Transcription
Hi, my name is Dan Kalish. If you don't know about me, I am a chiropractor by training, but I function as a naturopath. I was raised by, I went to Chiropractic College. That's where I got a degree, but every one of my teachers that I was interested in was a naturopath. And so, when I graduated from Chiropractic College, I studied with a bunch of naturopaths. And California at that time didn't have licensing for naturopaths. So, anyway, it's just a lot of the things that I've learned are fundamentals of naturopathic medicine.
A lot of the chiropractors have been into this for generations. And now we're in a, in a world where there's a huge emphasis on trying to figure out immune function. And it's been a part of integrative alternative medicine from the beginning. And there's, you know, people like me that I've been around for a while, we have a certain amount of knowledge. I've been treating patients for 28 years. I've seen, you know, maybe 10,000 patients in my practice, more than that through the training programs that I lead. And, and then I've been studying this stuff for a long time too. It's kind of interested in it. And so, what we're gonna see now, what we are seeing now, we'll continue to see, is just this wave of immune-boosting products and programs and whatnot. And so, I wanted to just talk a little bit about the science, a little bit about how your immune system works, and what we've seen over the years in integrative medicine work for real.
So, number one concept is, you don't want to get a virus in the first place. Number two concept is, if you do get a virus, you want your immune system to already be in really good shape so you can fight it off. And number three concept is, if you get the virus and you start to get really sick, you're in pretty deep trouble and you, you know, you're gonna end up in an ER. And we just don't want that to happen, right? So, what we're looking at is, how do you, number one, prevent yourself from getting viruses in the first place and strengthen your mucosal immunity so it's harder for these organisms to penetrate and get into your body? I talked about that in the first talk in this series. Number two, if you do get a virus exposed to you and it gets into your system, how can you make sure that you're one of those people that just fights it off and a few weeks later you're okay? You know, for any viral infection, when it's a common flu bug or new bug that we're all worried about, or any viral infection, right? And for that matter, the same thing for any parasite that you might pick up when you're traveling overseas or any bacterial infection. Um, it's the same general rule book is, you know, in terms of how your immune system worked.
And the people that we're seeing getting into really deep trouble with this virus are obviously either older, or many of them who are younger have what they call comorbidities. That means that they've got something going on already that's making their immune system not work that great, or they've got something going on already like they're pre-diabetic or diabetic, they have cardiovascular disease problems, they're overweight, and they've got something that makes them prone to not responding really well to inflammation, okay? And your, this is all over the news as well, right now, this idea of cytokine, cytokine storms. So, a cytokine, basically, they're saying that the inflammatory response to any infection is good, but in this infection, the inflammatory response can go bad, right? And so, you want again to have a normal healthy inflammatory response when you first get sick so that you can fight these things off and not go into this cascade of chronic inflammation and then the information growing and then they going into something that becomes potentially life-threatening, right? And so, when people have low-grade chronic inflammation just because they're not healthy, it's more likely that they're going to have problems when they get sick. And that's kind of what we're seeing right now.
So, we're talking about prevention at its best. And I think the, the biggest picture concept with immune Pro, you know, immune function in general, is that they're, you know, they're, you don't have to take an immune booster. You don't have, you don't want to think about this as boosting your immune system or improving your immune system. We just have to, and this is a convex fundamental concept of functional medicine, you just have to normalize it, right? And, and all these years of doing this work, when you look at, I'll show you a lab here, when you take somebody who's not that healthy and you look at their labs and you normalize their function, you just get them back to normal. It's like being superhuman. What that says to me is that the normal healthy state of the body is pretty amazing, okay? And so, not, we're not talking about immune-boosting. We're just talking about normalizing immune function because the normal healthy immune function was built and designed over eons to to fight infections, and it's very good at it, all right? And where you see problems are when people don't have that peak health, they don't have that peak functioning of the immune system, and then they get sick and then they're gonna have trouble.
So, I'm just, just show you today, just three aspects of immunity that are absolutely key. We look at a few research studies and then I'm gonna show you how the labs work too. So, let's just cruise through this lab. We're not gonna look at all these things on here, but I thought we could focus on these few. And the first one I want to talk about was zinc. So, this is an ion panel from a lab company called Genova. I run this on a lot of patients. Right now, it costs like around $600. And it gives you more information that you could possibly imagine about all these things that everyone is worried about now. So, if you're a patient and you're listening and you're curious about doing this, sign up. We have free 15-minute consults with my health coach and she can tell you all about what it's like to be a patient and go to Kalish Wellness dot com, you sign up, okay? If you want to be a patient.
So, now plasma zinc, you can see, is measured on this test. And if zinc levels are normal, that's a sign that your immune system in regards to zinc is in pretty good shape. If your zinc levels are low, that is a major catastrophic problem for your immune system. So, you can measure your zinc levels, see if they're normal or low. And zinc is also very strongly related to another mineral called copper. So, copper and zinc interact with one another. They almost sort of trade places with one another. And if you take too much zinc for too long, you will lower your copper levels, alright? So, if you take too much zinc for too long, you run the risk of lowering your copper, which is not a good thing. That doesn't make you healthier, that makes you worse. So, the right amount of zinc is good. Too much zinc for too long, not so good.
