Leading Scientist Reveals The Secrets to a Healthy Immune System with Jenna Macciochi

even if you have the best diet in the world other things can erode away at your immune system stress is probably the one thing i know that this is something that you've written about a lot and it's the one thing that we don't take seriously we think of it as being psychological and the causes can be psychological they can be physical they can be emotional but they're always biological because stress chemistry is real [Music] you know your day job is about a subject that is really close to my heart immunology mm-hmm now i did a bsc honors degree in immunology at university yeah uh so i've always been fascinated with it but i don't think i realized back then just how important it is for every single one of us yeah you know pretty much every chronic long-term health complaint stroke condition that we have in many ways the immune system plays a central role and i don't think people realize that no no why do you think that might be i mean when i was an undergraduate and learning about the immune system it was through the lens of infection protection and that kind of is a historical thing you know from maybe over 100 years ago when the first kind of ties were made between these white blood cells and susceptibility to infection and we've just always maintained this lens through which we look at the immune system as protecting us from infection and then suddenly you start to dive into the field of immunology and you realize it's not just protecting us from infection it's doing a whole array of other things and i i kind of um like to move away from that military analogy we often have about the immune system as going out to battle off the germs because most of the time it's not doing that most of the time it's kind of like your housekeeper you know it's just taking care it's working hard it's it's learning from your environment inside and outside and it's processing all that information and it's maintaining the kind of state school in your body yeah i like that i think a lot of us do think um still to this day that oh if i get cold symptoms in november my immune system in adverse ecommerce kicks in yes to fight it off exactly but the immune system is constantly running it's constantly working yeah right now as we sit here it's working hard it's involved in so many processes you know like cells in your body have a finite lifespan so eventually they die and they have to be disposed of and special immune cells are removing those and keeping things tidy they're repairing damage when it happens even if there's no infection so last year i broke my arm but i didn't rip the skin open there was no infection getting in there but there was still signs of my immune system working hard to knit that all back together yeah so it's it's sensing it's a real kind of it's like a mobile brain i think it's it's very dynamic and it's listening integrating all these signals from our environment from insiders and then reducing the appropriate response to kind of keep things in balance yeah and what's fascinating for me is that and i hope we get into this today is that it's not something passive that we have no influence over there is a lot that we can do a lot of it quite simple stuff that can positively impact how our immune system works yeah i don't know you've you know you you basically done a fabulous job of summarizing in your in your book immunity the science is staying well which is well worth the weed i think for anyone who's interested in learning more about the immune system and how they can use the lifestyle to help them so well done on such a great job thank you let's dive in some should we should we start with food yeah yeah exactly i think that's a good place to start i put the food chapter at the end because i was really sick of seeing you know the whole immune boosting food supplement whatever being pushed on you know the media social media everything so i was kind of like people are gonna want to open a book about immunity and expect to see on like the first page vitamin c does this to your immune cells so take a vitamin c supplement or eat these vitamin c rich foods and i kind of just wanted to emphasize it's not that simple you know and and almost um make people look at the other aspects of lifestyle first before you dive into food i i just want to i i love that you did that um that's what i did in the full public plan my first book i thought i'm not people are expecting this will start with food i'm not going to start yeah i'm going to start with stress because i think that's what no one's thinking about yeah but then i'm interested so you did that in your book but when the book came out yeah and you started to write you know articles or a bit of pr in newspaper columns yes i bet you or i'm gonna guess what were they wanting you to say oh definitely yeah it was all about you know my book came out in march which was you know covered pandemic you know going through the roof so all of the press and publicity was you know how can we make ourselves invincible to covid what what supplements can we take to be invincible and i'm gonna let everyone down and say well you know nothing's going to make you invincible because from the dawn of time we've always had this battle with with germs you know like they're trying to infect us we're trying to keep them out we just cohabit this earth together so there's always going to be infection and a pandemic's an unfortunate situation but it's a very real one yeah i mean i'd love people just to sit with what you said there which is we all cohabit this uh together us and the bugs you know it's really quite profound that you know it's not i think humans have we've often felt i think particularly in the times that i've been around on planet earth that you know we kind of know best and we sort of we can dominate everything around us but i think we're learning well mother nature mother nature is pretty powerful and they've been around a long long time and there's there's a certain urban flow and a certain dynamic we are not the only living species in the world there's animals there's bugs and bugs no doubt we'll get into yeah bugs are not all bad there's a lot of bugs yes exactly very good 99 of them won't hurt us and they're everywhere they're you know right now as we're sitting here there's there's bugs even in the air we breathe and they're not you know causing us harm so most of them are good but there's obvious ones that come along and um you know side swipe you like um sorry as kobe 2 has yeah as a sort of reminder a stark reminder that yeah infection protection is really important yeah and i i think i think the thing i would sort of reiterate to people is what i think the last few months have highlighted for us is that looking after your immune system it's really important yes and i would say i've said it a lot in the press like taking care of your immune system is for life it's not just for for covings you know suddenly everybody's really interested in it there's lots of marketing of immune boosting products you know all of the supermarkets and pharmacies were sold out of vitamin c supplements at the start of the lockdown um but it's something that we should all have been thinking of before copied because it's it's it's for the long game you know immunity is really entwined with how we age so you know if you want to live a long and healthy life we are as a population living much longer than the generations before us but we're not necessarily living better so if you want to you know i don't necessarily want to live forever but i want to be able to enjoy my years and feel well and not be sort of burdened with chronic disease and we can't bulletproof ourselves but there's definitely things we can do now that that are for the long game and when i wrote the book it was before we knew about um the current coronavirus pandemic so i was really hoping to try and get people thinking about the long game for their health yeah well you know i'm sure in many ways people if they weren't going to take it seriously before are really going to now so that would be our hope so in terms of the things people can do yeah uh if we if we sort of dive into diet and food then exactly what are some of the things that people can do to help their immune system yeah well i mean there's the sort of ones that people often think about which is vitamins and minerals and we have a whole selection of essential we call them micronutrients so the vitamins and minerals that we need to function and if you're deficient in any of those you will impair your immune system and i think that there's certain ones that are highlighted so vitamin a the b vitamins vitamin c vitamin d vitamin e but you could sort of say that taking more than than you need if you're not deficient isn't going to make your immune system work better than it already does at its baseline but the subclinical deficiencies in our populations are not really clear it's very hard to measure you know if somebody has an ever deficiency in vitamin d you would see it clinically as rickets but if they're subclinically deficient that would sort of fly under the radar and being subclinically deficient is in one micronutrient is often a sign that there's other micronutrients that might not be quite at the right levels for people who i just want to clarify for people that sub-clinical so you know a lot of people are used to getting blood tests and there's a normal range and often if you are with you know out with that normal range you will be it will said you are deficient yeah um but we're learning more and more like b12 for example is a prime example for me that the normal range is so big yeah you know it's something like you know 200-ish to 700 or 800 depending on what lab you're in but for some people here at 250 although it's technically normal actually they're symptomatic with it like they can have um you know they can have all sorts of things fatigue they have confusion they can have muscle aches and i really think medicine i would say has been quite black and white for a number of years i think we need to evolve a little bit to go there's optimal yeah you know there's normal there's abnormal but there's also optimal yeah and and and i think i think that's just a really important concept for people to grasp yeah and i you know um if you're if you know have problems with any of these micronutrients the vitamins and minerals it's going to impact your immune system so it's not so simple as saying i'll take a vitamin c supplement and that's going to make me more invincible so it doesn't quite work like that the other thing about the micronutrients is if we're low in any of those it can actually increase oxidative stress in our body so this is kind of the balance between oxidants and antioxidants and what we've actually come to realize is this can affect how badly uh an infection causes us symptoms so if you're in a more oxidative state so you're not um your imbalance of antioxidants to oxidants is out that bug if you if you catch an infection like you know coronavirus for example it can cause a much worse pathology in you and it can also cause that virus to be under a greater pressure to mutate to become more virulent so let's let's take a winter flu for example a winter flu type virus that we are exposed to are you saying then that the state of your immune system at that time potentially can influence whether you actually get sick with that infection yeah or whether you fight it off with no problem and how sick you get and whether you the environment that your body provides when that infection is inside you can shape how that infection behaves how that virus might be under more pressure to mutate or more likely to mutate