is our immune system sort of actively managing this immune system is definitely there to pull some strings I'd say and I love this one paper where they had people put their hands into a jar of bacteria I think it was E. coli that they put their hands in and of course then the hand is full of bacteria and then they retest after a while and they see that most of the bacteria are gone and this is also because well the skin bacteria and then our immune system and cells producing antibacterial substances so you know the body takes care of quite a few things if you let it and give it the time and of course they have to work together the immune system will allow the bacteria when it sees that the cells are okay so if there's a bacteria in the gut for example and producing short fatty acids that really nurture our gut cells and the gut cells are actually feeling better and they have more fuel and energy and they look healthier so to say but then the immune system will be like oh whatever's going on there I'm not getting in it because it seems like it's a good deal this basically happens every day every second in our gut all the time also with foods if we're eating that or that and then your immune system says oh we had some peanut but you can be here if you don't do anything damaging but then my cops sometimes do the opposite they do damage ourselves and then the immune system will get a bit nausea it'll be like what's going on here calls some colleagues of mine will check it out and then we'll all share our opinion and then decide whether we start an inflammatory reaction for example. So should we think about our skin and I've got microbiome as part of our immune system? Absolutely and I think it's scientifically correct now and regarded as such. And so how does our immune system tell whether this is a good microbe and I want to as a like an extended part of my immune system or this is like a bad microbe and I need to try and get rid of that. There is different immune cells and there's different ways of how they look at us and some will go with very basic ground rules like they'd say if there's a leakage of intracellular liquids like you know the plasma of the cell basically running out because the cell is damaged a cell war was damaged by a microbe for example. Then this is a typical pattern where some sort of immune cell will go there and be like whoa why is there you know a cell leakage what happened here and it'll create attention and it'll catch other immune systems cells going there and they will then with their way of looking at cells see if something's wrong. Other cells for example will attach to special receptors where there's always a tiny piece of protein showing what the cell has been doing throughout the day and if this protein suddenly is weird like one that are actually in virus mate and not the cell itself then those immune cells will say oh something's really wrong here and other immune cells will have just receptors for typical patterns of microbial walls so they would say this is usually not a good microbe that I have learned you know to form this receptor against to notice it. So there's very very different ways of immune cells asking us in ourselves the questions how are you doing and then there's this conversation that all of these immune cells have with each other let's say all of these types are alarmed at the same time or then it's really going down because then they're super sure that something's wrong like with the viral infection for example but if just one of them is alerted and it'll ask all the others and they're like no no you're maybe just a bit panicky everything here seems fine for us then other immune cells will tone it down and not initiate an inflammatory reaction. So there's really this ongoing discussion and debate and research is looking at that like RNR cone and this is why I said in the beginning describe it really more as a way of consciousness because in consciousness in the brain we network all these cells to create you know a neural network that is capable of suddenly saying I am well or I am worried and the immune system just does exactly that it connects cells that all have a different way of perceiving information and then they will say oh I'm not well I need an inflammation here so let's initiate that and then they have a go at it. So you're saying it's almost like my immune system is making these decisions like a conscious thinking thing? Well yes because it is a nice term to throw around consciousness but what do we base it on? We base it on how much information is connected and summarized into one for example with artificial intelligence we say about 150 million connections are made to create AI say you look handsome or something you know and so when you look at the immune system and the amount of cells and then the number of connections that are made between all of these cells it is much more than 150 million so it's actually way more complicated than AI and with that number actually it gets much more close to the connections forming consciousness in the brain so this is why you can confidently say it is quite similar to that process. That's really cool I think I'm definitely coming away from this like with a sense of how complex it all is. I'd like to come back to something you said a bit earlier because you said that the immune system can be sort of set too high and attack innocent targets. What happens what you're describing and why does that happen? There's certainly the time when it just has an inflammatory reaction towards something in a wound for example that's