So, if your levels of zinc are low and you start to supplement with it, it typically takes about six months to start to get the levels up by one quintile. That's one little chunk, you know, you know, when little hash mark to the right, okay? So, again, six months of zinc supplementation for people that are low will bring those levels up. So, so typical person who's low in zinc, you can see the math here, right? They would do six months to get to here, and now there's six months to get to here. So, about a year of zinc supplementation for someone who tests low will get them to into the normal ranges, okay? So, it takes a little while. If you take zinc for too long, let's say you keep taking it and your zinc ends up being high, then you're gonna start to lower copper. And that is not good for you, okay? These two minerals interact with one another. You don't want to lower your copper. Copper is really important. It helps your blood cells, red blood cells, carry oxygen around. And that's a pretty important thing. So, copper is really important. Most people don't take copper as a supplement because no one thinks about it, really. Good. And, you know, that's a good thing, probably, because you can become copper toxic. So, you only want to take copper if you know you need copper, okay? And if you do a test like this, you'll be able to see. And sometimes people are low in zinc, their copper is normal. Sometimes people are low in copper and their zinc is normal. And sometimes, you know, people are low in zinc and copper. You can't really tell. You have to do the test. You can't just look at somebody and tell if they're low in zinc or not, okay?
So, if you are low in zinc, again, six months to a year to bring the zinc levels up, but you don't want to be on it for too long, okay? So, let's go look at that's the lab part of this. So, let's go look at how this all relates to immunity here. And I've got a bunch of different immune slides that I just want to show just for talking points. So, innate immunity, right? And adaptive immunity. And you can see on this slide, you're looking at all the different ways that zinc deficiency interferes with your immune system. I'm a cool slide. So, here's a normal immune system on the left, and then a zinc deficient immune system on the right. And they're trying to show you, and we're not going to memorize all this, this is not a physiology class, obviously, but just so you can kind of get familiar with some of these terms, and it's not too hard to see this. They've got the diagrams laid out pretty well here. So, in the, on the to, to start this whole thing off, right? You've got the infection agent, that's the bad thing, right? And then you can see what they've done is highlighted in red all the parts of the immune system that zinc is directly involved in. And let's just not get into what each one of these interleukin things is or T cells or B cells or whatever. You're not to get into the detail, but you can see zinc is important all around here, right? And it's important for you to be able to make this attack. And it's not just that zinc is important in one part of this process, zinc is important in many, many parts of the immune response. And so, we just have to kind of, you know, be aware of that, all right? Super important, super, super important.
And I'll show you a little bit more detail here about what these terms mean. And I'm sure you'd be hearing these more and more as time goes on. So, we have this idea of innate immunity and adaptive immunity. So, innate immunity is your rapid response team. I don't like your Navy SEALs, like your SWAT team. It's like the people that are first on to the first responders, we call them now, right? That's your innate immunity. And there's, there's different names here again, natural killer cells, macrophages, neutrophils, you see, I don't finnaly, CNO fills, you basophils. You get these, some of these you'll see on the standard blood work you do with a regular doctor. And then there's adaptive immunity. It's adapting, it's a little slower, right? And these have other fancy names, B cells, T cells, CD4 cells, CD8, all these different fancy names, okay? And there's some overlap between them. And why this is so important is because your adaptive immunity, well, your innate immunity makes that first attempt to kill things. So, you want that innate immunity in really good shape, right? If you're, you want your reverse responders to be good at what they do, right? And then adaptive immunity is where your body is starting to make antibodies against whatever the infection is. That's your body ramping up production to try to fight this thing, okay? So, you want both sides of your immune system to be in good shape.
And you'll see, this is a nice slide here that just shows you time after infection. So, let me make this smaller here. So, in an innate immunity, again, that's the early responder, right? Within hours after an infection, your body's mobilizing innate immunity. And then within days after an infection, your body's mobilizing the adaptive immunity, and you're starting to make antibodies against whatever the organism is, okay? So, you want to be able to do all these things. But what's really important is your first line of defense against the microbes, these epithelial barriers I talked about in my first talk, that secretory IgA has a lot to do with that mucosal barrier and protecting us from the microbe in the first place, all right? And then the strength of the innate immunity is going to determine whether you win in the first round or lose in the first round. You could have a mild illness if your innate immunity is quite strong, and that you allow your body for your adaptive immunity that then kick in. And if both these systems are a good shape, then you'll be someone who gets mildly sick, right? And the things that undermine these different aspects of our health are a problem.