because of the the environment of your body which is really is this why you can have 10 people in the same room with the same person with let's say a cold virus coughing all over 10 of them but not all 10 will get symptoms of the virus will they yes exactly and we've known this for a really long time but i think coronavirus and the current pandemic has really kind of put that under the microscope because people are like why are some people getting really really sick and others have no symptoms and this is quite commonly seen with infections that we have this huge diversity of how we respond now you mentioned oxidative stress and this balance between the oxidative stress and the antioxidants and one of you we could just make that super clear for people so what is oxidative stress exactly so we have um oxidation like things that are are produced when uh like byproducts of of our cells normally working um things in our environment various different things can can cause that oxidative stress in our body and then we have our own internal antioxidant systems we have the micronutrients vitamins and minerals that support production of antioxidants and we also get antioxidants from foods and we kind of need this to be in balance so we don't want to completely extinguish the oxidative side and we don't want to um have too few antioxidants because they both play roles in different ways and just being alive and functioning and going around your day yeah today is going to increase oxidative stress yeah because it's a normal it's like all these things you want it you as you say it's a balance you want that but you want enough going on in your lifestyle to balance that out yeah i think that's a good way to put it and oxidative stress is something that our immune cells do when they're fighting an infection because they want to make our body's environment very hostile to the infection so they produce all these kind of um reactive oxygen species like free radicals and stuff to try and fight off infections and make that environment hostile and then you have the antioxidants gonna quench that and bring things back to normal once you no longer need to be fighting the infection so is this why it's a good idea to eat antioxidant rich foods because it helps with this balance exactly and a lot of the minerals and vitamins in our diet are sort of co-factors in all of the processes that are involved in achieving this balance and then you have all the kind of phytonutrients so these are plant chemicals that are not considered in the recommended daily allowance like we we don't have a sort of reference amount that you should be taking uh and there's 20 odd thousands of them recorded so far so um they're kind of they're the things that plants use as their own defense system because they cannot run away when a little um you know insect comes along and tries to bite it so they'll produce their own little chemicals phytochemicals that will try and make it hostile and when we eat these they help our own internal antioxidant systems and they also have their antioxidant properties themselves so that's why we should focus on like a plant-rich diet and most of these phytonutrients are found in the pigments of different plants so something i do with my kids is that we talk about eating different colors and you know red fruits and vegetables we have leafy greens orange fruits and vegetables um yellow then even like the browns and whites like cauliflower and those kind of things um and the purples and the blacks you know they're real and that are found in berries and kind of trying to eat from a whole range of these foods rather than focusing on one particular phytonutrient like curcumin and turmeric so that's one that we commonly see in sort of wellness arena that people take um supplements of this and i think the the most sort of basic thing that you should think about is that they work in concert like an orchestra so you don't want to isolate one particular phytonutrient or antioxidant and put it in a pill and take it because you might actually be removing some of its power because it's not being consumed in situ of all the other phytonutrients and parts of your diet that help with that digestion and absorption so i think food first food is what everyone should be thinking of when it comes to their immune system trying to get your nutrition from foods so that you're not deficient in any of the micronutrients which are the vitamins and minerals and then getting all these phytonutrients which are kind of like the icing on the cake to really um nourish our immune system and they have their own natural antioxidant properties some of them are antimicrobial antibacterial anti-inflammatory and they're often considered longevity compounds so we know that we don't need a certain amount to be able to function but we know that over the course of a lifetime they're very important for longevity so i you know food first seems really simple and if you have a chronic condition or some underlying health problem then you might that might not be an approach that works for you but i think that is the best thing that we can sort of aim for i think that's a nice approach it's it's saying look there may be some value in some supplements at some time depending on your state of health but let's get the basics right first let's focus on food first and it's the pattern of your diet it's the consistency it's not what you ate this morning but what did you eat all week what did you eat all month you know maybe you had a few meals that were not the best but if the majority if the pattern overall is is strong then i think that's that's what you need to be looking at rather than getting stressed about every meal being perfect yeah that's a very empowering message i think for people because you know we are living in stressful times people do sometimes struggle with energy or motivation to you know cook that perfect meal that they want to but your approach is saying look that's okay right don't beat yourself up yeah if now and again you have a meal that isn't let's say what you would ideally have okay fine maybe enjoy it you know don't feel guilty about it yes but try to make most of your meals as much as possible yes exactly you know natural minimally processed foods i would like i think so one of the one of the tips you're saying is colors focus on colors different colors yep exactly rather than maxing out on one color yeah you're saying go for a voice for a variety and the other thing is you know food when you focus on food first it's conveniently packaged up with other things that your body needs and one of the key things that is often not linked to your immune system but i'd say it's like massive for the resilience of your immune system is fiber so pills and and potions and whatever are not full of fiber but the fresh produce is full of fiber and people might be thinking why is fiber important for your immune system because your gut bugs the microbiota at the interface of your digestion and the rest of your body are one of the key educators of the immune system and again this is something that's probably exploded in the field of of immunology in the last 10 15 years if you do not so if you take an experimental animal model where the animals have a reduced or a minimal um collection of good bacteria in their gut their immune system doesn't develop and they're very impaired in how they can respond and heal and even things like you know protection from cancer because our immune system is the main cancer surveillance system so these bugs are helping to educate and teach and mature our immune system and this happens potentially in utero before we're born but predominantly when we enter the world because we go from a relatively sterile there is some evidence that there may be some bugs in the placenta but we go into this hugely germy world and suddenly our immune system has to cope with that because you know it it's um it's got all these receptors on it to to detect pathogens as being problematic so it has to learn to tolerate those because you know most of the bugs around us are safe and harmless and we need them because they're helping us and that's actually how the immune system develops isn't it it is by exposure to the environment around it to the bugs around it to sort of give it that sort of ongoing education so it starts to learn oh i respond to this i don't need to respond to that exactly i often say that you know the immune system's made it's not born there's maybe a percentage in the genetics that we inherit but then it's made it's built throughout our life and it changes throughout our life so that's a lovely idea it's a maine not born we can we can build and we can sort of develop it the way we want to if we give it the rights yeah and i i often think about the inputs as a way to shape the immune system and i was trying i was working on a talk the other day and i was trying to make a slide of all the inputs some that we can control some that we can't that are shaping our immune system from birth and then it just became a really busy messy slide because there was too much to put on there but yeah a lot of it happens in childhood and in some ways i find that quite daunting as a mother and you think well you know there's sort of first three years i would say is when you're being colonized by all these good bacteria and there's huge changes going on in the immune system during that time um and there's this kind of interaction happening these bacteria they help protect the gut barrier to keep it very nice and and tight and stop any bacteria going into the body because they're only good bacteria if they're in the right location so they're not meant to cross over the gut and enter our body because then they become a problem um but one of the biggest things that they're doing to help our immune system is they're they're eating our foods and i often think your diet's only as good as your microbiota in your gut because they are they're the interface they're eating your food they're helping you to produce these vitamins and minerals from your diet but they're also producing these postbiotics um and people might have heard of prebiotics and probiotics but postbiotics are basically the metabolic waste of the bugs in your gut so they're producing stuff that is their kind of you know waste product of eating your foods like short-sharing fatty acids fatty acids is the classic one i i used to work on these when i lived in switzerland um and looking at how they influence um inflammation in the gut and beyond so short-chained fatty acids are kind of a metabolic byproduct of the the bugs in your gut and they directly bind to the immune cells at that site and they help educate them and teach them to sort of tolerate anything that you're throwing down your mouth because we're not supposed to um react to that because it should be you know benign things that are going in there but they have to help strike that balance that if you did get some kind of food poisoning they also can identify the bad bugs so they help create an environment that's what we call tolerogenic so it's encouraging um tolerance of the food that you're eating and there's a very kind of dynamic interaction between these bugs and the immune cells and i'd say what happens in the gut is not just staying there this um influence this sort of tolerogenic influence of things like short-term fatty acids is also being absorbed into your bloodstream and helping regulate the immune system at distal science from the gut as well it helps makes he regulates yourself doesn't it exactly before there was i think i i mean you mentioned the term peacekeeper i think the first time i read that i think it was in a nature paper in 2014 i think i think i think i use that one of my slide