usually good but even there it can sometimes go overboard a bit like when everything's already done and you're healing up sometimes it overcompensates but then you have it also in things like allergies or autoimmune disease and when I hear people say these things like or promote supplements and like everything's just targeted for having a stronger and stronger and stronger immune system I say oh I think you don't have the whole picture because it's really not about just having the strongest army on the planet but it's about having a balanced one if you had like security personnel around you and they were stoked up all the time almost like on cocaine be super aggressive and super strong then this might lead to some risky situation you really want them well balanced and really analyzing the situation well before they overreact so this is I think the same for the immune system and if you have all these substances to stimulate it or let's just say sugar because sugar gives all the energy to produce more and more and more immune cells and with more more can go wrong and sugar also gives it a signal to maybe be a bit more pro-inflammatory because it can afford it studies show that over 20 years or so if people regularly drink soft drinks with lots of sugar in them then they just have a higher risk of having as you said rheumatoid arthritis for example and so you don't want it on overdrive you don't want it doing too much you want a balancing in system and of course I want to really be clear there's other ways to get those diseases but it's not people's fault or having too much sugar that will then lead to them for sure to get this disease so people have genetic disposition there's environment like air pollution all these things can also lead to that so it's not the only cause but it's just one aspect you might want to be careful with because it pushes it in a wrong direction and there's other ways when I think people say well should I not at all strengthen my immune system now and here I would also interfere and say no no oftentimes it's about not weakening it because for example chronic stress really weakens it because the body uses all this energy for problem solving for ruminating and then it takes it away from for example sleep and forming ripe good immune cells that regulate the immune system so when there's a cold season and everyone around you sick you might as well strengthen it with some substances I'm okay with that you know but for the most part it's about knowing a bit about it like having a balanced body supporting it not weakening it I think but many people when they're thinking about the immune system and they immediately go to like these supplements that say they're going to boost your immune system firstly do any of them work and secondly are they all a bad idea because boosting your immune system you said like potentially actually is not what you're looking to do so they're not generally a bad idea but sometimes the focus is wrong here people sometimes lose sight of the big chunk of like the 80% stuff as I like to call it those are the things maybe your mama already told you know get enough sleep have a healthy diet don't stress too much enjoy life a little bit like you know these things where it sounds so basic and simple but actually just to take care of these things is already a handful and it's the most effective and we know this from so much research and studies now that I don't think there should be any doubt you've mentioned multiple times actually in our conversation this concept of stress can you know impact my immune system maybe weaken it or maybe sort of cause inflammation and I guess my question is firstly did I hear that right yes absolutely and then I guess more interestingly what can people do to manage their stress better in a way that could help to like balance my immune system you know reduce a little bit those body guards going wild but or equally well I don't want them to just like go off on holiday and leave me I'm protected we can't eliminate all the factors from the outside world and sometimes they're too heavy but you know for some aspects we can be mindful of and by just for example knowing how stress affects the gut when you are really stressed the gut for example will tone down its work you can actually see it with the camera the walls of the stomach for example turn pale paler than when you were relaxed and this is because the blood flow is being reduced a little bit so there's less blood so it looks less cheeky pink it's more whitish and less blood flow means we have less you know nutrients energy coming in for example to have immune cells coming with the blood or for example to have mucus built up because that's a process that needs proper you know blood flow and everything to be developed fully so when you have less mucus barrier your protection layer is a little bit less so bacteria and particles from food they food they can get to your cells a bit closer and maybe sometimes irritate them even but if it's just for a day or a few hours that's no problem because that's just a good deal that's just you know trade off a good sacrifice to solve a stressful problem but if this is going on for days and sometimes even weeks you're really taking advantage of an organ being good willing you know giving up its own work and stuff just for you to solve this horrible situation and then the gut gets problems and that's when the stress induced gut problems often start and arise from from that mechanism being take advantage on or going on too long oftentimes we see our outside demands