So, again, we just kind of summarize. Here's a little thing to reeve to you about the different kinds of immunity. Mucus is divided into two categories: innate and adaptive. Innate immunity refers to non-specific defense mechanisms that come into play immediately or within an hour of an antigen and answering in this bad guys, the bug, antigens appearance in the body. These mechanisms include physical barriers that see mucosal tissue, mucosal barrier, right? And immune cells that attack foreign cells in the body. The innate immune response is activated by the chemical properties of the bug. Okay? Adaptive immunity, a little different, refers to antigen-specific immune response. The adaptive immune response is more complex than innate. The antigen must be first processed and recognized. Once the antigen is recognized, the adaptive immune system makes an army of immune cells designed to attack that antigen. Adaptive immunity is also also includes a memory that makes future responses against the specific bug more efficient. So, when you hear about antibodies or antibody testing, your immune system makes antibodies to kill these bugs, and those antibodies can stay in your body for a long period of time, okay? There's also what we call PCR testing, which is being done for the COVID virus. That's looking to see if the virus is actively in your body at that time causing an infection. The antibody test is looking at your after community to see if you have antibodies against that bug that would imply that either you have it right now, or that you had it before and you got rid of it, okay? So, again, the PCR testing tells you you have the bug right now and you could potentially infect someone else. The antibody test tells you that either you have it now, or you had it before. And the antibody testing is now becoming widely available in the United States. And we have access to those tests. I'm going to start having access to those tests on Monday. Let's see, a little behind schedule here with the testing, but we're catching up, okay?
So, we talked about innate immunity, the bigger picture. And again, I just want to emphasize that what's the most important thing is just to establish a normal immune function. You don't need extra zinc. You just need the right amount of zinc. You don't need extra vitamin D. Just need a healthy amount of vitamin D. But most people that we run these labs on are low in zinc and low in vitamin D, right? Many of us are. Most everybody that I test is nutrient deficient. And so, we're prone to picking out problems because we're not really figuring all that stuff out.
So, let me talk a little bit more about zinc and then we'll move on to vitamin D. I've got some zinc articles I pulled here. Yeah, so here's an A B search study from a few years ago, Zinc and its role in immunity and inflammation. And just so you know, you can look these things up too. You know, PubMed is open to the public. Most of these articles, you can at least read the summaries for free. Sometimes they'll charge you, you know, to read the entire article. But, you know, if you look in the scientific literature, it's quite interesting. You can start to read about these things. It's not like these are new ideas. So, I'm gonna read a little bit about zinc. And now that we've talked about the different kinds of immunity, this should make a little bit of sense, okay? I'm gonna skip around because that this article is not obviously about just the general ideas about zinc. Is when I couldn't make it here. So, again, this is an article, Zinc and its role in immunity and inflammation, from the journal Autoimmunity Reviews, 2015. So, zinc, nutritional zinc, nutritional importance has been known for a long time. But the last decades, its importance in immune modulation has arisen. This review aims at describing the mechanisms involved in the regulation of zinc homeostasis and their effects on the immune system. And this is related to arthritis, but there's some things in here that are important. Zinc deficiency affects cells involved in both innate and adaptive immunity at the survival, peripheral iteration, and maturation levels. These cells include monocytes, natural killers, T and B cells, right? Does all the songs we just looked at? So, zinc is involved in all aspects of these immune functions. And you can measure your zinc levels in time, you know, tell if you're low. And say, okay, so this link is important. And there's literally thousands and thousands and thousands of studies on zinc and immune function. I'm showing you, I think, like two or three just to get you kind of open to the concept. Like, literally thousands. There's more than any human being could ever read. You can spend your whole life trying to read about zinc and you would die before you were through, okay? This is too many articles.
So, this is from an American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Zinc and Immune Function: The Biological Basis of Altered Resistance to Infection. What a great title. Zinc is known to play a central role in immune system. Zinc deficient persons experience increased susceptibility to a variety of pathogens. That's not what we want, right? Zinc deficient persons experience increased susceptibility to a variety of pathogens. And, you know, I don't think this will ever happen, but if we just could magically test the zinc levels of every American and put everyone who is low on zinc on a high dose of zinc, that would probably change the outcome of immune function in America, right? I'm not saying that's gonna happen, but that would be pretty cool if it did. So, zinc affects multiple aspects of the immune system from the barrier of the skin to gene regulation within lymphocytes. Those are some of the immune cells. Zinc is crucial for normal development and function of cells mediating non-specific community, including neutrophils and natural killer cells. Zinc deficiency also affects the development of acquired immunity, okay? By preventing both the outgrowth and certain functions of T lymphocytes. And they've got some fancy names here, we won't get into that, okay? And then zinc also functions as an antioxidant, can stabilize membranes. This review explores these aspects of zinc biology of the immune system and to provide a biological basis for the altered host resistance to infections observed during zinc deficiency. So, in other words, when you're looking at an infection, you can think about trying to kill the virus, kill the bacteria, kill the parasite, or you can think about strengthening the host. What they call strengthening host resistance. Zinc is something that would strengthen host resistance, right?