decks it's where it calls them our peacekeepers yeah i think for the first time when i saw it in prince which is kind of what they are yeah really and i i sort of yeah i mean i i really think we a lot of people talk about gut health these days but i don't think people understand the immune system's linked it you know they think they've got something separate but i i often teach uh doctors about this triad between our diet our in uh our gut bugs and our immune system and how they all sort of cross talk oh definitely yeah there's bi-directional communication between you know diets and gut bugs diets and immune system and gut bugs and immune system together it's like this so you know if you if you make certain dietary choices you're going to improve the health of your gut bugs which is going to improve the health of your immune system yes exactly just empowering right because we can do something about that yes exactly and i think as a nation we're not eating enough fiber and also fiber in the uk has a really bad like image problem i think like most people i think come on if i was to ask my husband what he thinks fiverr is he he's not in any kind of medical nutrition wellness field he'd um in fact the other day he came home with some crackers that said he's like look they say they've got added fiber and i was like okay because we kind of think of it as being like you know breakfast cereals like cardboard with the big fiber logo on it and um or fiber as being one thing but again it's the diversity different bugs need different forms of fiber and we find it in all the plant-based foods so it's not just the fruits and vegetables nuts and seeds legumes beans pulses and and whole grains and it's about trying to bring in the diversity i think in the last few years there's a publication about the sort of trying to get 30 different plant-based foods into your diet because it's about per week yeah because it's about the diversity but also it's that includes i think lentils and nuts yeah you know and you know i i think it's very achievable yeah once people have it in their minds exactly and they're very common in in traditional diets i remember growing up you know my mom would would add lots of different um grains and beans and pulses to spin things out as she put it so that you could make a dish go a lot further yeah wonderful advice so so far we've said that lots of different colors lots of different diversity of plants is going to help your gut microbiome it's going to help your immune system eating less is also something that might be helpful right yeah so this is another field i've just got fascinated with um and that's the immuno metabolism i don't know if you've heard anything about that word yeah you know metabolism chipping two words together yeah and it's only just in the last five years that it's really kind of popped up um and people have started looking at this but metabolism metabolism is basically breaking down of um the major components of our diet so the protein carbohydrate and fats into energy and building blocks that our cells can use and people might hear things about metabolic rate or i've got a good metabolism these kind of things that people say um and you know metabolism and the immune system are really intimately entwined and i don't know why it's taken us so long to figure that out because immune responses are energetically very costly you know it has to be sort of triaging of resources to be like right we're going to fight this infection and turn on all the inflammation turn on all the antibody producing and all those molecules that are being produced and the proliferation of immune cells that takes a lot of resources so it needs energy it needs building blocks is this why we feel tired when we're fighting an infection because the body's diverting resource yeah to making all that stuff and you might find that you need to kind of build yourself back up again after you've been uh sick um particularly if you've been sick for quite a long time or if you have an ongoing illness your nutritional needs might be very different from somebody who doesn't have that so in immunometabolism is the field that's trying to understand how metabolism can shape immune responses and vice versa so this happens at the level of the individual immune cell but also can happen in the environment of a tissue and an environment of our whole body and this is something that there's not really any kind of absolute concrete um understanding yet in this area but we know that when an immune cell is fighting an infection it goes through a metabolic switch and it goes from being in this kind of resting state to suddenly sucking up lots more glucose to fuel uh proliferation the immune cells are making armies of themselves building antibodies requires you know the building blocks of proteins all of this kind of thing is happening and that metabolic switch is known as the warburg effect this is also what's happening to cancer cells but immune cells do this when and it's perfectly normal when they're fighting an infection or fighting any kind of um um problem and then it's switched back off and the immune cells go back to normal and there they don't have this huge need for metabolites anymore but what people are starting to to wonder is can the overall environment of a body influence um the the metabolic switches inside our immune cells and switch them on aberrantly when they're not needed so we know that diabetics with poorly controlled blood sugar so they have elevated blood sugar and in their body this creates an environment that causes some of our immune cells like neutrophils to not work so well so it affects so immune cells have nutrient sensing um um switches inside them so they can sense what nutrients are are available and they're taking in that information and then that affects how they can work now what is not known is can we feed someone different um macronutrients proteins carbs or fats and influence how their immune system is working so can you switch unwanted immune responses off or on based on the different macronutrients that your body's metabolizing i think this is where the field of immunology is going to be headed in terms of treating chronic diseases because we know that people with chronic diseases like metabolic syndrome type 2 diabetes heart disease or people who are carrying too much visceral fat that the whole environment of their bodies is metabolically different and this might be causing the immune cells to act abnormally and become more pro-inflammatory for example wow super interesting yeah a lot of research to come in that area exactly and i think we just don't know enough to say specifics yet but i think that's you know for so long we've been focused on the micronutrients but actually it's the macronutrient so you could adjust someone's diet give them different proportions of protein fat and carb to maybe alter their metabolism and alter immune cells that were going wrong so somebody who had a chronic inflammatory disease we can kind of steer that around and incredibly exciting isn't it on the other side of it what you said about eating less another thing that i bring up in the book because i wanted to get people away from just thinking about you know a vitamin supplement for their immune system is that the immune function is impacted by over nutrition and under nutrition so if you're not eating enough or you're eating too much this is going to send your immune system awry and i should context that by saying if you're doing that consistently and then we have this field of research coming out about fasting and immune function and i remember being at conferences decades ago and they were talking about fasting and how it would regenerate um all sorts of parts of the body it was kind of mind-blowing and now we kind of see it more in the mainstream and we have all these kind of forms of different diets um and this again is causing metabolic switches in the body that then when you go on to refeed after someone has had a period without food you get increasing in growth hormone you get production of fresh new immune cells from the bone marrow and the stress of the lack of eating kind of causes some of the older immune cells and ones that might be more likely to malfunction to be deleted so you're kind of replenishing your immune system and we start to see in experimental models of autoimmune disease that this is you know highly therapeutic yeah it's fascinating that it's not necessarily just what we're eating it's you know how much or how little it's are we fasting are we not fasting all these kind of different components that all play i guess they will play a role in the signals the body is receiving because i guess that's all that isn't it the immune system is trying to interpret the signals you're sort of going okay what does that mean is it is it sort of safe or is it unsaid do i need to take action yes or can i just stay calm i guess everything we do even our thoughts our words our sleep our stress they're all giving a signal in some ways our immune system exactly do i need to respond or is it okay exactly yeah it's called yeah it's that simple isn't it it's core yes yeah yeah it's it's this decision-making that's ongoing and constant it's integrating all these different inputs to decide and i think the thing with the sort of so-called western diet that that you know we talk about as being having a negative impact on our health um it's just it's just really tasty and we just want to eat it all the time it's salty it's sweet it's delicious it's everywhere we can quickly override any lack of hunger cues just to to eat we kind of pathologize being hungry it's like you're not ever allowed to be hungry you have to have 10 snacks in your bag in case you might not be able to reach some food and then we have millions of incidences of eating across a huge portion of our waking time and part of the research i was involved in several years ago was looking at postprandial inflammation so when we eat there's an inflammation a subtle inflammation that happens in the body and this is quite normal we have plenty of checks and balances in place to keep that in check and actually dietary fiber is one of the best ways to kind of seal that up again and prevent that from happening as is having a period of um time without food in between meals so eating enough and the right things at one meal that you do not need to eat then until the next meal and it's actually quite good for over overall gut health but the whole body health i i i'm sort of super fascinated by this research as well and you know not only do many of us eat too much we eat too often in the day and as you just said there you know the act of eating is inflammatory yeah so that's a response to eating is that your body will become inflamed as you say nothing to worry about it's sort of that's part of the process but i guess you know and you know i know uh sachin panda's done a lot of look at this professor panda um and i think when when he started his app in 2015 i think it's called my circadian clock i i can't remember the figures off hands but it's something like 20 30 years ago most people were eating three times a day in the us i think you could probably infer in the uk as well and then in 2015 when he was measuring and people were impulsing into the app i think the top ten percent of people were eating 15 times a day and it was yeah you know so that if we think about that let's say let's say i'm eating 15 times a day and let's say in theory it is all whole food right it's all nice uh health what what is considered yeah you've got to be careful with the language but what is considered sort of helpful foods for our health you do have to ask the question is eating them 15 times a day helpful that's