and outside worlds so clearly that it's easy to fulfill all of them but we don't know a lot about what's going on inside while we're doing that for example during a stressful day at least for lunch break for 30 minutes or in the afternoon have some downtime really eat calmly don't stuff your mouth whole as you know really enjoy eating and being there being present and saying you have pushed back all your work this whole morning because it was so stressful now i'm giving you this time to really do your thing and then we'll go back to my job afterwards these things help and sometimes it's things like actually looking out for your breath because breath is a great mediator between the outside and the inside world and it can really tell the brain oh now we can calm down when we breathe slowly for example so and sometimes it's so simple it's just one minute at 12 o'clock and one minute at four o'clock during a stressful day for example i'll take and just breathe slow for a minute and it takes me to a place of like more calm serenity and it's just this simple short minute and in studies it shows that you have reduced stress hormones if you just take it so julia you're saying even just like this minute twice a day to slow down my breath can reduce my stress in the moment and the overtime that can have an impact on whether my immune system is sort of like dialed up too high or it's at a sort of more steady level if the rest of my life is stressful which i suspect for almost everybody listening to it they're like they'd say oh yeah my life is stressful it can take the edge off it can't really it can't take away all of your stress but it does shift a little bit in in an important aspect which is value suddenly you give your body this value and even if it's just those two minutes you say at least it's worth that and for some for a lot of people that sometimes is more than they had before so two minutes is more of a value than they had before isn't that insane what does that tell us about our relationship to our inside world what about sleep because i have already heard you mentioned that that influences the immune system what happens if we're not getting enough sleep well quite a lot of things well one thing as we were just talking about is that sleep is the time when most of the immune cells are being produced and this is because during sleep we're not being disturbed by all these foods or having to run or metabolic challenges stress signals from the brain disturbing everything no we incomplete harmony with just regulating our insights perfectly well and during that time cells make remarkably less mistakes so it's smart of them to pack all their processes and dividing and producing new cells put a big chunk of that right there in the middle of sleep so that they're not being disturbed and need less energy to fix mistakes later on so this is one thing that's happening there and also a thing why for example shift work can then be a bit risky for your risk of developing cancer for example because if you disturb this process all the time and cells don't have this calm space to divide with less mistakes well then they can make more mistakes it just adds up over many years of working not within you know a week or a stressful year even or so we get this vast amount of data from everybody who are zoe members almost everybody reports the fact that their sleep is not as good as it should be i think we all know the things in modern life like phones and tv's and electric lights that i think mean we tend to sleep less than our ancestors word does that mean that if they were able to sleep better that that would probably help improve the sort of the balance of their immune system i mean it depends on how severe your sleep disruption is the immune system needs especially the first half of the night because that is when there's most deep sleep and deep sleep is the part of the sleep where the cells have this perfect window to multiply and then the second half of the sleep is more REM sleep processing feelings finding new emotions these kind of things happen more there so if you're good in the first half then that's good for a lot of physical processes like bodily things happening most people have rather hard time with the second half of the night or they wake up and then they have a hard time falling back asleep and i think well we weren't even done with listing all the things sleep is good for you know pain tolerance hormone balance digestive health because of replenishing of the cells there as well so it could go on and on and mental health risk of dementia blah blah blah but the funny thing here is people have all these advices now they have social media and health information with what you should do do this do this do this do that in order to sleep better and you know then they also get scared if i don't sleep well i will get this this this this and the ironic thing is that sleep is just really out of the territory it's not the territory of the conscious mind who lists all the to-do things it i mean it can do that before you go to bed it can watch not to use the cell phone not to not eat too late like all these things but sleep in itself is really the other parts of the brain taking over and also the consciousness being able to give them this responsibility and let go of it for a few hours these areas that just have a very different way of going about things and i actually quite successful at it so our consciousness compared to them is so bad at regulating our body blood pressure breathing and so on it you know regularly disrupts it