And then when we look at, I think that was, yeah, there's another image here, how zinc affects housing deficiency affects the immune system, okay? So, again, we're looking at the same basic framework here, where we've got zinc deficiency interfering with thymic or T-cells, right? Also, as we saw in the second one, B cells and other aspects of your immune system, and making it so that your immune system is weak. And if you're deficient in zinc, it's pretty hard to get it from eating zinc-rich foods. But let me show you one more time here. Now that maybe this would make a little bit more sense. Now we come back to the one that we started at. And you started to get familiar with some of these terms. We're all going to learn all these names in the next couple years anyway, so you might as well learn them now. So, T cells, B cells, lymphocytes, right? What we're talking about with zinc is that it's involved in many, many of the different roles. It doesn't just have one role, it plays many roles in the functioning of our immune system. And if your zinc levels are low, you can be in trouble. You take too much zinc, remember, you can have a copper problem, okay? So, it's not, you don't want to just take it forever. And by the way, zinc is sold out like worldwide. There's every zinc supplement just got bought by somebody in the last month or two. So, you can't even buy zinc right now, anyways. But, um, which is probably not a bad thing, cuz I'm a whole test before you guess, before you take stuff, kind of person, right? So, I want you to know about these things, but be careful. And if you do have zinc and they're taking zinc, just don't take it for more than, I don't know, maybe six months, because you eventually, if you take it, if you take it for too long, you're gonna end up lowering your copper. So, if you have zinc and you're worried about your immune system, let's say maybe six months. Membranes in six months, they can go. Let me show you here. In six months, you can go one quintile to the right. So, let me show you what I said that. So, if your zinc levels are normal right now and you take zinc for six months because you're worried about getting sick, you'll boost your zinc up to here, but it's not gonna go super high, right? If you took zinc for a year, you would go here and then you would go extra high, and that would be bad. And if you take zinc for too long, you lower copper, and then your red blood cells can't carry oxygen, and that's really bad for your lungs, right? So, you don't want to do that. So, if your hearings and on zinc, you need it for six months or a year just to get up to normal. If you're here with your zinc, you need it for six months to get to normal, right? So, if you're already at good levels of zinc and you took it for a year, you'd get too high. So, logic there stands. If you got some zinc and you don't want to do a test yet, then maybe take it for six months, but not much longer, okay? Cuz you don't want to go high and you don't want to lower your copper. All right. I don't think zinc is particularly toxic if it goes high. It's more than that, it lowers your copper. That's the problem. But it's a very, very important immune nutrient. So, we don't want to ignore that.
Let me see. Take an emotional break here. Have a sip of water. Let's talk about fatty acid. I'm not going in any kind of order because I've been putting these presentations together like the hour before. Where the assets here, I think you're down at the bottom. Oh, yeah. So, let me show you another really important nutrient. And I'll show you the test first again. The test costs $600. We do those with patients all over the world. If you want to be a patient, go to the Cancer Institute, Kalish, Kalish Wellness dot com and sign up. Everything I do is over the phone, so you don't have to worry.
So, again, on a Genova ion panel, they measure fatty acids. And that the classic classifications of fatty acids that are measured are some of these. You may have heard of Omega-3 and Omega-6. So, the Omega-3s include ALA or alpha-linolenic. This one is EPA or two, usually you see it on the label if you say EPA, it's the type of fish oil omega-3. DHA, also usually sold as a supplement, you know, say on the label, you know, omega-3 fish oil or something like that. So, the omega-3s are really important. You can see this person is quite low in the omega-3s. And then we also have the omega-6s. And the most famous omega-6 is called GLA, gamma-linolenic. KG LA, and that's usually sold as primrose oil, borage oil, or borage oil. Sometimes people pronounce it an omega-6, okay? And out of all these, we want to really start to focus a lot of our attention on arachidonic or arachidonic acid. So, arachidonic is an omega-6. And arachidonic is responsible for many very important immune functions. And arachidonic is responsible for many important anti-inflammatory or inflammatory functions. If arachidonic is high, we're gonna be inflamed and not very good, alright? And you don't want to be in walking around being inflamed right now because if you're already in an inflammatory state and you get this viral infection, that is gonna put you at risk, okay? So, you want your inflammation to be low, low normal. And arachidonic, when it's high, indicates that the person is losing the battle against inflammation. That they're walking around inflamed. And you want to be uninflamed when you walk around, okay? And omega-3s are also famous when they're low from leading to problems with inflammation. So, when you take omega-3s, they have an anti-inflammatory or protective effect. In the anti-inflammatory or protective effect. And if arachidonic is too high, you want to bring it down. And I'll show you some examples of why.
So, again, you can test for all these things. You know, tests don't guess. Now, if your omega-3 is low, E, and you're vegan, you don't want to eat animal products. So, that's fine. You can do it with, as the picture shows, nuts and seeds, cashews, walnuts, hemp seeds, chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, you know, all these good foods have the omega-3s. So, you don't have to use animal products. What most people do with omega-3s is they can think about fish. And they have fish a few times a week. Fish has mercury. Fish is not always the greatest. You have to get clean fish if you can. But if you want to get, you know, again, omega-3s, you can get them from plants. You can get them from animal products, especially fish. But nuts and seeds also have them, okay? So, that's where the omega-3s come from in our diet. The famous ones again, chia seeds, hemp seeds. And the famous of all, the best of all, the most, you know, just anti-inflammatory omega-3 you could possibly imagine is called flax seed. In a normal world, you know, flax seed production should be completely sold out right now because this guy right here, flax seeds. The ones that I buy are a little more brown, but I think those are just a lighter color flax. Flax seeds are really, really, really, really, really important as an anti-inflammatory, okay? Here's another example of omega-6s. Flax seeds, your walnuts, your avocado. All these are omega-6s, okay?