that's like 15 bouts of inflammation whereas if you had the same sort of food over you know it's not a perfect analogy but three times a day over five days you're still getting 15 bouts of inflammation but that's over the whole week yeah as opposed to in just one day and i i really do think societally culturally there's a problem with how much we're being encouraged to eat even healthy foods like you can buy yeah healthy snacks here and healthy snacks there but you're you're sort of inflaming yourself each time and i don't know what what would you make of that yeah no i think that's a real uh issue i think it's not well enough understood in the scientific community to really translate into a kind of clear health message for people but from the research i was involved in and from work like what sachin panda has done and others i definitely think we need to look at the incidence of eating as well as um you know the the stretch of time that we're eating i think some of the studies show that we're spending 18 hours a day eating it's just like the whole time we're awake um and i don't think that we are designed to cope with that on a long-term consistent basis you know going back to the traditional diets i you know my grandparents weren't eating all day every day um because that just wasn't how it was constructed in different cultures or eat in different ways but certainly it's not common to eat all the time and i i want to fuse the tradition with the modern life somehow because i think that's the key that we need we can't go back to times gone by but we can bring bits that we've left behind and kind of integrate it into what we have to work with right now somehow when i i find a very effective and powerful recommendation i use in my patients is to try not to eat for 12 hours and every 24 hours so uh you know basically eating all your food within a 12-hour window which you know really was the norm for pretty much yeah everyone maybe 30 40 years ago i mean yeah you know we we might stop eating at 8 00 p.m and maybe we wouldn't have breakfast too late i mean i'm i'm not talking about an extreme fast i'm just saying i think it's quite i certainly know when i managed to stick to that consistently i sleep better i feel more energetic yeah and i think there really is this idea that you know you need time for the body to regenerate a little bit if your gut is constantly having to use up energy to constantly digest food that's going to impact your immune system it's going to impact you know the resource it has for something else yes exactly there's um you know the the guts lining as well there's a kind of um uh it's energetically costly because it's there's a turnover of those cells quite regularly and things like the short-chain fatty acids we mentioned earlier that are produced when our gut bugs digest fiber they are really nurturing to the growth of and repair of the the cells that line the gut barrier and those are kind of the interface cells between what's going on in the guts and what's being put in the bloodstream that could exacerbate that inflammation and we know that certain things like um saturated fats um high fructose diets um fiber poor diets as well as other things like stress and extreme exercise can alter the integrity of that gut barrier and exacerbate the sort of inflammation that you see postprandially um and i know that some of the work that tim spector recently published um looked at postprandial inflammation and looked at also people's microbiomes and found that the same food did vastly different things in different people which is why we have to kind of have a bit of intuition of our own bodies and how we're feeling how do we feel after we eat and not you know just be eating something because our friends are eating it i know we have our kind of eat well guide and the public health messages which are kind of good to give the whole population um a safety net against certain diseases but i guess we don't all have access to personalized nutrition but we all have a very personal response to food and we can't just say don't eat that because that's inflammatory it might be in you and it might be not the same as me yeah it it's you know as an ideology like these public health guides it's tricky actually because i get what you're saying i get what the idea is to give a bit of a safety net and i guess the way i sort of feel more these days is have we sort of disempowered individuals by doing that sort of by saying this is the way one should eat when it's kind of it's always been passed down hasn't it from you know parents to child from grandparents a grandchild it's like this is how you eat and you know i'm not expecting an answer from you i appreciate you know you're a lecturer and you you know may not wish to get drawn into this but i'm just sort of sharing my perspective is i sort of get that but i think we've lost touch with ourselves like definitely i think you know the conversation i had this morning here was with someone called pippa grange who is an amazing psychologist she works for the england football team she's you know all kinds of high-powered business but we were really talking about um kind of intuition but but spending time understanding yourself and really sitting with how you feel so making that relevance what we're talking about yeah this idea that trying to tap into oh when i eat this sort of meal oh i've got more energy i sleep better my gut feels better i actually personally think and this is probably different from 10 years ago as a doctor probably evolved the more patients i see but i sort of feel that's i think where the power lies to people is to yeah get a bit of guidance understand some principles yeah but then sort of within those principles kind of figure it out for yourself experiment and see how you feel there's no there's no better tool than actually figuring out yourself hey when i eat that i get bloated afterwards i don't sleep well but when i don't have that or i have this i feel fine i think that is very powerful but i think the problem is with many people are too busy to actually tune into how they're feeling definitely i think that's something i've learned as i've got older but i can definitely see how there was points in my life when i was too busy to really yeah you know and i'd like to be eating on the go um years ago when i lived in london and that just became really normal and i remember speaking to my um uh great grandmother and she was like in our day it was a you know it was unheard of to eat and be on the bus or be walking around you sat down to eat and she was outraged by all the young people eating on the go and just kind of got points because now i just avoid eating on the go because i i don't like how it i feel you know it that's rushed and i'm not really chewing my food properly it's mindless it's not a very nice environment sitting on a bus or somewhere i just wait till i get to the other end and given that's not always possible but i think we have become you know we've definitely pathologized feeling hungry like yeah most of us are not going to kill over we don't snack in between our next meal or maybe maybe you might keel over because your blood sugar balance has kind of gone awry because you're metabolically sort of i don't like the term broken so much but because there's there's some sort of dysfunction there metabolically that we can hopefully fix but that may be why you need to eat every two hours yes yeah maybe if the the metabolism is working more opposite yeah you wouldn't need to let's get some more practical things um i think you've really helped people understand the immune system how important it is so food so far it's been potentially think about how often you're eating how much you're eating how you're eating but also this diversity you didn't mention saturated fats um let's just quickly go through the macronutrients then like yeah because there was a really nice bit in the book about protein and immunity which i found really interesting um but saturated fat is is a very hot topic of conversation and uh how can i put it the twitter diets wars yes definitely you're clear up yeah i i i do these things i'm just like okay i'm over it really yeah i don't find it particularly helpful um but also when we talk about saturated fat there's so many different types of saturated fat it gets quite a nuanced discussion but i wonder if you could let's talk about protein maybe we can talk about fats and carbs and actually yeah how you see them impacting the immune system exactly so i think carbs is the quality and the quantity so these are where we're getting the fiber to feed our microbiota so um thinking of that diverse colorful produce that we're trying to eat 30 different plant foods and over the course of a week um carbohydrates are fueling our immune responses um and then protein i think protein malnutrition is probably globally one of the biggest factors that has a negative impact on our immune system because it's it's protein breaks down into amino acids and these are the building blocks to make so many other proteins in our bodies and the immune system is a huge sink for that because it needs you know antibodies are made from protein the communication molecule so we need protein for the fabric of our immune system exactly yeah and i think you know that's probably one of the key things like as i said globally that impacts our immunity what's sort of less understood is which particular amino acids these building blocks of proteins are more or less important for different aspects of the immune system and i think that's something we'll see coming out in the next few years under this kind of immuno-metabolism field um i think he beautifully addressed animal versus plants uh in the book where you said you know animal proteins are typically more complete yeah but plant-based proteins a lot of cultures have actually learned how to combine them yeah to give you that completeness and i thought that was very inclusive and very empowering because people you know people these days are choosing to eat in very different ways and of course choosing how you eat is a very modern it's quite a privileged phenomenon the first place to be able to choose the dark you wish to follow yeah um but i thought it was really nice how you did that what are some of those examples of combining so i think um i think rice and beans i think you're probably good yeah and you find these in sort of different uh cultural diets as well and the complete proteins the complete proteins are the ones that contain all of the amino acids that are considered essential we cannot make them ourselves and then there's certain amino acids that we can make yourself and there's some that are conditionally essential so in certain situations they become essential so most animal products tend to um you know generally speaking contain all the essential ones whereas most plant products tend to only contain some or other of them but you can piece them together and i think anyone who's switching out all animal products for plant-based uh protein sources should really make sure they get some sort of nutritional advice to ensure that they're not lacking in any of these amino acids and study traditional diets i guess or traditional cultures who eat that way you know there is a lot of kind of ancestral wisdom there that we've noticed humans before that yeah we've sort of forgotten maybe it's the human condition you know like when our parents try and tell us stuff and we're like no we'll do it anyway um and then we're like oh yes they were right that's what they were trying to tell us yeah i think we all know that yeah exactly yeah so what's the deal with fats then so fats um i think for a long time we kind of thought of fat as one thing but it's