Transcription
You know, if you personally have an autoimmune disease, or you know someone who has an autoimmune disease, this video is so vitally important. And I think many times people give you advice on what to do, or even doctors or videos tell you what to do, based on maybe a study. You know, you hear a study that says, "Well, if you do this, your risk for autoimmune disease decreases by 50% or whatever." Well, that's cool, but I want to know why. And this video is all about why. And it's about the pathophysiology, or the mechanism of how this disease is created. And it has everything to do with several factors, but a vitamin D deficiency is at the heart of this problem. In fact, some will say you can't even get an autoimmune disease unless you first have some type of vitamin D deficiency in the first place, which is fascinating.
An autoimmune disorder involves this perfect storm of various things that must occur at the same time. A vitamin D deficiency, that would be number one. Number two, it's usually triggered by maybe a virus, or a bacteria, or another pathogen. You can be exposed to something weakening your immune system, like a vaccine. You can also be exposed to stress, and the worse stress is losses. That's why there's a huge connection between people who have losses and then developing an autoimmune disease. And we also know a big part of this originates in your gut because your diet's not right, that triggered the whole mechanism. And as an additional thing, you can have a genetic weakness or susceptibility to autoimmune diseases in general, or you could have a genetic weakness with either the absorption of vitamin D or the conversion of the inactive vitamin D to the active vitamin D, which is very applicable to me because I found out I have that problem. I have a hard time converting the inactive vitamin D to the active form, which explains a lot of my history of having all sorts of inflammatory conditions. But thank goodness, I know enough to keep my lifestyle in check to prevent certain genes from kicking in. And that's really cool about this topic of epigenetics. If you really understand epigenetics, which I am including more and more in my videos, boy, even though you have certain genes that make you susceptible to all these conditions, you personally can prevent all these conditions from occurring. You can keep these genes turned off 100%. And all it takes is some knowledge, and that's what this video is all about. So it's the vitamin D deficiency that is the most important thing in relationship to autoimmune diseases.
Now, there are many barriers to getting vitamin D that go beyond just the genetic one that I just recently found out I have. If you're obese, you're gonna have problems absorbing vitamin D. If you have insulin resistance, okay, you're gonna have a hard time absorbing vitamin D. If your skin is a little bit darker, you're going to need more vitamin D to break through that barrier. And during the winter, you're not going to get vitamin D where you're inside all the time. It's becoming more and more difficult to get vitamin D, not to mention as you age, your skin becomes thicker and you don't get enough vitamin D.
Alright, so what is this relationship between vitamin D and your immune system being overactive? When you think about an autoimmune disease, you think about some crazy immune response that your body is attacking itself. It's generating antibodies, that means certain immune cells that are against your own tissue, which is insane. Why would your body do that? There must be some massive confusion. Well, when we talk about vitamin D, what's unique about vitamin D is that it controls your very complex immune system. It can either increase or boost, or decrease or suppress certain parts of the immune system. And when you think about vitamin D suppressing the immune system, you might automatically think, "Wow, I don't want to do that because that's going to weaken my immune system." Well, just hear me out, because I've never met anyone who had a weakened immune system by taking vitamin D, and you're going to learn exactly why.
Now, to explain this, I do want to bring up some new terms for you, but I'm going to define them. So don't click off because I'm getting too tactical, but I think it's really important for you to understand this. So in an autoimmune situation where you have this inflammation, and inflammation is the hallmark of autoimmune, this is why the number one selling drug on the planet is an anti-inflammatory. And that just means a lot of people have autoimmune diseases as well as inflammatory diseases. So when you have this immune inflammation, there are several things that are turned on, okay? And the first one I want to talk about is something called NF-kB. And without getting technical, this is something that triggers a lot of inflammation, and it's part of the immune system defense mechanism. See, inflammation is there to help you, well, in theory anyway. And so anytime you have an infection, anytime you have an autoimmune disease, you have this NF-kB thing in active mode. It's always turned on. When you have an autoimmune disease, or you have a cancer, cancer tends to spread into areas of inflammation. Interesting. In fact, one of the new strategies for treating cancer is to block NF-kB. And this NF-kB is triggered by pathogens, heavy metals, stress, a few other things like oxidized LDL, which is kind of like the, this bad cholesterol that kind of can invade your arteries, that's just going to involve inflammation and cause like the plaque formation and a clot in your arteries. But what's interesting about that, they're finding more and more that the plaque in the arteries is biofilms filled with microbes. So what's probably happening is your immune system is trying to kill off the microbe, and that's why it's there.
Now, this NF-kB thing that's creating all this inflammation is coming from this big cell called the macrophage. And the macrophage is kind of like the first line of defense mechanism where it's going around and it's literally eating pathogens and cancer cells. And it's also signaling other parts of the immune system that turn on certain defense mechanisms, and one being inflammation. And so this NF-kB thing, um, it's kind of like the start of this whole immune process, right? You have this inflammation, but then there's a cascade of things that are going to happen next, and most of them involve more inflammation.