So, why is this so important? Let's talk about how do these relate to your immune system? Well, remember that a lot of why people are dying right now is cuz of what they call comorbidities, high blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease problems, right? And general, these people, or obesity in general, these people are inflamed. They're overly inflamed. And so, when they get the virus or a virus, they're not very well suited to deal with it, and they're at higher risk for having really catastrophic problems. So, one of the ways you can protect yourself is to uninflame. Oh, make a threes are probably the, you know, top, top, top category of ways that you can get inflammation out of your body. And you can do with this with food, right? So, flaxseed, fish, try to get fish that doesn't have a lot of mercury. And you're thinking about the omega-3 side of this, right? And that's super important, okay? And they're also are supplements you can get that do the same exact thing. In fact, I just bought a half a dozen bottles of omega-3s and brought them to my mom because I don't want her to die from COVID. And then she's on a really great nutritional program, taking all this stuff right now. We should do that. I should, I should promote that after the way I've been, or like, Dan's mom's supplement program. Anyways, I bought her a box of stuff. It was kind of funny because she's, she lives in this senior apartment housing thing, you know, she has a studio apartment. And it was really funny because she comes out, she's like, Danny, I'll meet you on the corner, you know, because they're in lockdown, right? Well, I'm gonna tell you the whole story. So, a few weeks ago, this thing hit, and I called the Senior Center where my mom lives. And I told him, look, you're gonna see the biggest lawsuit in the entire planet. And I'll probably like bomb the place if you don't lock this place down. My mom saying people are coming in and out. I just totally threatened these people that day. They shut down the senior apartment unit. They forbid any visitors from coming in. They stopped the cafeteria area where they have meal service. They're feeding everybody in the rooms, anyways. They're very responsive to an outright threat, which is great. So, mom's totally safe there, but she's kind of locked up in her studio apartment. So, she's like, and I needed to get her her supplement. She's like, don't leave him with the front desk because if they do, then they're gonna like clean up, you know? So, I said, okay. So, she's like, I'll meet you outside. So, she like stealthily sneaks out of her senior place. And I'm, it's just an apartment building, right? It's not like a hospital or anything. But she gets out of her apartment and we meet on the corner. And I pull up and then I get out, it's like a paper bag and it has all her supplements in it. And she's like looking around like it's some, you know, spy movie or something. She's putting them in her backpack, shuffles back over to her apartment. But anyways, yeah, so mom's on omega-3. This is really important, right? You don't want to mess around with this kind of stuff.
Oh, make it six. Now, here's where things get a little interesting. Remember now, most the, the sort of dogma upon about the fatty acids is that the American diet has too many omega-6s and not enough omega-3s, which is why we're all so inflamed, which is why they're part of the side effect or relation to things like diabetes, obesity, etc. And so, the idea being, you take omega-3s to balance that out because the American diet is full of omega-6s. Okay? Now, omega-6 is linoleic and arachidonic. When they're high, when arachidonic is high, remember we talked about that earlier, that is catastrophic because arachidonic produces these pro-inflammatory compounds, eicosanoids, prostaglandins, leukotrienes, thromboxanes. High levels of these means you're highly inflamed. And they come from high arachidonic acid. So, higher arachidonic acid means high inflammatory markers, right? High eicosanoids, high prostaglandins, high leukotrienes, high thromboxanes. That is bad. That means you're really, really inflamed. So, the general off-the-shelf solution to that is to take omega-3s and to reduce your omega-6s from your diet. That's like, don't have a lot of corn oil and vegetable oil stuff like that, okay? Get off your processed foods generally. And don't eat too much meat. Some meat is fine, but, you know, don't eat a steak three times a day. And don't have tons of corn oil, right? Boy. And get into your vegetables and your fruits and your nuts and seeds and all the healthier foods that don't have these inflammatory responses, okay? So, that is sort of natural health 101. Omega-3 is good, omega-6 bad. Omega-6 is lead to arachidonic and high arachidonic is problem, alright?
So, however, well, on this look cases. So, here's a case of a test that I did recently on a patient, and his omega-3s were low. So, again, six months of omega-3 supplementation will bring him up. And what's that going to do? Reduce inflammation? Is that immune-boosting? Absolutely not. That's like normalizing your omega-3s. Does it boost your immune system? Well, yeah, of course, it normalizes it, though, right? It's not like a, it's just where it's just making your immune system work properly, okay? And a lot of us have these omega-3 deficiencies, which means our immune system is inherently weak, and we're gonna be inflamed as a result of that, okay? Now, what you can also see in this, I'll just make up some numbers here because we don't take too much time to find all the different labs, but you can have high arachidonic. And remember, we said that was bad because that means you're very inflamed. You can also, in some cases, have low arachidonic because you don't have enough omega-6s. So, it's not like always one thing. And isn't it just like life? There's, you get older, you realize that it's just a gray area. All of life is just like one big gray area. I still remember when I was nine or ten years old, something happened that was profoundly unjust. I don't remember. I think my bike got stolen or, oh no, my dad said I couldn't buy something or I don't know. And I was just like, oh, it's not fair, it's not fair. And I just remember my dad saying, life isn't fair. And just looking at me like, you got a long way to go, can't figure this out, you know? My gosh, yeah. Life is gray areas. And life is not fair.
