**EP319: Buffing Up Your Immune System**
**Dr. Auric Bishop:** Welcome, my name's Dr. Auric Bishop. I'm a cardiologist, I'm an author, and a keynote speaker. I'm CEO of the Healthy Heart Network. I'm all about trying to help people live as well as possible for as long as possible. Heart disease is huge in Australia. Every 20 minutes, someone suffers a heart attack. Most of these could probably have been avoided if only we knew what to do. This podcast is all about helping you understand blood pressure, weight, and cholesterol for better health. If you enjoy this podcast, I would be honoured for a five-star review. You can share it with your family and friends. It may well save someone you love.
**Warwick Bishop:** Hi, my name's Warwick Bishop, and thank you for joining me on my podcast and videocast station. As always, I'm grateful that you found the time to have a listen, and I hope I can give you something valuable, interesting, and worthwhile.
Today, I'd like to talk a little bit about our immune system and the sort of things you might do or consider to basically look after your immune system. It might be timely because right at the moment, as I'm recording this, there is another wave of COVID. Of course, for the younger people in our population, they'll be going through exams. I know from my own experience during exam times, it’s just to get to the last exam, manage a celebration, and then get sick. I'm not sure if that's the same for you.
I think it's pretty important when we think about boosting our immune system and looking after our best health that we do that through habits, not through, you know, 30-day challenges or 60 days or a brief week or two in the lead-up to schoolies, for example. So, I think it's really important that we think about how to give ourselves the best shot all year round by building up our immune system.
What is our immune system? To a large degree, it is the cells in our body that interplay with our autonomic nervous system to act as the body's defence against external attacks. Those external attacks that we most commonly think of are infections, which can be bacterial or viral. If you can't remember the difference between those, bacteria are living cells, while a virus is a part of a cell. There are occasionally other harmful invaders like fungi, but that's pretty uncommon.
So, why worry about your immunity? Well, if you've got your immunity right, probably other things are running well as well. Remember, your immune system in balance is probably going to be beneficial for inflammation as well. Inflammation is a complicated concept and one that we hear a lot about these days as people talk about inflammation impacting coronary artery disease and potentially affecting blood pressure. So, let's get your immune system right. Let's get your immune system in balance. Let's reduce that risk of inflammation within your body and see if we can keep you healthy and functioning well on a daily basis.
Not today, but this week, I investigated a patient’s heart and undertook a coronary artery calcium score. It turned out that she had a score in the 90th percentile, meaning that the amount of calcium in her arteries compared to an age-matched group of women was in the top 10 for that cohort or that population. So, she had a lot of calcium in her arteries. I went to do a range of different screens, which I often consider doing in people who have a very high calcium score, like these ladies. It transpired that on all those screening bloods, her lipoprotein little a was normal, her homocysteine was probably a bit on the high side, and she wasn't diabetic. But what was elevated was a C-reactive protein, a protein that tells us about inflammation in the body.
I said to her, "Look, your bloods don't look that bad per se, but there is an elevation of inflammation somewhere." I asked, "Could you have bad teeth, for example?" She said, "Funny you say that. My dentist, who I visited just a few weeks ago, found I have periodontal disease, and I'm being sent for that to be fixed."
It's very important you're aware that things like your teeth and the things that you challenge your gut with are quite possibly the entry point for bacteria or even the proteins that can kick off inflammation within the body.
So, what are the things that you can do apart from looking after your teeth and brushing them to keep healthy and well? Well, let's think about a few things. First of all, number one would be what you eat. As you are wanting to look after yourself and your immune system, start to steer away from processed foods, sugary foods, and foods that are too fatty. Really move towards whole foods—foods that will have within them the vitamins and minerals and the constituents to allow your body to produce exactly what it needs for your best health.
When you look to cook it, don't cook it until it's black. Cook it sensibly. There are some concerns about cooking food until it's black. So, fresh food, whole food, and cooked in a sensible way. Salt, as you may have heard on a different podcast, is problematic in high doses because it seems to have a direct effect on the gut microbiome, increasing gut permeability and allowing lipopolysaccharides and even small amounts of bacteria into the bloodstream, therefore inciting an inflammatory response.
Well, once you've got your fuel right, the next thing you need to do is move your body. Exercise has been shown to reduce levels of inflammation, so this is really well worth knowing. It doesn't take a lot; we're talking about walking at a rate where you can still talk. You're not necessarily puffy, and full sentences are not problematic.
As a side, I've just been listening to an interesting book on how mitochondria work. Mitochondria, if you like, are the energy cells within our actual cells, which power our cells and therefore power our entire body. Mitochondria can be thought of as a hydro dam, but in fact, it is protons generated from chemical reactions. Those protons sit in a dam within the mitochondria. That dam can fill up, and if it overflows—if the protons are not being used, if the energy is not being used—the mitochondria take an alternate path in terms of its chemical activity, which can lead to substance build-up, by-product build-up that we don't necessarily want. Exercise clears that oversupply of protons. It allows that, if you like, dam of energy, that reservoir of energy, to be maintained at a safe and healthy level. So, it's not too much and not too little. Moving your body really counts; it has been shown to be helpful for the reduction of inflammation.