in a negative way to be honest by all these stupid thoughts and thinking and responsibilities and when they have time without it oh they're so relieved they can just do their thing you know there'll be a lot of people listening who you know really struggle with sleep and one of the challenges is that you know as you're going towards bed you're actually really thinking about it it's become this almost like this mountain you've got climb and that therefore makes it hard to get the thing and i guess i always worry that listening to the you know something like this they're like oh but now i know it's even more important to get to sleep and actually potentially you you know we're increasing anxiety about it well yes and and i think in a way this is a indicator for how estranged the conscious parts and the outside world dealing parts of our thinking and brain have become to like the more bodily earthy parts of our brain because there is different parts and how estranged our like whole perception of life and world and ourselves has become to all these parts of ourselves that are just not connected to the outside world that are not relying on getting up at six but they're actually just worrying about how's the cell doing then how are the cells doing then like really the foundation of being alive and these areas that run very differently and that don't have to do with you know if you're able to perform at work or something and sometimes it becomes even hard for people to imagine that there's this part of ourselves that is not about performing and that is not about fulfilling and not about to do lists and it seems like those two parts of ourselves have really a hard time getting along nowadays it's really interesting i think in a world before electric light and phones basically got dark it got really boring there's nothing to do and i think you know you don't have that stimulation and i think you just sort of fall tend to fall asleep like our children do but you never had to like be well programmed to say oh i've got all this stimulation but i need to go to sleep so i'll i'll go to sleep so it's sort of not built in so much of what is difficult in modern life is where you know the environment it's just not well set to how we we just evolved to be well but that's just a process the body is in this very good at adapting and finding always new ways and i think probably always in history there was something new coming up that it really wasn't you know prepared for and just sort of like adjusted and went along with it and i think we'll be able to do that here too but i think it will be problematic if we tune out the knowledge we have about the body if we just try to stuff it into this you know for corner product of modern life then it won't work very well and we obviously see the indicators for that everywhere sleep problems included but if we understand it better and move along with it more smartly then we'll find no ways then we find good ways and then we'll make also modern and innovative things happen and work for us and not the opposite us working for them and Julia if i go back to sleep yeah talking about how important it is for my immune system and creating these immune cells do naps count yes but if you have a hard time sleeping during the night then sometimes advisable to cut out the naps so that you build up more sleep pressure as they say and then you have an easier time really being asleep during the night but if you've had a horrible sleep and you know you're carrying it through the day then a short nap can be a really good idea and that is for example one thing that i think we should make the world adjust more to the body and not the other way around for example young parents when they go to work but they've really had a horrible night and if it's possible to have a room where they could just lay down for 15 minutes and not be judged for it then the rest of the day they would be able to do much better work be much more you know bringing things forward being effective and then just pretending they're a machine and trying to hide their imperfectness you know work with that you're a human and that actually when you understand yourself you can get a lot out of that as long as it's not ruining my ability to sleep at night nothing can be good yeah and we see that there's also this built-in biological clock as you can say where it has proteins that fall apart twice a day so once is of course when we go to sleep but then the other one is especially at that nap or siesta time in southern europe where so two times a day there's this offered platform to us where we could actually fall asleep and if there's enough reasons to do so then we will Julia what do you do to make sure you get enough good quality sleep i realize that i really have to tone it down in the evenings i don't do late exciting gatherings if it's not my birthday or anything you know that really makes me sleep not so good i don't eat too late um and then during the day i try to come down once or twice like really as i said i usually try to do the 12 and 4 o'clock where i just have a minute or sometimes i'll just like even sit and just breathe and take a breather and just calm down because i think it's so unrealistic to have your conscious mind being constantly super activated and taking all the responsibility the whole day being at 150 and then at 10 o'clock in the evening you expected to go to like chill out level how's that supposed to work so i really try to tell my body you know it's good that you have this but it's not always necessary you can be brainless