So, here's another example of the threes and sixes. So, the threes are, there's fish oils and flax oil. The sixes are the vegetable oils. And this is a kind of a complicated chart, but you should know a little bit about how this works. Your body may, you know, converts the threes one to the other to the other to the other. It makes one from the other to the other to the other. It takes the sixes and can make them down these pathways. In order for these pathways of production to work in your body, you have these enzymes called desaturase enzymes. So, what happens is the enzyme takes this one fat and GGG networks, this little magic on it, it makes the next fat. And then as this enzyme does a little magic, it makes the next fat. And your body, it's pretty amazing, you can even do this, right? And so, when you take a lot of omega-3s, you're going to be using a lot of these enzymes to make these other fats. And the body preferentially converts omega-3s. So, if you take a ton of omega-3s for too long, guess what happens to these enzymes on the omega-6 side? They get reduced. They don't have as much of an impact because all the enzymatic action is going over to the omega-3s. Now, if you're high in arachidonic and you're inflamed, this is a good thing, right? Because you're reducing your, here's your arachidonic, you're reducing your arachidonic, okay? So, fish oils will hog all these enzymes and they'll make you less inflamed because they're anti-inflammatory. And also because they'll help break up the overproduction of arachidonic because the enzymes are going to be hugged on this system side and you won't have as much enzymes over here. However, if you take fish oils for too long or too much, then you get all these enzymes working on this side and you won't have enough of the good omega-6s, okay? So, it's not, it's a black, and it's not a black and white issue. It's not like threes are bad and sixes, I'm, it's not like threes are good and sixes are bad. It's the balance of them that matters. And when you do the lab testing, you can dial in the balance. Now, this particular person had decent omega-6s and really low threes. So, this person could take omega-3s for a year and be healthier and healthier each year that they did that. I mean, each month that they did that, okay?
So, quick review. Threes and sixes. Threes in general are considered anti-inflammatory, but you can take too much of them. Would take probably six months or a year to get too much of them. And sixes can be dangerous, especially arachidonic acid, because it's pro-inflammatory. And this is what everyone needs to avoid. Now, we all want to be not inflamed, right? So, we want to balance this out. However, as I try to show with the lab, there's a balance between these. And there are some people that are low in sixes. Let me just show you one example of that, so you can see I'm not making this stuff up, just in case you're wondering. Here, here's another a test. This one is a woman. Here we go. Omega-3 low. Mm-hmm. You guys getting, uh, figuring this out now, right? It's a little fish or fish oils, need some flax. You do it. Flax. You want to be all vegan, just do the flax. But, oh, wait a minute. Low omega-6. Look, low, low, low arachidonic. Low. Remember we said high arachidonic is inflamed, dangerous. Low arachidonic, not good either. So, this person needs to get a little bit of omega-6 cautiously to bring up the levels, okay? Now, obviously, you don't want to take omega-6 fats unless you know you need them. But if you need them, you want them, okay? So, let me show you some other reasons why these are important. Here's more information on the fatty acids. They help with balancing your lipids or fats, obviously. They help with your blood vessels. A lot of people take them to help prevent cardiovascular disease. They help with platelets, cardiovascular health, mitochondrial function, all kinds of stuff, right? Another diagram here, just to show you about the arachidonic and how that can be dangerous. And not to get into the detail here, but let's just say arachidonic is in the middle, right? And you can see everything that comes from there, prostaglandins, how it regulates kidneys, brain, your vascular system, your muscle cells, your mast cells, right? All these different things are regulated by arachidonic. So, you want that arachidonic to be normal. You want these prostaglandins to be normal. That's how we regulate a lot of stuff that has to do with inflammation. Again, here's nothing just to show you. Or academic, it's on the top right. That means it's super important. It's doing all these other things. Anti-inflammation. This is what we want. Protection of mucosa. Okay? This is what we want, right? We want to protect ourselves and keep from being inflamed. So, that's super important.
So, then we go back up and think, okay, well, you could take omega-3 supplements. Don't take them for too long. Kind of like the zinc problem. Let me show you here from the lab. I'm sorry, I just think in terms of labs. I don't know. It's just so used to look at these reports. But let's say that, um, it's a bad example. Let's use this one. So, let's say that you take omega-3s. Let's say here, omega-3s are low. When you take them for six months, that's fine. A year, pretty good. But don't take them forever, right? If you take them for too long at too high a dose, you're gonna lower your omega-6s. Remember I showed you the enzyme thing? The enzyme kind of pulls over to one side. And the sixes will end up becoming low. In the beginning, when you're inflamed, that's a good thing. But if you do that for too long, it can mess you up, right? So, in the beginning, if you're lower, let's say your arachidonic is high and you're really inflamed, omega-3s will go up, arachidonic will go down, and that's good, okay? But after six months or a year, you can get yourself into trouble. So, if you take the six, if you take the threes, let's say for three years in a high dose, and all your threes are super high, you might start to lower your sixes too much. And that's not healthy either, okay? So, there's a balance there. How long could you take the threes? Since probably like the zinc, it's probably, I would guess, like six months. Or let's say that you're here, you know, and you take him for six months, you take him for a year, maybe towards the end of a year, you're gonna start to get levels maybe a little too high, you know? So, yeah, six months to a year, you could probably take fish oils without having to worry about it. I'm obviously, I'm an advocate of doing the testing so you know exactly what's going on.
