Hay House Radio Episode Recap
- Episode Name: “The Autoimmune Fix”
- Live Broadcast: January 23rd, 2017 at 3:00 pm Pacific Time
Episode Summary Re-cap
Learn how to take your immune health into your own hands!With chronic and autoimmune diseases on the rise and the vast amount of research on the power of the immune system, how is mainstream medicine changing? We’re looking at the 3 main contributors to autoimmune conditions, along with gluten issues,
inflammation and epigenetics.
Special Guest: Dr. Tom O’Bryan
Dr. O’Bryan is a world expert on gluten and it’s impact on your health. He is an internationally recognized and sought after speaker and workshop leader specializing in the complications of Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity, Celiac Disease, and the development of Autoimmune Diseases as they occur inside and outside of the intestines. He is the founder of www.theDr.com and the visionary behind ‘The Gluten Summit – A Grain of Truth’, bringing together 29 of the world’s experts on the Gluten connection to diseases, disorders, and a wide-range of symptoms and ages. You can find this info at www.theglutensummit.com.
Dr. O’Bryan is considered the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ for chronic disease and metabolic disorders. He is a clinician par excellence in treating chronic disease and metabolic disorders from a Functional Medicine Perspective. He holds adjunct Faculty positions with the Institute for Functional Medicine and the National University of Health Sciences. He has trained thousands of practitioners around the world in advanced understanding of the impact of food related disorders and the development of individual autoimmune diseases.
His 2016 critically acclaimed ground-breaking book, The Autoimmune Fix, outlines the step-by-step development of degenerative diseases and gives us the tools to identify our dis-ease process years before the symptoms are obvious.
TheDr.com | TheGlutenSummit.com | Facebook | Betrayal Series: The Autoimmune Solution They Aren’t Telling You
The Truth About Autoimmune Disease
First and foremost, your immune system is not betraying you, it’s just working overtime to protect you. The key is to remove the load of toxins and inflammation so that your body does not have to kick off a constant immune response.
Autoimmunity occurs on a spectrum. You don’t wake up with diabetes, Alzheimer’s or Hashimoto’s thyroiditis one day. These conditions develop slowly, almost imperceptibly, over time. Scientists now know that for autoimmune diseases, the process starts as early as your twenties or thirties, with multiple steps of declining health along the way.
In the case of Alzheimer’s, it might begin with symptoms like brain fog and progress over time to forgetfulness, confusion, memory loss, and dementia.
How to Prevent or Treat Autoimmune Responses
Reduce Inflammation
Excess inflammation beyond the normal range will cause cellular damage. Continued cellular damage will cause tissue damage. Continued tissue damage will cause organ inflammation. Continued organ inflammation will increase the intensity of symptoms, and you develop elevated antibodies to that organ. Continued elevated antibodies to an organ leads to organ damage. Now you have symptoms that can be identified as an autoimmune disease.
Imagine that the human body is a chain of interconnected organs and systems. Whenever you pull on a chain, it will break at the weakest link. Wherever your weak link is in your body, that’s where inflammation will impact, causing symptoms.
This weak link might be why you sense you don’t feel well. Perhaps it’s weight, your memory, your thyroid, joints, or hormones. The weak link in your chain is where, or how, you will experience illness. You might have been associating these symptoms with getting older, but the reality is that age has very little to do with your sense of well-being.
Genetics can come into play when identifying a weak link because a genetic switch for a chronic health condition can be “switched on” or express in symptoms, once it’s triggered by something like chronic inflammation.
Reduce Your Exposure to Toxins
Reduce your exposure to toxins in food, water, personal care products, and the environmental (such as Bisphenol A, phthalates, GMO foods, mercury, lead, aluminum, food coloring, MSG, chlorine, etc.).
Eliminate Gluten, Dairy and Sugar
Dr. Tom recommends you eliminate these three categories of foods for three weeks to see how you feel.
Gluten (the family of proteins in wheat), dairy, and sugar are the most common triggers that set up the entire mechanism of inflammation and autoimmunity. There are others, but the clinical world of functional medicine considers those to be “the big three.”
With respect to gluten, eating it tears the intestinal lining in every human (even if one is not Celiac or gluten-sensitive). The intestinal lining then repairs itself. At some point, if the intestinal lining is not repairing itself fast enough, you have leaky gut. This creates inflammation.
According to the University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center, more than 300 different conditions may be associated with a sensitivity to gluten. Any of these may be the reason one could end up feeling sick, fat, forgetful, or tired.
When It Comes to Foods to Focus On, Consider:
- Foods high in polyphenols – colorful fruits and vegetables
- Avoiding processed carbohydrates – like cookies, cakes, breads
- Grass and pasture fed meats, poultry and animal fats
- Healthy plant fats like avocadoes, coconut oil and extra virgin olive oil
- A forkful of fermented foods daily (like kimchi or sauerkraut)
- Prebiotics – food components that cannot be digested by the bodybut are consumed by the beneficial bacteria to help them function. Chocolate is considered a prebiotic that is also rich in polyphenols.
Recipes: The Autoimmune Fix contains recipes that are gluten, sugar and dairy-free. You can also check out The Recipe Section for free recipes.
Autoimmune, Gut-Health and Gluten Sensitivity Testing
Testing can help identify if you need to make adjustments in your diet and lifestyle. Learn more about autoimmune, gut-health and gluten sensitivity testing here.
A Case for Prevention: Where Have 52% of the Animals Gone?
An article in the World Wildlife Federation, reported a 52% reduction in wildlife species between 1970 – 2010 (source – http://www.worldwildlife.org/press-releases/half-of-global-wildlife-lost-says-new-wwf-report). This caused Dr. Tom to ask, “What are we doing?”
Our tribal ancestors always watched the animals to learn what to eat and how to survive optimally. If 52% of the wildlife species have been wiped out in a 40-year period, it’s a wake up call that we have to take better care of our health. Dr. Tom called it, “wake up to good health.” Everyday when you wake up, re-commit to taking good care of yourself.
Taking steps to have a good functioning gut, a healthy microbiome (mix of good and bad bacteria living in harmony in the gut) and reducing inflammation can support your immune system in doing its job to keep you well.
The good news is, no matter where you are starting, your body was designed for renewal. We generate a whole new body’s worth of cells every 7 years. Some of those cells turn over quickly: The inside lining of your gut turns over every 3 to 7 days. Other cells, like your bones, turn over much slower. You can begin making loving changes in your diet and lifestyle today to regenerate healthy cells for the future.
Listen Again!
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