for a minute you know do you have a friend or family member who's really hard on themselves when they have a cold why not share this episode with them right now it might completely change the way they think about their body's response and maybe even help them to deal with it better can i move on now to to diet that you mentioned and obviously we talk about nutrition all the time on this podcast if you were going to give us like a high level explanation of thinking about you know the food that is going to sort of balance my immune system what would you be describing i mean we have these typical formulations where we say you know Mediterranean diet have some fibers so that your gut bacteria are well nurtured so that they don't eat your protective mucus and stress your gut lining and that stresses your immune cells like things like this it is also about good fats but that is included in the Mediterranean diet and about not you know riling it up as i said with sugar for example and then we have some foods that are declared as pro-inflammatory usually with all of them it is really about the amount if you have too much of them like peanuts, sesame oil i suppose because of the omegas in there too much like meat butter all these things that drive up your blood sugar pasties like it's a list and i really don't usually like those lists too much but you can pretty much tell it's the old story about having some veggies some fruit and some like balanced carbs and good fats what about exercise which i think a lot of people will be surprised this link to your immune system health i think no one will be surprised listening to this that it's good for your health overall but why is that good from immune system and therefore what kind of exercise should we be doing well one interesting factor that the immune system will even use for itself or manipulate in order to like have better outcomes is just having a stronger faster heartbeat when you get sick you notice that your heartbeat will get a bit faster and well it does make sense because the immune system the cells they travel through the bloodstream so if you have more pumping going on they get everywhere faster and they can you know be pumped around more often and visit more areas in the same amount of time if you just pump a bit more and the the important thing about exercise is that you have immune cells in the venous system and lymphatic system of your tissues and by activating muscles you press them up back into the circulation from the tissue so you give it a little boost which otherwise happens just in a longer period of time you you boosted while moving because you pump everything faster and with more force so does that mean you should be doing exercise when you're sick no not when you're sick not necessarily that can be bad for the heart especially when you have a viral infection but when you exercise regularly when you're healthy then you train your heart and your lungs to pump around stronger and also it makes the whole tissues being you have more blood flow so more immune cells observing and checking if everything's okay and in case you are sick you have trained you know the whole system to get along with this rise in blood pressure and heartbeat and yeah and also what we see is muscle the effect of muscle on the immune system is really interesting what's that muscle is a big amount of our body well we have so many big muscles and they can influence the immune system by regulating it down after exercise for examples muscles tend to be a bit irritated and when you exercise a lot they will learn to reduce this inflammatory reaction towards a muscle being maybe a bit strained like aching after exercise if you have this effect over and over again the immune cells will start to notice okay there's a little bit of aching and maybe inflammatory processes and the muscle is going on after exercise but we'll fix it and then we'll tone it down so they practice this process of toning it down again and again and again and that is important to have a balanced immune system that doesn't overreact but also you know muscles regulate blood sugar and do those so lots of indirect effects also that's fascinating you're saying that if i'm doing exercise regularly then there's many ways in which it's good for me it's like making my heart stronger which will be really important if i'm sick it's creating better blood flow across my body so my immune system is able to sort of see everywhere but also actually i think you're saying that for my muscles if i'm regularly doing exercise where you know they're sore and aching afterwards like you know it happens to me after i go to the gym but i guess we have a run you're actually saying wow that might be good because your immune system is sort of learning ah okay i'm getting to start to realize that i should lower my immune system because i don't want to overreact because this is just a regular sort of normal thing and this is part of what you describe in often one of the things we need to do with our immune system is not to boost it quite the reverse we actually wanted to get it to sort of relax a bit more into a more neutral setting and be able to do that a bit faster sometimes sometimes just to like cool down faster like in the office when you get a really stupid email and you suddenly are able to say i'll just reply later instead of going on about it for two hours inside of yourself so the immune system is the same way when it gets you know fed up with something or insulted then it can either be like really stupid but we'll take care and like calm