If you're thinking about what sort of exercise to do, well, that's probably on another podcast. But to a large degree, I'm moving myself to a belief that you need to satisfy both ends of the spectrum. What I mean by that is one end of the spectrum is strength, making those muscles as strong as possible. The other end of that spectrum is endurance, allowing those muscles to do something over and over.
Think about your day-to-day living. If you can't pick up your shopping bags, you're not going to be independent. If you can't pick up your shopping bags, strength, and walk up the stairs, endurance, you're still not going to be independent, so you're going to need both.
The next thing, or the third thing you could do to improve your immune system, and this has been shown over and over, is to reduce stress. Stress plays into the sympathetic nervous system. It releases things like cortisol, increases sugar levels, increases activation of the brain, reduces sleep, and pushes up blood pressure. All in all, it's just not good for you.
It's much easier to say, "Just don't stress about it," than it is to actually do it. So don't think I'm offering you a banal or simple remark, but stress is really important. I've spoken about this before. If you do want to dig down on that, go back to some of the James Buckley podcasts. If you don't know how to find something on my website, go to the little AI bot on drwarwickbishop.com. Down in the bottom right-hand corner, there's a little cartoon figure, which some think looks a little bit like me. If you ask him a question and say, "Tell me about stress and anxiety or hypnosis or meditation," he'll tell you a small spiel from my data set, from my collection of information that we've made available to that little bot. He'll also tell you which podcasts would refer to that information. So, if you're ever stuck and wondering where to get a bit more information from, check out the little AI bot on my website. He's super handy, and I use him myself.
So, we've talked about good food, we've talked about exercise, and we've talked about stress—super important to get out from under that. In my own experiences, I've seen over and over patients in stressful situations be able to get out, if you like, from under that stress. I've seen blood pressure get better, and I've seen atrial fibrillation get better, and of course, I've seen general health improve.
Well, the next thing that I think is really, really important is rest and sleep. These days, I've moved to a position of believing sleep is probably foundational in a good health program. It is number one. If you don't sleep well, you do not set yourself up well for everything else.
What do I do when it comes to sleep? Well, I try to go to sleep every night about the same time, around nine-ish. Shell and I start getting ready for bed, brushing teeth and bits and pieces. We try not to eat in the hour or so before sleep. We make sure the lights are dim in my bedroom. I've now got a red light, so it's not bright, and again, dim—allowing your body, the circadian rhythm, and the pineal gland to all align to help you sleep.
I try not to be stressful, obviously. I also now have essential oils running in my bedroom, and we put those on as we go to sleep. Interestingly, I think they help sleep, but there is interesting research now appearing that by their direct stimulation of the olfactory system—olfactory is your nose or your sense of smell—they can actually improve mental capacity and reduce the risk of progression to dementia.
When we go to bed, Shell and I will turn off the lights. I use an eye mask every night because my room's not pitch dark. So, I put an eye mask on every night, and we will play either a deep breathing meditation, a delta breath meditation to help us get into a delta pattern of breathing before sleep, or we'll listen to a self-hypnosis tape. Both of these set us up for a beautiful night's sleep.
I've set my alarm. I've been able to find on my iPhone an alarm option that is birds twittering—not a loud alarm that jolts you and shakes you out of bed, but this bird alarm which is within the setup for the sleep-wake cycle that you can find in your iPhone setup. It's a really nice gentle noise to wake up to; it’s birds. Interestingly, it sounds a lot like the birds that we have outside, which often start an hour or so earlier, but it's a little bit louder and nearer to me.
So, sleep has become hugely important, and Shell and I both work really, really hard to make sure we put in the investments so we can take the dividends through our days.
So, we've talked about food, moving, stress, and sleep. I guess you could add in there supplements. Currently, I take a little bit of vitamin D, vitamin A, and vitamin E as fat-soluble vitamins. I occasionally take vitamin C and zinc. Zinc, in particular, has been shown to help a bit. I don't know how much further you'd go, although lots of other supplements do get a run. Things like echinacea and elderberry all get a flag when it comes to supplements for the immune system.
For me, though, I'm going to wrap up now. I'm going to wish you the very best. I will invite you to drop me a note at info@drwarwickbishop.online if you have any queries or questions. If you've got any suggestions for podcasts, please let me know. I'd love to answer.
While I think of it, I did have a patient the other day ask if he could download my podcast from my app and listen to it when he's not in Wi-Fi or network range. Unfortunately, having spoken with John, our app is not capable of downloading a whole episode. So for that patient, if you're listening now, the way to download an episode is to go to any of the other apps that run podcasts, and that would be things like iTunes or Spotify. You can Google all the others that you like, but any of those, someone will give you a hand with that. You can download from those particular platforms. Unfortunately, the Dr. Warwick Bishop app, which has all the podcasts in it, needs connectivity to run. So, sorry about that. I hope that's a solution.
For now, I'm going to wrap up. I'm going to wish you the very best. I hope you live as well as possible for as long as possible. Take care and bye for now.
**Dr. Auric Bishop:** Hi. Ever wondered what your risk of heart attack is? You should. It's the single biggest killer in the Western world. We're talking one death less than every 30 minutes in Australia and one death less than every 60 seconds in the United States—9 million deaths globally per annum.
Well, how do you check your risk? You can go to www.virtualheartcheck.com.au. You'll find out about your risk and what can be done beyond that to be even more precise.