Okay, I'm not sure if you've ever heard of the term cytokine, but I do want to bring that up because that is part of this inflammatory process. Cytokines are signaling communication things that are involved with inflammation. And there's several different cytokines that I want to talk about because they directly relate to the topic at hand, which is vitamin D and all autoimmune diseases. And so, let me just first define another word, interleukin. Inter means as a means of communication, and Lucan basically is coming from a leukocyte, which is a white blood cell, or targeted at a leukocyte. So interleukin basically is this communication between white blood cells, okay? So that's all you need to know about that. And so there's many different types of interleukins. There's like, I think there's 50 different kinds. The two that I'm going to talk about are the interleukin or IL-1B, which very basically and simply is recruiting other parts of the immune system. It's like saying, "Hey, I need more help in this immune reaction." Okay? So that's what a IL or interleukin-1B does. And another one, which is an interesting one, which is IL or interleukin-6. This one also recruits more inflammation, more immune help. It's involved in something called C-reactive protein, another inflammatory protein. But what's interesting to me about this IL-6 is on my genetic test, I have a problem with this protein. Okay? My genetics show that I'm a hyper-responder. So when I have an immune reaction, I'm going to respond a lot worse than the average person, which is not good. But it's good that I know what to do about it. This also explains a lot that happened in my past. Like if I overtrain, I will end up with a lot of inflammation. If I eat poorly, I will just fill up with inflammation. If I get poison ivy, I will react way more than the average person.
But the cool thing, which is the whole point of this video, is that vitamin D turns this off. Okay? It just turns it off like a switch. And personally, because I don't convert vitamin D, I need to take vitamin D in much higher amounts than the average person, like at least 10 to 20,000 IUs, if not a little bit more per day. But of course, I don't have any autoimmune problems. So I don't need to take necessarily like 40 or 50,000 IUs, but 10 to 20,000 IUs is a good amount for me.
There's some other things that you can do to turn off this inflammatory process because if you have an autoimmune disease, you want to really have a multi-approach to this problem. So omega-3 fatty acids, cod liver oil, it's a must, very, very important as a natural anti-inflammatory. But omega-6 fatty acids compete with omega-3. So if you're just consuming omega-3 fatty acids and you're not eliminating the omega-6 fatty acids, it's not going to work. So you have to do both, okay? This means avoiding certain foods, going to restaurants, junk foods, cooking with omega-6 fatty acids like corn, canola, soy. Instead, you could do like olive oil, coconut oil, things like that, butter. But make sure you do a lot of omega-3 fatty acids.
Here's the um, confusion a lot of people have with omega-3 fatty acids. They think if they just take a little bit of it, it should knock out the inflammation really fast. Well, if you're deficient in omega-3 fatty acids and your ratios are not like a one to one, okay? Realize that a lot of people have like a ratio of like 26 omega-6 to 1 omega-3, which they're so far out of balance, it's going to take months, if not a few years, to re-establish in your immune system, in your nervous system, enough of the omega-3. So you just need to make it part of your new lifestyle and just include it as a regular thing, like a couple tablespoons, or if you get them in capsules, you know, take a good amount of that each day.
A couple other things you can do. Curcumin is really important, reducing inflammation. It's even found in blueberries. If you take a couple blueberries a day, you can actually decrease this interleukin-6. There's another cytokine that I want to talk about, okay? And this is an interesting thing because it's called a tumor necrosis factor. Basically, it's this immune protein that destroys tumors, okay? And viruses. So as soon as the virus invades the cell, boy, this tumor necrosis factor kicks in there. And in the process, there's a lot of inflammation going on. And an autoimmune disease, you have a lot of this tumor necrosis factor being generated. And guess what? What if there's no pathogen? Like an autoimmune disease, like the pathogen is gone, you just have this immune reaction. Thank goodness, vitamin D is there to actually turn things off.
Now, the last cytokine I want to talk about is called COX-2. Now, maybe you've heard of COX inhibitors. Like aspirin is a COX inhibitor. It turns off this inflammatory signal in the body. And again, the original reason why you have this COX-2 is to help pathogens. It's like a defense mechanism. This is why with any reason you need aspirin, you could very easily just do higher amounts of vitamin D to turn it off. But there's some other really cool things you should know about to inhibit or stop this COX-2 reaction from happening. Maitake mushrooms are a natural COX-2 inhibitor. Omega-3 fatty acids, like the cod liver oil, is another inhibitor of the COX-2. Hypericin, which is a compound in St. John's Wort, inhibits COX-2. In fact, in certain studies, it can work 18 times stronger than aspirin for pain. You think of St. John's Wort to help regulate serotonin for depression, but it also has a potent anti-pain effect. But don't forget vitamin D. If anyone has an autoimmune disease and they're not taking vitamin D, good amounts of it, they just simply are very unaware and they need to watch this video. If the doctor who is treating you for autoimmune doesn't suggest this, there is a severe gap in knowledge on the relationship between vitamin D and the immune system. You should have them watch this video.
Now, I've talked about vitamin D being the off switch to a certain part of the immune system, okay? There's another off switch to just generally your T cells, okay? And your B cells, okay? That's another part of the immune system. And this is a very good thing in an autoimmune disease because vitamin D receptors are all over the T cells and the B cells, way more than this phagocyte. Now, so far, I've talked about the suppression of your immune system. Now I want to talk about what gets activated, what gets boosted with taking vitamin D. There are three very powerful, yet ancient, they go way back on the evolutionary track, defense mechanisms. These three things tend to surround the pathogens and just poke thousands of holes through there, completely obliterating that pathogen. It's called cathelicidin. Another one's called LL-37, and the last one is called beta-defensin. Now, these names are not important. All you need to know is it's another part of the immune system that gets boosted, okay? I mean, think about this, when you take a steroid, right, for autoimmune disease, all you're doing is you're suppressing the entire immune system. But vitamin D selectively turns things off, but it selectively turns other things on. So it's not going to weaken your immune system.
So now you know the importance and the significance of using vitamin D for an autoimmune disease. There's definitely other things to do as well. If you haven't seen this video, okay, the one on the gut health, like the thing that starts the whole process in the first place, I put that up right here. Check it out.