not it's lots of different things and there's the unsaturated fat so there's the mono and the polyunsaturated fats so olive oil is probably the best example of a mono unsaturated fat and there's lots of um epidemiological research around why it's important for health and it has lots of these phytonutrients that i mentioned earlier included in it and my own personal bias because of my hybrid italian family is like you know olive oil is life so it's all that i use and um yeah hold my hands up to that um so it's it's something that's um really important to include uh in your diet i think people get afraid of cooking with olive oil but it's for the short-term sort of home cooking it's been shown to be stabilized by the presence of these phytonutrients so it's it's a good healthful oil to use and you know people have been using it for millennia and it's associated with some of the most healthful diets in the world like the mediterranean region um then the polyunsaturated fats are kind of interesting because you have the omega-3 and omega-6 so some people might be familiar with these omega-3 supplements are quite popular now um and i would say if you're not eating oily fish then you should really think about an omega-3 supplement because these are they're making up the the cell membranes of our our cells but their immune system is using these as a resource to produce different um molecules that it uses to do its job and um this includes production of inflammation but also resolution of inflammation and resolution of inflammation was something that was really neglected in the field for a long time it's only maybe 10 years ago that we started to understand oh it's an active process inflammation just doesn't go away by itself simply the act of having inflammation in the body having the presence of certain inflammatory cell types causes the switch to the next phase which is the pro-resolving um resolution of inflammation which is healing and repair and this is where our immune cells utilize these omega-3 fats from their cell membrane to produce pro-resolving molecules that help dampen down this and and heal and repair the the body that that is super fascinating so you know we we were saying at the start that inflammation is a normal process you know it's but it's it's meant to be short-lived so it's meant to be there to help you find something like a you know broken ankle you know sorry sprained ankle you don't get red hot swollen for a few days and then it resolves the the chronic inflammation the chronic unresolved inflammation that's behind you know type 2 diabetes high blood pressure yeah a lot of cases of depression all kinds of autoimmune diseases is this sort of chronic unresolved inflammation and you're saying that omega-3s help to resolve inflammation yes which is which is you know it's like it's quite nice to actually be able to draw a direction oh that's going to help me you know in colloquism switch it off i guess to a certain and you have to also consider whatever stimulating the inflammation in the first place needs to be somehow removed or contained as well there's a lot of studies in things like heart disease depression i think probably um rheumatoid arthritis is one that springs to mind because there's you know dozens of um clinical trials now that show that high doses of omega-3 is really beneficial to the overall um patient's quality of life and you know their pain and disease management but yet the nice guidelines are still not suggesting that we treat people with this it's still that they're welcome to explore something like a mediterranean diet so for me rheumatoid arthritis is the one that holds the strongest evidence but it's just challenging to get that into clinical practice i think there's also things like allergies where omega-3s the evidence is really quite mixed but we have a picture appearing where what the mother is eating when she's pregnant and the fish which is a great source of omega-3s is really important to help prevent allergies in the unborn child so again not a really strong um clinical message yet but i think that's some something that we're going to see coming out in the next few years yeah and i think you know this is one of the big problems at the moment is with how information is communicated um we can easily get over excited by certain things but at the same time i also think we put the brakes on a lot of things as well of course we often need more evidence but i also think sometimes with some things when the risk of harm is low we should really be starting to think about well look and when you when for example we say mixed evidence that implies well some evidence is suggesting it may work and some are suggesting it it's not so it could be that in certain populations it works brilliantly exactly and another population is it doesn't work at all but no we're gonna have a global recommendation that you don't do it because we don't have the evidence yeah i just don't think it's i really think we need to think about a better way sometimes to communicate somewhere else with the public it's really hard especially if you know the thing with pregnant women and and fish because there's mixed messages about how much fish pregnant women should mercury because of mercury but yet we we're starting to see a picture where having omega-3s are really important during pregnancy but pregnant women might decide to not eat fish at all during pregnancy rather than the kind of gray area of you're allowed so many portions but not this fish and only so many times a week um and in which case then maybe a supplement would be suitable but that's not again it's very difficult to communicate um this kind of information into very clear public health messages it says a saturated fat you have written about this in the book i think you cover it really well um as i say there's lots of different kinds of saturated fats and i think sometimes i i find it confusing in the literature as to it's a specific type or they often it's an animal study where they're high sucrose high saturated fat diet so you can one might be confusing sort of the high sugar and the high fat exactly combination and i sort of think some people seem to do okay with a little bit of saturated fat in the context of a natural sort of more traditional diet and i think that's where and as you yourself said at the start it's very hard when we just go to individual nutrients and try and say good or bad exactly a lot more nuanced yeah so we do know that saturated fat can be something that causes the gut barrier to open up uh more than other um foods and that in itself can cause this sort of transient post-eating inflammation but we also know that eating it in the context of a fiber-rich diet is gonna kind of counterbalance that and i think no food is just 100 saturated fat every food has a mix of different nutrients so we're not just eating saturated fat on its own but you can eat foods that are higher or lower in saturated fat and for some people it may be beneficial to eat a lower saturated fat diet for other healthy people maybe it's not even something that needs to be on your radar because your overall pattern is quite bad and then it also comes down to doesn't it like what's your current state of health so if you have for whatever reason had a lot of insults to your body whether it was stress poor diets inadequate movement insomnia maybe work night shifts for 20 years or whatever maybe at that point maybe the gut is a little bit more leaky than um than we would call physiological or normal or small maybe in that context foods can start to become problematic on the background of that compared to someone who's got their their health and their microbiome yeah in a completely different state yeah exactly i really i so strongly feel that that nuance is getting lost in health communication i really think it gets lost on social media a lot of the time where things have become black and white yeah it's like and i don't know i i i am heavily influenced by my experience as a clinician seeing patients i've just realized that it's very hard to say one thing for sure that is applicable in every single situation yeah yeah and i guess that's where you know we're not going to be able to deliver personalized diets to everyone but we can help sort of nurture intuition and yeah and steer people towards the helpful i thought for you to be a very small part of this discussion we spent a long time on feed so i think overall pattern lots of diversity yeah um you know we've covered a few things there uh depending how long we've got i'd love to talk about stress emotions um the idea of hormesis hot stress cold stress yeah these are really interesting so yeah um i mean i don't know which one do you want to get yeah i don't know i mean i guess i start by saying i'm a natural stress head i don't know why but i i get stressed very easily by things that i probably shouldn't i think i my husband's opposite end of the spectrum so sometimes he's like why is she getting so uh worried um about things that she doesn't need to worry about so it's always on my radar because i know that if i let it run away with me i will start to feel the detrimental effects of stress in one way i think the biggest example was um the time i gave myself pneumonia which is um kind of embarrassing but i was very stressed i had i wasn't someone who grew up understanding what boundaries were maybe that was my generation but i'm i'm someone who i enjoy what i do so i get excited about projects i take on everything i say yes to everything so i'm like that sounds amazing that sounds amazing then i have to realize i have job i have kids i have to have down time i need to spend time with family and friends you know all the other life admin and life load that comes with it and um and it was a couple of years ago i got cold my husband got the cold as well my son got the cold my daughter didn't which probably could have another tangent about why even though we're all coughing on her and and they got better and i took no time off i was working every evening to finish deadlines on various projects um i wasn't sleeping well because i was going to bed a bit wired from working and not able to switch off my brain and thinking about what i had to get done tomorrow because i had other deadlines and other things and then going to work and i had this awful hacking cough this free covered so definitely wasn't covered and i was starting to hide it from my colleagues and my family i was trying to pretend that i was fine i was just feeling awful my chest was rattling and then i just couldn't get out of bed one day and i i couldn't take care of my kids i feel quite emotional talking about it actually um because i was just there i i just literally i've never had the sort of bone rattling chesty cough um fever and i was in bed for three weeks and you know all of those deadlines my job my kids i couldn't do any of it and i i just ignored a cold and i kept on going anyway and i was so stressed and i didn't stop and recognize that i was stressed and the trickle-down effect it was having on all the other behaviorism that i was engaging in like my sleep and everything and that was uh you know i mean a very powerful story and thank you for opening up and sharing it i can see it so yeah yeah it's very emotional um so that's your immune system getting completely flawed so what's going on there i mean let's break that down you were overworked overstressed not sleeping well and all those things are impacting your immune system yeah so what what is going on i think that one of the most interesting things was i was probably eating pretty well because i love cooking and it's part of my thing that i i enjoy doing so that in itself is just evidence that even if you have the best