All right, emotional break here for water. You know, just when you think you have problems, you know, like I thought my biggest problem a couple months ago is that I had to take my car in for the like 30,000 mile checkup and I was five thousand miles late and I was all stressed about that, you know? And now I'm worried about like entire continents of people dying. How did that happen? I don't know. It's so crazy. All right, okay. One more thing. If you guys are up for it, I know this is a lot. One more subject area here before we wrap up. And that is everybody's favorite, vitamin D. So, let's just start off with a nice little scientific article here. Vitamin D and Protective Immunity. I thought this was really interesting. Let me, let me show you this. Some, I love historical medical stuff. So, this is an article, Vitamin D and the Immune System, for the Journal of Investigative Medicine. And it's talking about vitamin D in the immune system. That's what the article is called, right? So, it is now clear why vitamin D has important roles in addition to its classic effects on calcium and bone balance, right? As the vitamin D receptor is expressed on immune cells. Remember, we just saw these B cells, T cells, right? And so, vitamin D receptor is expressed on immune cells. And these immunologic cells are capable of synthesizing the active vitamin D metabolites. Vitamin D has the capacity or capability of acting in a local immune fashion. I'm kind of summarizing that. Vitamin D can modulate. And we talked about different types of immune function. Vitamin D can modulate the innate and adaptive immune responses. Let me say that again. It's just like zinc. Vitamin D and zinc can modulate. That means improve, normalize, regulate the innate and adaptive immune responses. So, vitamin C and vitamin, vitamin D and zinc can modulate. That means control or regulate the innate. That's that immune response that happens right away. So, you get exposed to a virus, your immune, your innate immune response jumps in within minutes or hours. Vitamin D modulates that. It controls it, regulates it. So, it is zinc. Do you want a really strong innate immune system? Absolutely. Because then when you get exposed to the virus, your body fights it off, and you'll be one of those people that, yeah, I got it, but it wasn't that bad. Okay? If your innate immune system is engaged, then you need the adaptive immune response to be engaged as well. That's where you start to make these antibodies to kill the virus. Do you want that really strong? Yes, you do. Vitamin D and zinc also have roles in the adaptive immune response, okay? So, what you're saying here is vitamin D and zinc, we saw earlier, modulate or control or regulate or improve, strengthen the innate and adaptive immune responses, both. Now, can you measure vitamin D? Absolutely. Do you need more D than you, you know, me? Can you become toxic in D? Yeah, absolutely. You can get too much of it, for sure.
Let's look at this person's vitamin D levels. But that is not good. Vitamin D is 30 on this individual. You want your vitamin D between a 50 and a 70. Okay? High vitamin D above 100 is not good for you. You want it between 50 and 70. You have to test. And I'll just look at the other one here. I've just got two labs up, but that's just just for fun, okay? This other person, oh, very good. How's their vitamin D? Not that great either. 28. Alright. Does this person have good innate immunity? No. So, this person have good adaptive immunity? No. Let's just look at a few others, just so, just for fun, just because we can. I don't know. I've always thought that stuff was interesting ever since I was a kid. I thought physiology was pretty cool. But now it seems a little more important than before. Oh, this person has good vitamin D. Look, 73. That's like healthy. What does that mean? In terms of vitamin D regulating innate immunity and adaptive immunity? This person is in good shape. They don't need to take vitamin D. They don't need to take it. Let's look at one more, if we can, here, just for fun. You guys can see how this stuff really works. It's not that complicated, is it? 50 indeed, 43. But not great. So, a little bit of a tune-up, right? We saw somebody had a 20, someone had a 30, some of the 40s, one has a 70. You know, you really want to have good vitamin D. So, now.
Here's the really cool thing about this article. And I'm reading this article the other day, and let's see, the immune system, the body from foreign invading organisms, blah, blah, blah. Implications of vitamin D deficiency on the immune system had become clear in recent years. But here's where it gets really interesting. Vitamin D has been used unknowingly to treat infections such as tuberculosis before the advent of effective antibiotics.
Okay, so let's just take a deep breath here and remember back to the day when you could get tuberculosis and they didn't have any antibiotics. Does that sound familiar? You could get a virus and there's no known treatment, right now there's no antiviral. So there was a time, not that long ago, where doctors were faced with this issue: tuberculosis and no effective antibiotics. Very similar to the time we're in now. And what did they do? Read on. Tubercular super-colossus patients were sent to sanatoriums where treatment included exposure to sunlight. Where treatment included exposure to sunlight, which was thought to directly kill the tuberculosis. Cod liver oil, a rich source of vitamin D, has also been employed as a treatment for TB as well. So, in other words, back before we had these antibiotics, doctors knew there's something about sunlight that made TB patients get better. And part of it was that the sunlight brought up their vitamin D, right? And everybody has heard that before, vitamin D is a sunshine vitamin. Although you'll find that a lot of people that have, I test people that live in Florida, I live in Hawaii, living very sunlight-rich environments that are still low in vitamin D. Okay, so you still have to test even if you live somewhere where it's sunny and you're outside all the time in a short-sleeve shirt and shorts. You still have to test your vitamin D. But the point is that there's been times in the past when people were fighting infections that they couldn't treat. The doctors were treating infections they'd had no medications for. They stuck these people outside, right? And they got better. Part of that because of the vitamin D. Fascinating. I thought.