down or it can be inflammatory about it for you know another two days and you don't want that i often feel calmer after i finished an exercise session i tend to do a gym session like during the day within work and i notice often i feel calmer even though in fact i've obviously been straining myself much more than just like sitting in front of a desk you know usually looking at a video screen talking to people what's going on and how does that tie into what you're describing about the interaction with like calming down my immune system well this is not only about the immune system this is also really about the brain being in the body having all these things happening like playful stress the experience the brain just had was similar to a disease like it had a high temperature when you were doing sport it had an elevated pulse it had an elevated blood pressure it maybe even had like a surge of like stress hormones like all these things that actually would should be horrible you know but it was sort of a playfulness because it's not really a fever and it's not really something exciting do thing that drives up your heart rate and it can all stop the moment you're done you can decide when you're done so in a way this is kind of like good for the brain to experience that it can be out of its comfort zone but then come back and especially also the change in temperature as we see in sauna for example and then just coming back with nothing bad happening has an effect that is calming and so it's not only sports sometimes that can do this when you do breathing exercises where you breathe really fast for a while and then you breathe really slow it's also in a way the same thing you change the pH value in your blood and this is stressful for the body and weird but then you just go back to normal and so in a way you tell your body you know I can do this and then the other aspect is sports and exercise really influencing your brain chemistry so you see different receptors being expressed different way of handling some transmitters after sports just you know the brain is so isolated up there when it gets really into contact and really has to deal with reality and the muscles and actually do movements that work otherwise you drop the cup if you don't hold it right it's it's sort of like a good thing to get out there into the real world for the brain it has this effect of like lifting heavy things when you're stressed people like in in the army are being trained when they have a really stressful situations too that they couldn't really process in the moment to like calm down to like lift something heavy or just hold something heavy or do breathing exercises to really get into the body and connect the brain with the physical reality to calm down and not by just laying down or doing nothing you're describing this positive impact for my body and my immune system is there particular types of exercise that can be much more effective than others well what we see is that the different types of exercises have different effects so now strength training is all the rage and people talk about it all the time and this has a good reason for it because when we built a lot of muscle they can regulate our blood sugar level for example better and it has also more measurable effects on as I said like brain receptors being expressed when you do strength training when you do other like aerobic exercises duration like jogging for a half an hour or longer and you would be able to talk while you're doing this this has other other effects that will for example train your heart and lungs a bit more and this can also be good against things like anxiety because anxiety can develop just by your body suddenly having a faster heart rate breathing a bit faster and this slows down when you have exercise that makes the heart stronger so it doesn't have to beat so fast so there's multiple aspects that come from different types of training and I would always encourage people to really try out and just see for yourself when you feel best because that's also the downside of sports people do it and then they hate it and then they just stop doing it because it doesn't feel good so I think the really first thing to start with is finding something that feels relatively good and then stick with it and then go from there you know is there anything that we haven't discussed that you'd really like to mention to someone who's thinking about how they can keep their immune system better balanced the only thing I would really want people to know is just that they have this genius side of being a living being and that this is also something and that this is counterweight to this loud noisy challenging outside world that is good to have as well but you know have this counterweight and know more about it so you can actually really feel and get into that I think that's a very good antidote to a lot of the things we're experiencing in this time amazing I'd like to do a quick summary of maybe some of the highlights on what we've touched and please correct me if I get any of it wrong no I'm curious now the thing that is most like lodged in my brain is this amazing fact that you said that if you keep drinking like sugary drinks then actually over 20 years you're basically going to have this like higher level of inflammation it's going to boost like these immune cells and actually you're more likely to get an auto immune disease like rheumatoid arthritis so it's amazing this like direct link just from like having more sugar diabetes and depression also by the way the other thing I'm really