diet in the world you know other things can erode away at your immune system and and leave you open and stress is probably the one thing i know that it's something that you've written about a lot and it's the one thing that we don't take seriously we think of it as being psychological and the causes can be psychological they can be physical they can be emotional but they're always biological because the stress chemistry is real the things that are being produced in our body that give us that stress response um that is having a really real impact on our body and i've come to really start to think about how i can make stress a positive in my life because ultimately it's the thing that gets us out of bed in the morning it gives us the get up and go to go and do things um and what i've been learning about my own journey is when you reflect on events you describe them as stressful if they were negative but you describe them as something else if they worked out you know well for you so as a society we we think of stress as being um a negative thing but if you uh there's experiments that have been done where they take groups of students before presentation then they're being told to recite kind of positive affirmations or or negative affirmations about what they're about to do and this has a huge impact on their stress chemistry but also there's a trickle-down effect on your immune system because stress is you know designed to save your life so you're about to be hit by a bus you're going to run for your life your your you know within seconds you're switching on that um adrenaline response to mobilize you to safety then we have cortisol one of the key stress hormones that's going to keep you running keep you going it's going to pump glucose into your bloodstream so you've got instant energy to to go and take yourself from safety that's all energetically costly and that's saying well you've got a cold but we're going to stop fighting the cold right now because we need to save your life so turn off the immune system and turn on all the other stuff that needs to save your life so cortisol um is sort of like the off switch for protecting ourselves and it really dampens our immune system and that's okay if it's for you know a series of hours but when it's hours and days and months and over the long term then you're constantly kind of running running on empty yeah it's i mean i'm glad you shared your story and i'm glad you're making a point to this because i think in health and wellness in general there is you know i'm a big fan that food is important i think there is far too much focus on foods at the expense of other facts as well and many people frankly their diet is good enough and trying to make a five percent improve in their diet they're much better off trying to address their stress levels quality getting it getting an extra half an hour sleeper night yeah is probably going to do them more good than tweaking their diet by an extra five percent exactly and i really think we've got the balance strong and i think that's also because at the way we talk about stress and how we see it in society and our food you can see that it's on your plates right you can see food you can see the choice exactly but you know you mentioned that i mean that was a pneumonia i'm you know my dad's who who i spent 15 years caring for dad when he was you know he was a uh he was a he was a consultant doctor in this country um but he you know he worked stupid hours right he did two jobs he had a full-time job as a consultant he also worked nights four days a week in another sort of medical job so for 30 years my dad only sat three nights a week which and you know when dad was i think in his sort of mid to late 50s he suddenly got unwell he'd never been unwell before and boom all our lives changed he came down with lupus kidney failure and then that was 15 years of dialysis that was me moving back to the northwest it was it's really impacting my whole adult life and i now the more i delve into research and the impacts of stress on your immune system the impacts of sleep deprivation on your immune system but also emotions and things like anger and pent-up stuff i'm like well of course my dad got lupus right and and someone might say to me or you can't prove that okay sure but i don't need to like in my head i like like i don't have to prove that's on it i know looking at my dad's life that that sort of lifestyle and i love my dad i love what he's done for the family right so i understand he was doing what he felt he had to do to give us a great life and he has but it came at a cost and as you said before there is a cost to the immune system doing what it does there is a cost and i think in my dad's cost chronic stress chronic insomnia mm-hmm i am convinced led to his lupus yeah and now there's so many anecdotes that i hear all the time of people saying there was a stressful event or there was something that happened or i lost a partner or you know and and that was a turning point and my health started to decline and nothing else changed but the stress i do a timeline with my patients right and and i can tell you when people come down with an autoimmune illness when you go back into the whole history and again i'm skewed by my patient populations this may not be applicable to everyone but in my patient population when i draw a timeline it is amazing how many times within six months of them getting symptoms some significant life stress happened could have been a lost job bereavement breakup it was it's almost like stress can sometimes not only be a contributor sometimes it can be the trigger the trigger yeah everything else was waiting there and it has all the the trickle-down effects as well when i'm stressed like i said before i wasn't sleeping very well because there's a trickle-down effect and you're more likely to engage in negative behaviors so most people when they're stressed they might say oh i'm just eating really badly because i'm stressed it's a major kind of driver of um you know these negative behaviors that are then you're in a sort of vicious cycle of things and at the moment people are beating themselves up that they put on weight during this pandemic and i really want to sort of say with heartfelt compassion to people you really don't have to because um there's a study from about 10 years ago which showed that you know maybe 80 of us change our eating behavior in response to stress and it's roughly i think it's roughly 45 percent of us eat more and 35 of us eat less yeah i can imagine that i've got friends who say oh when i'm stressed i can't eat yeah and then there's other people who eat too much of course in one of the most stressful months you know a few months and certainly my lifetime in many people's lifetimes well of course there's going to be a certain population who are wired yeah to use food to soothe their stress yeah um i know i've heard you talk about before the stress impacts the the microbiome the the gut bugs but it also impacts the stress the cortisol receptor doesn't say it's yes yeah it's kind of like you're you're constantly revving your engine but you've got your feet on the brake at the same time and it's you know we have ways and means of switching off the stress response but that circuit gets worn out a little bit when it's constantly at play and everything just starts to get um off balance yeah from then and because you know our immune cells have receptors for all of the different hormones the stress chemistry they're being influenced by that as well it's influencing the production of fresh new immune cells from the bone marrow so things like cortisol can have a sort of dampening effect on that um and there's a concept of the immunological space i'm not sure if you've heard of this but we only have so much space in our body for immune cells and over your lifespan your immune cells you know proliferate when we see an infection and we sort of gather up more and more immune cells until it becomes full and we kind of have to wait for the old ones to die off before our body can produce fresh new ones and older immune cells are more likely to go wrong so we need to have a way of getting rid of the old ones and bringing in the new ones and so this kind of balance and can be really interrupted by being stressed out all the time is there anything you do yourself having experienced the negatives of burning the candle at both yeah really trying to say yes to everyone and do everything that's the hardest list yeah getting pneumonia yeah when you couldn't do anything what if you as an immunologist yourself but also as a human who's susceptible to the same practices all of us what have you changed i've tried to be a bit more open because i hate seeing in in the wellness sphere people looking like their life is perfect and i just think we all get it wrong even you know my colleagues were like how on earth do you end up letting yourself get pneumonia like it's so stupid even though language like letting yourself like come on you should know better um i went on a bit of a journey to this just look at what what helps stress um and some i obviously went into the research first of all just being a scientist and what i found was um you know there's sort of cultural aspects to our immune system and what i mean by that is you know um i was writing about this the other day like the act of writing stuff down like disclosing stressful events or traumatic events is seen as being very cathartic and good for our health but what we don't realize is this is through a western perspective and in some cultures writing is actually more stressful because it becomes visual on the the page somebody might read it even if you know it's private and that can be more stressful and they can alter the stress chemistry it can also alter things like their immune cells and how well they're working and how many colds and flus they're likely to pick up that year so when i think about the current pandemic and how we know that certain populations are more susceptible to severe cobalt so the black and minority ethnic groups and instantly we try and look at the biology of why is that and then we realized that it could be cultural things the stress of um not having you know living up to sort of cultural norms of how you live your lifestyle or not having the cultural norms of how you relieve your stress or what a support network looks like it can be quite stressful for people that is one of the most interesting things i've heard jenna it's it's like you know i'm a huge fan of journaling i think journaling can help so many people but if you're journaling and you're worried that someone's going to see what you've written well that's a whole different experience yeah like and and what's interesting is you're saying that your immune system senses that yeah and alters what it does based upon that perception exactly so which is kind of mind-blowing it's mind-blowing but then it's it also it can either be frustrating for people or empowering so it basically means everything we do the thoughts we think the emotions we feel yeah and you've got this lovely bit i think i've probably got to open it you know as above so below emotional roots of disease and it's page 160 of your book like i really like what you put there and how um you know you know and you you sort of say much of the medical community remains skeptical but there's piling evidence that virtually every ill from the common core to cancer and heart disease is influenced positively or negatively by a person's emotional and mental state and you're saying we can no longer ignore this connection it's just the hardest thing to study because you know it's subjective it's it's fuzzy it's it's it's not any of that hard empirical but if you want to any