Influent, another paper here from the, a journal. It's an older one, 2006, Epidemiology Infectious Disease Journal. Epidemic flu and vitamin D. Oh yeah. Now this one's interesting too. In 1981, R. Edgar Hope-Simpson proposed that a seasonal stimulus intimately associated with solar radiation explained the remarkable seasonality of epidemic influenza. So I think what they're trying to say there, everyone, for that in English, is that people get the flu really bad in the winter season. One way. And what the heck's going on? And Edgar is thinking, hey, people, it's solar radiation. That's a little weird. Solar radiation triggers robust seasonal vitamin D production in the skin. But you know that maybe there's something to that, right? It's kind of a little crazy sounding. But you think about it, when it's winter, if you already have low vitamin D levels and you're not getting a lot of sunlight, your vitamin D is gonna drop even more. And that innate immunity and adaptive immunity, it's gonna be compromised because of that. All right.
So let's see. I think that's it on the vitamin D and vitamin D maybe. Oh, here I had a link to this thing I want to show you too. I forget what this was now, but let me try to pull it up and then we're gonna wrap up in one more minute. Okay? And I'll see if there are any questions. I'll try to answer them. Oh, here it is. Oh yeah, this is just a link to the entire article. That's it. This was pretty interesting. I read this this morning. I think. Yeah. And again, these are all like published in medical journals or available online. You know, as long as you start to have understanding. Oh yeah, here. And this is, see, this is like scientifically gobbledygook stuff. But look, vitamin D has numerous effects on cells in the immune system. It inhabits, inhibits B cell proliferation, blocks B cell differentiation, vitamin D suppresses T cells, results in the da da do that, right? Anyways, it's involved in tons of different aspects of immune function, just like zinc. Remember, not just one little place. It's involved in a lot of different ways. Effects of vitamin D on all these different cells that make up your immune system. And if you're low in vitamin D, you can't do this. Okay?
So what does that mean really? It's like if you have, let's say you, you bought a 2001 S600 Mercedes. Not that I love those cars, but let's say you did buy one. They're the kind of cars that you see like foreign dictators driving around in black armored cars, you know, to put their Mercedes. They're really fast. They have like a V12 engine. They go really fast. So let's say you have like the most beautiful 2001 Mercedes S600 ever made, spent $150,000 on it years and years ago, and you have no gasoline. Is it abused? Not really. It's gonna sit there, right? So your immune system without D, your immune system without zinc, your immune system without the omega-3s and 6s balanced out, it's like a car without gasoline. It just doesn't work. So when we're talking about boosting the immune system or supercharging the immune system or making your immune system strong, all we're talking about really having to do is creating normal physiology and normal balance, right? Testing and correcting your vitamin D. Now, we don't even talk about this other one. You know, it's equally important. Testing and correcting your vitamin A. A is as important as D. Testing and correcting your zinc. Getting your omega-3s and 6s balanced out. That's all you really need to do to restore a very robust immune system. So it's not like we have to boost our immune systems. We want to get out of that mindset. You just want to normalize your function and normalize your physiology. And you can do that by taking these supplements if you want. Don't do it. You know, most of these probably don't take for more than six months. Or you can contact the office, schedule a consult, and do some testing and see exactly what you're low in. And so when I'm trying to do now for the rest of the year is design the ultimate immune programs, like I did for my mom, that are based on lab data. So we know exactly what you're taking and why. And at the end of six months or a year, we can test again and make sure that your levels are good, right? And that it's not, it's what they say, test don't guess. The test, test, and test and make sure that everyone has a robust immune system, both innate immunity and adaptive immunity, you know, maxed out and functioning like it should.
All right, let me see if there are any questions. And yes, we will. Yep, this is recorded and we'll send out a copy of it. Let's see. Yeah, let me show you here. We'll show you the website real quick here in one second. If you want to get in touch with the office, go to Kalishwellness.com and you can click "Start Here." You can schedule a consult with our coach. And we have this thing going now. I can show you here. Well, let's see. What about vitamin C? Yeah, I wanted to, vitamin C and quercetin. And there's a bunch of, when I wanted to start with though, I thought is the, um, the things that you can test for, you know, as the initial round of what we're doing here. And then move on to other things that are just important for your immune system, you know, that's hard to test for. Yeah. So we also have our health coach Jennifer. You can call and schedule a free consult with her, see if you're an appropriate candidate for becoming a patient. Okay? And everything I do is over the phone, telemedicine. So you don't have to go anywhere, travel. We just ship the lab kits directly to your house, believe it or not. Do the samples at home, ship them back to the lab. And then we get on the phone and talk about anything, right? Okay. So we'll talk again. The next one of these. If you guys are safe out there. Talk next time.