struck by is this idea that the whole language that we use to describe the immune system might be a product of the time when the scientists were first understanding it was like at the time of world war one and world war two and so all the focus is on sort of killer cells and thinking about centuries and things like that but actually a huge part of what the immune system is doing is sort of cooperating with these microbes looking at what's going on and actually it doesn't sort of shoot first and ask questions later actually it's sort of looking at what these bacteria are doing being quite thoughtful and deciding these responses and in fact the way that you think about it is you think about us as having this microbe cloak around us very few of these bacteria are making us sick and actually many of them might be like helping to look after us which is a completely different way of thinking about it which I love it then you talked about like rethinking what happens if you're sick and so don't think about all your cold symptoms as being caused directly by this infection actually this is your immune system helping to look after you and that can make you feel better about it and that also means be thoughtful before you try and get rid of all the symptoms so I am allowed to take a decongestion if I can't sleep which is great you know I can take a painkiller if it's really getting my way but you know the other example you gave was like if I have diarrhea you should really try and let that happen because this is just getting rid of this pathogen and similarly you know when I've got a runny nose actually it's doing a great job getting this stuff out so don't be so hard on yourself and then I think we talked about like what are the specific things you can do not to boost your immune system because you don't want that but actually to balance it and I think you have this really broad set of areas you started with stress which is interesting that this is actually really important and you can see stress you said like your stomach will look paler you know I obviously most of us don't have a tube to put a camera inside your stomach but you can actually see it and therefore you know your advice was quite simple I have some downtime at lunch like have a proper break and that for you just like one minute of breathing slowly at like lunchtime and 4pm makes a big difference to reducing that stress talked about sleep and I learned this amazing fact that deep sleep in the first half of the night is when most of my immune cells are being made so it's really important but even a short nap can be good if I haven't had enough sleep and you know one of the key things that you do also is like think about like not eating too late not being so excited the end of the day that you can't sleep. Dart obviously and I think that what you discuss is very much the sort of patterns that we talk about on this podcast a lot and then finally we talked a lot about exercise and I think what's really interesting is it's not just all the health benefits we think about but actually it's really going to help sort of balance your immune system and have it in better shape when it is needed and that you want to do both strength training that's good for muscles you talked about the way in your muscles can be really important for immune system which is amazing but also aerobic because that's not only good for your heart and your lungs but actually it can also be lowering your anxiety you know to get into it so there's a sort of all-round somehow being more balanced as opposed to going and like finding a supplement that says it's going to boost your immune system because actually you know if I have one takeaway it's like you don't want to boost your immune system you want it to be quite calm but ready to go into action when needed yes perfect at Zoe we never stop being curious about how people respond to food so we recently asked thousands of people about their breakfast what they eat and how they feel about it their answers may surprise you over 70 told us that their breakfast is balanced yet only six percent get enough fiber if you've been listening to this podcast you know that's not enough to be balanced and it's no wonder that only 16 percent felt energetic after eating clearly breakfast is broken but what if you could get a breakfast that actually supports your energy and gut health meet daily 30 our 30 plant gut supplement that's out to fix breakfast one scoop at a time daily 30 is designed by Zoe gut health scientists and features four grams of fiber and ingredients that support gut health digestion energy immunity and skin and hair deliciously crunchy you can sprinkle it on yogurt and berries porridge avocado toast eggs even pancakes tastes great on lunches and other meals too as we've discussed repeatedly on this podcast healthy habits are easier to start in the morning so why not get your 30 plants in before 10 a.m find your breakfast fix and try the new formula at zoe.com slash daily 30 our scientists have just redesigned daily 30 to include even more plants including raspberries goji berries fermented green tea kombucha kale and marine algae by the way whenever we share what daily 30 can do UK law requires us to say that it's a natural source of calcium which supports gut health and digestion and copper which supports energy immunity and skin and hair if you tune in regularly you know what we think about this honestly we prefer to let the benefits of daily 30 speak for itself go to zoe.com slash daily 30 to get started try it for a week and see how you feel