cl like the the experienced clinicians who i'm friend with friends with um we all get it because we've seen it now i get there's a there's often a disconnect between what we see clinically and what we're able to study and quantify yeah but i got to tell you you know you see this all the time and you sort of you summarize i think what was what was the quote it's far more important to know what person that is it what what person the disease what was the quotes yes so it's more important to know what person the disease has and what disease the person has so it's kind of who is the person first and foremost and there's a really interesting yeah yeah there's a really interesting study that um it looked at sort of these five major personality types so they are kind of roughly divided into like openness to experience conscientiousness extrovertedness agreeableness and neuroticism so in psychology terms are kind of ways that we can be categorized based on our personality and each of these personality types have specific immunological features and one of the most interesting thing is that um some of them are more likely to be pro-inflammatory and have higher levels of c-reactive protein which is a marker in the blood for for inflammation um and things like being neurotic and um being uh less introverted it can affect the inflammation in our body it's because i guess we're all very different we're all on a sort of spectrum of different personalities but that's evolved from maybe different roles you might play within a community and then what your exposure to different infections might be or your risk of getting injured and things like anger is known to prime the body for um for becoming damaged because maybe anger preceded violence and throughout our evolution we've like okay if you're angry something might happen that might damage you so we need to prime parts of our immune system to prepare for that you mention anger and it's something i wrote about field question five is the importance of forgiveness there is good research on forgiveness a guy called fred luskins done the stanford university i think forgiveness trial or research that i can't remember the exact name yeah his research is incredible and i i shared in my last book a story about one of my patients who had high blood pressure and which again you know to to make it relevant to our conversation you know high blood pressure is a chronic non-communicable illness that you know will have chronic inflammation playing a role yeah in some way and you know what she had changed her lifestyle though i was you know i was doing this stuff i try and uh talk about food and movement and sleep you know what it wasn't budging and it was to do with um you know basically her um her husband of many years had cheated on her and they had split up and it was only once she started practicing forgiveness right that her blood pressure started going down it it was incredible and so that's that's an anecdotal story from my clinic but i it really i think it does stand firm and consistent with the research that is out there in terms of if you're holding on to resentment and anger that will influence your biology and your immune system exactly and maybe that is culturally what we see dividing different groups and how they deal with illness as well because they may feel marginalized i think social status is also really important i know that in the animal kingdom being lowered down the pecking order can be quite stressful for an animal and that can be seen in its its blood chemistry but also for us humans um and i think that's you know something that we see playing out with the sort of lower social economic um uh demographics are worse hit by some of these lifestyle-related diseases yeah they may have more stressful lifestyles and but we always we put it down don't we to oh less access to good food more stress and of course i think those play a role but what if it's also related to stasis as it is the animal kingdom what you know that's something i haven't properly given as much thoughts and it's probably not as common a narrative it's where do you i guess it's you know in many ways it's do you feel your life has purpose yes yeah you know how do you see your life what's the meaning behind it because that as well in itself has a huge amount of research suggesting it's just you know if you feel your life has meaning and value you tend to have a happier and healthier life yeah i mean another piece of research it came across recently was comparing um samoan individuals to european individuals with um epstein-barr virus which is a virus that almost all of us harbor but when we activate our stress chemistry um this can be actually a sign that the virus uses to allow itself to reactivate and cause problems and we know in the western culture that being of a lower socio-economic status means that you're more likely to experience spiral reactivation but in the samoan culture um being on a lower socioeconomic status has a totally different impact on the stress chemistry that actually meant it was the people in the higher social economic brackets that were worse affected by latent viral reactivation and this is just you know they use the viral reactivation as a readout an empirical way of of measuring the immune system changes but it in different cultures you know you and we never think about this in medicine i mean what's that like for you as a scientist and as a lecturer these are the kind of yeah these would be these would be perceived as a kind of softer yes yes aspects of health and science but it's that exactly we need to bring it together a lot of the data is actually quite old now but i guess it's just been parked there and we have this real kind of biomedical model where we focus in on one cell type and what is that cell doing and it's really reductionist and then we try and piece the jigsaw together and we kind of need to fuse it with the anthropology and be like okay now how do we bring these two fields together because that's the only way we can tackle i think where we're at yeah with our health and you know you sort of you really beautifully bridge it throughout the book all these different components emotions food movement sleep stress yeah you know you've got a nice section on supplements as well which you probably won't be able to get into today um the joy of the table so the joy of the tavola which is an italian phrase for enjoying being at the table and linking what we were talking about earlier with food to emotions you know make your table a joyous place to be because the endorphins from enjoying being at your table with your family your friends or even on your own and just enjoying the meal endorphins can alter the function of our immune cells because they have receptors for those on them so those feel good hormones that actually helps nurture things like the t rags the regulatory t cells so bringing the food together with the emotion and and enjoying that that's so so important yeah we haven't had a kitchen for the last four months so we've had no table no joy but we've still been trying to cobble together as a family you know little meals on the floor and it's just you know what i'm so delighted to hear you speak about these things because i think these are things we've missed in health advice yeah it has been too reductionist you know eating at a table with you know your community your tribe has kind of always been a part of human culture yeah and i think in in if you sort of extend the argument that you're making it's kind of like well you could potentially eat the same food feeling stressed out and lonely yeah and the same food might have a different response if you're eating it with good friends when you're feeling relaxed and calm i'm convinced that you know one thing i've really i've observed clinically maybe for two three years now a lot of people these days are reacting or perceive themselves as reacting to foods yes and i think what's really interesting for me is and i think i really got this in the year preceding me writing the stress solution because i thought well the stress changes your uh your guts and your gi tracts and your digestion significantly as it does well are they actually reacting to the food or are they reacting to the fact that they're eating in a stressed state and i've seen with some patients the same food if they do some sort of what i call a transition between you know action states and eating when they do that for one or two minutes before eating yeah they're no longer reacting to the same foods yeah which you know i think this has even been shown with gluten as the nocebo effect yes which i don't know people say this all the time i go on holiday i can eat the bread it doesn't make me feel bloated but the bread at home must be somehow different maybe it's different but also you're different you're in a different frame of mind when you're on holiday and you're eating and you're chewing your food as you look at the lovely vista and you're just feeling more relaxed and that's affecting your digestion this stuff matters yeah people think you know when i i really don't i hardly pretty much don't drink anymore um but when i did i used to remember that i'd go on a holiday and like you know a glass of red wine would affect my sleep in the uk or you know i feel a bit groggy the next day but i found when i was on holiday i could have a glass or two with dinner i found nothing yeah i thought this is stress this is like there's no like stress load on my life i'm chilling with my wife and my kids and there's a beast yeah so it's not bothering me but if your life is chronically overly busy you're stressed out the whole time not only are you going to get sick more or potentially you know you're going to be able to not tolerate yeah various things you're going to you're going to you're not going to manage those insults as well exactly i call it the food prison you know i see so many people who are so stressed about eating the perfect diet that that's that's just eroding their health you never mind what they're eating being being helpful um but i guess you know you asked me earlier about what i do to manage my stress and i think it's my is still my learning curve but it's just on my radar now that i'm i'm i'm always experimenting i'm learning how to say no i think having boundaries was one of the biggest things i learned as an adult like why are we not teaching kids this in school and saying that was okay and there's a time and a place for projects if i want to get involved and it it can't be now because that compromises my time as a mother or my time spent with family or my time just you know being on my own or doing the things that nurture my day then i have to say no and let go of that and i guess that's like you know the catharticism of writing or some ways of you know putting a narrative to what stressing as i has a release to it and that you can feel that you know like a big physiological sigh that your body is making when you're like okay and once the decisions made you move on from it i've said no to that it's sad and i wish i could say yes but i don't think about it the next day when i've moved on and other things are you know it's very freeing actually you know something i struggle with for years and it's i'm getting much better at it but it's it feels good yeah yeah half the time i used to say yes and stuff and then i would just be stressed out why did i say yes i've got to do this i've committed now they've started advertising and i'm i'm getting much better at nipping it in the bud yeah source yes but it's taken a lot of work oh yeah i had to learn the hard way yeah um but i started feeling like i was doing everything badly when you start to feel like you're being a bad parent probably i wasn't but in my mind i wasn't doing what i wanted to do and that i think with my kids i just that had to be a firm line that i couldn't ever cross again wow now you mentioned eating and you said um that you know there's some studies that our immune system operates differently if we're eating in company feeling joy feeling happy that reminds me of something else i read in your book about it's something to do with you were giving a list of strategies to people but it was about you know like walking whilst listening to music it was about putting two senses in together could you expand on that yeah that this is it's really interesting actually so this was um data that was generated in the 1980s there's some scientists who were trying to disprove research that had come out of russia around that time about conditioning so the classical example of conditioning is pavlov's dogs um most people will be aware of that but they're these experiments they had done where they they had looked to try and condition the immune system and so these scientists were like this this can't be right you know we're going to redo the experiments much more stringently and um see if it is really what it makes out to be can you condition your immune system with various rituals and routines and what they did was they they used an animal model experiment and they gave the the animals a sweet solution to drink and one group got the sweet solution that also had a particular chemical inside it that would modulate antibody responses so they could measure the antibody responses in the blood and see um if that there was an effect happening some kind of readout tangible piece of data that they could observe so the mice were given these this sugar solution with this chemical for a period of time and after a while when they just gave the sugar solution on its own they got the same effect happening to the immune system so it's kind of like a placebo effect it's like you expect something the most expected this effect to take place in its body on some kind of subconscious level because it was so used to that happening that the the effect happened anyway even without the chemical presence to actually cause the modulation to the immune system and people have been scratching around to try and understand the mechanism and i think the best we've come up with is the placebo effect like it's it's there's some part of us that we don't quite understand that embodies things and when there's a response expected that the biology changes and we can start to pair things together so what you're referring to in the book is like the kind of little stress relieving rituals like you know playing your favorite music whilst you're doing something like taking a nice bath or having a particular scent being in a room while you're doing something else and eventually then you just can play that music and you start to feel the same relaxed feeling that you do when you're in a nice warm bath even without taking the bath yeah you know it makes me think about you know if your home is or has been a stressful place then you know that it kind of works that you may come into that and you your body may start to almost the immune system might sense that and get okay this is a stressful place and react even if nothing stressful happens yes but then you could also flip it and you know i'm a huge fan of ritual and sort of daily practices that even if they only take five minutes they can be very powerful and i think when i hear that i think of a morning routine and i think what if someone you know can design their ideal morning routine let's say let's say it was five ten minutes yeah you know a bit of maybe a minute or two of breathing yeah um you know three or four minutes of some light movement practice yeah and then let's say five minutes of reading a positive book yeah for example i mean that's you know i in the stress season i write about the three m's of the morning we've seen mindfulness movement and mindsets i think you can create one that lasts an hour you can create one last five minutes but the point i'm trying to make is if someone started doing that in the same room let's say they lit a candle yeah in the room did that that even on a day when they're a little bit busy or they haven't quite they can't quite switch off and they just you know sat there with their coffee with the candle on yes maybe that will also condition their immune system the other way and go hey things are okay because he's got the candle on yeah it's quite it's quite powerful well all the sensors kind of integrating so it might be particular scent that you're burning there might be a particular song or playlist that you always play when you're doing those activities for your morning routine and then the morning you wake up and you're just tired and you don't want to do your movement you just want to sit and enjoy a tea but you're in that room with that space and you still may be reaping the benefits of the the meditation and the movement that you would normally do and i think as a human being we just seem to be anchored by routines for me especially becoming a mother it's been it's been hugely important so much so that now i can buffer the lack of routine more because i can circle back to a really strong routine that i've built over time and i think when we went into lockdown this year everything kind of got off kilter and we haven't we're living in a building site basically at the moment so it's stressful the routine is shock you know each shot has really done a number on us but i think having been someone who needs routine particularly as a bit of a stress head it didn't take long for us to find a new rhythm uh being at home and that's anchoring i think that's i i i love the way you the way you say certain things you said you know we can build a routine like you can build your immune system yeah it's a very empowering word yeah build means we can do that right it doesn't mean it's fixed exactly we've got some agency over that yeah um it's really interesting as you know as i mentioned right at the start this is you know day one in the new studio yeah and gareth who's videoing and sitting there in the corner um we've been talking about you know how do we create a stress-free space that allows a really deep authentic vulnerable conversation to happen yeah and you know it's not quite ready yet you know bringing plants in is one thing you know um we're gonna probably have a candle on or some sort of you know a nice scent yeah you know my my dream is because my this podcast is all about authentic conversation it's not interviews it's conversation i want um someone like you to walk in and within you know i almost want to program it so that people feel calm and they go they want to open up and actually yeah do you know what i mean yeah i think you've done a really good job already but also i think that what you give off as a person really helps so the way people's eyes feel relaxed you know when we're angry we like narrow our eyes or if we're feeling quite negative or stressed and then we pick that up when we're reading the body language and so if somebody has a relaxed disposition that's going to be interpreted by the other person and make them feel at ease as well so and interpreted by our immune systems yes exactly as this is a safe environment it's all about all of those millions of inputs that are going in yeah every minute of every day and our immune system's reading those shaping and responding jenna look i've really enjoyed this chat there is so much i want to discover that we've not got inside like hot and cold supplements which is it's all there in the book for people if they're interested in movements and how that impacts the immune system but but i i really enjoyed thank you for opening up if people hear this conversation and they want to sort of interact with you are you sort of um you know are you active online do you like interacts with people online and if so where can they find you yeah i mean i i'm on uh instagram mostly that's the easiest place to find me that's kind of my um internal monologue where i uh i don't know like to post about things that i've been researching and doing and also a bit of kind of general mom life and a little bit of what's going on at home um as well i'm sort of on twitter on a professional capacity so that's mostly like publishing research and interacting with academics um and then i have a website too which is just my name which is dr jennamataki dot com fantastic um so janet as you know this is called feel better live more um when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of our lives so we covered a lot of different um topics today a lot we didn't cover as well i wonder if you'd mind finishing off by giving the listeners and the viewers some really practical tips if they're inspired by what they've heard and i want to say yeah i like that i want to take steps today yeah to start improving my immune system have you got some of the top tips that you can share yeah i would say shut out the noise the noise of social media the noise of marketing the noise of messages and just kind of write down or find a way to to to um distill down you know what what it is about your day-to-day that you think is is making you feel a bit nah a bit like not yourself um because we're bombarded with so much and when i speak to people i realize i'm in a very privileged position because of the virtue of my field and that i work in that i know a lot but other people who are with no background at all in this they're very confused and it's very confusing um and go with what we talked about you know step away from the supplements and just lay out on the table how is your diet how many times a day are you eating are you overeating are you stress eating are you consistently getting all of the relevant vitamins and minerals that you need but also good quality sources of carbohydrates and proteins and including um good quality fats in your diet and you know diet is not the only way to to shape your immune system you know we have movements stress all of the different things in our in our life and and your immune system is always changing as we grow older it changes you know don't really focus on one solution because health is complex there's a lot of different inputs going into it your immune system is the foundation of your health and so it needs to have all these kind of different areas targeted so you can have the perfect diet but like me stressed out of your head and then end up with pneumonia don't do as i did but you know take care take care of the whole sort of 360 of your health and it's about balancing not boosting your immune system yeah wonderful advice um you know i want to thank you for you know you study a lot of immunology you you've do a lot of research you also take the time to communicate it to the public and i think that's such a valuable thing if we get scientists like you yeah trying to communicate what you know to help educate people i think it's a wonderful thing so thank you for doing that thank you for making the journey up today no problem and we'll see you again soon thank you thank you for having me press subscribe to get more inspiration and ideas on how to feel better so you can get more out of life and if you have a moment why not check out this conversation that i've picked out as a perfect follow-up remember lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better you live more

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 182,313

Keywords: #feelbetterlivemore, drchatterjee, feelbetterin5, immunity, Dr Jenna Macciochi, jenna macciochi, infection, immune system, metabolism, stress

Id: 82lR57NfwpA

Length: 100min 44sec (6044 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020