Dr. Paul Anderson on Lifestyle Immune Support: Strengthening Your Body Naturally

In this episode, Dr. Paul Anderson explores natural and holistic strategies to support and enhance the immune system through lifestyle choices. He covers:

• Diet and Nutrition: Key nutrients and foods that boost immune function, such as antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals, and how to incorporate them into your daily diet.
• Exercise: The role of regular physical activity in maintaining a healthy immune system, including specific types of exercise that are particularly beneficial.
• Sleep: Understanding the critical connection between quality sleep and immune health, with tips for improving sleep hygiene and ensuring restorative rest.
• Stress Management: Techniques for reducing stress and its negative impact on the immune system, including mindfulness, meditation, and other relaxation practices.
• Hydration: The importance of staying hydrated for optimal immune function and overall health, with guidelines for adequate fluid intake.
• Hygiene Practices: Effective habits for preventing infections and supporting immune health, such as proper handwashing and maintaining a clean environment.
• Supplementation: Overview of supplements that can enhance immune support, including vitamins C and D, zinc, and probiotics, and how to use them safely.
• Holistic Therapies: The integration of complementary therapies like acupuncture, herbal medicine, and essential oils to support immune function and overall well-being.

Dr. Anderson provides comprehensive advice on lifestyle changes and habits that can naturally strengthen your immune system, helping you stay healthy and resilient.





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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, good day and welcome Medicine Health. I'm doctor Paul,
and today we're going through preparing for cold and flu
season and some things that you can do that you
probably have control over in your life, that you can
do to help your body be prepared, help be a
small target. Our first section is going to be what

(00:21):
I term lifestyle intervention. So these are things that probably
your grandma told you were good for you, and she
would have been right, and they are things that can
be quite helpful with keeping your immune system a little
more spunky and involved in the fight, keeping you a
little more resistant, making you a smaller target. And so

(00:44):
that's the goal here. So the first thing I want
to talk about under the idea of lifestyle enhancements would
be sleep. And when you think about sleep, of course
we all know we usually don't feel that good if
we don't get enough sleep, and enough sleep is different
for different people. Certainly there's people that can get by

(01:08):
with less and some people need more. Bottom line is
you need to be having a good amount of sleep,
but also good quality of sleep. You need to be
going into all of the proper parts of deep sleep
and rem sleep and all of that and during sleep,
your body actually has some regenerative things happen, So things

(01:33):
like certain parts of your immune system can become regenerated
or they can sort of renew themselves overnight. Your liver
does a lot of dumping of things that it doesn't
need and needs to get rid of overnight, and on
and on. Let alone your brain function being better. So
there's a lot of things that collude together in the

(01:55):
world of immunity, immune resistance, and sleep where that comes from.
So when we're thinking about these things and we're talking
about lifestyle interventions, I want to keep in mind that
you know, we're looking at cold and flu season coming up.
Everybody is saying, well, you know, it could be a
bad cold and flu season. I don't remember a single

(02:17):
cold and flu season in six decades I've been around
them that they haven't said, oh, it might be a
bad You could always say that it's sort of like, well,
you know, it might rain in the next week or
something like that. And right now, you know, with COVID
and all the other stuff going on, they said, well,
we're having increases in you know, RSV, and it could

(02:38):
be bad. We could have multiple things hitting us. So
this not being about specifically any particular bug, but cold
and flu season being a time when we all get
exposed to stuff. I want to keep in mind these
lifestyle interventions are important just to make you a smaller target,
make you more resistant. Now, can you do all these
things perfectly and still get a cold or the flu

(02:58):
or something? Sure? Sure can. But it doesn't mean that
you shouldn't try if you want. I mean, you do
whatever you want, but it doesn't mean if you're trying
to do everything you can you shouldn't do something. Now.
So sleep is the first thing we talked about. There's
a lot of regenerative things that happen during sleep, way
beyond your mind. Of course, our mind feels that when

(03:19):
we don't sleep appropriately, but our whole body can, and
our immune system actually has some regenerative activity during the
sleep cycles. The next area that we can do to
be a little bit more resistant, or maybe a lot
is movement. And so you might think of movement as exercise,
and if you do, that's fine. The idea with movement, really,

(03:42):
if we boil it down to the basics, is going
to be we want to keep the skeletal muscle, the
muscle that moves our body around and holds us up.
We want to keep that active and working, and so
we have more muscle metabolism and we have a lower
amount of fat and insulin metabolism. Now, if we're working

(04:02):
out a reasonable amount and we're eating correctly, et cetera,
we might have some fat breakdown, which is a good
kind of metabolism to have, But what we don't want
is the pro fat metabolism, the part that is stimulated
by insulin biology and creates inflammation and all of that.
It takes a lot of resources away from the immune system.
So moving your body, and as we've talked about, and

(04:24):
you can go back in the videos if you want,
or the recordings and look for all the movement is
medicine things that we've done. But the bottom line there
is that the more you move the core muscles, So
think of your legs as some of the biggest contributors.
Then your arms kind of can get into the act,
and then your core muscles in your body. The more

(04:45):
we move those, the more we have the signals sent
out for muscle saying this is a resistant body. This
is a body that is involved in repair and maintenance.
And when we're involved in repair and maintenance are our
immune biochemistry is such that it is also being vigilant

(05:08):
for and helping with invaders, so foreign invaders like cold,
flu covid, whatever. The other thing that we get when
we move the large muscles that we get more circulation,
and more circulation actually pumps more of our venous blood
back through the liver and the spleen gets to see

(05:29):
more blood, etc. So we have a lot of immune
cell contact with our blood, which is what we want.
So if for example, there's something that's come in through
the respiratory system, it gets into one of the nodes
and lymph nodes and the body has sampled it and
the networks its way through either directly in the lymph node,

(05:51):
we may have some immune cells turning on and telling
the rest of the immune system there's a problem, or
it may work its way through the limb and those
signals through the lymph and then they get into the
venus system and then that needs to get pumped around.
Those sort of signals can be seen faster the more
active we are, so movement become very important as well.

(06:13):
The other thing that becomes very important is and it
goes right along with the sort of muscle as medicine,
and this gin and young of muscle metabolism versus insulin
and fat metabolism. But the next really is our dietary
control over that. So we can have muscular action and
muscle control over those things. But also then we can

(06:34):
look at our diet and we can set our diet
up in a way that does the best job that
it can at keeping our insulin production as level as possible. Now,
we all know that without insulin, we would die, and
that would happen. So like a type on diabetic doesn't
get insulin, they will die. And so insulin is not
a bad thing. It's just in excess beyond what our

(06:58):
body actually needs, which is easy to do for most people,
not Type one diabetics, but certainly most of the rest
of us, and if you have certain genes a lot
easier for the rest of us. It's easy to have
more insulinogenic or high glycemic food in our diet that
would trigger insulin response than we really need, and so

(07:20):
then the insulin can go around and it feeds into
the fat metabolism and inflammatory biology, and that actually sucks
away energy from immune system. So you can look at
the glycemic index, you can also look at the insulin index.
These are both online, easy to find, and you can
look at the foods, especially foods that contain carbohydrates you're

(07:41):
going to eat, and you can minimize either the glycemic
or insulinogenic load. The other thing is that you can
eat things that have multiple avenues towards benefit. So some
of those avenues might be eating brightly colored plants that
have a lot of fiber, but they also have a
lot of polyphenols, bioflavonoids, a lot of other chemicals in

(08:06):
them that are good for you, and also some nutrients,
and so taking those in can help with a base
of nutrition that your body would need. We'll talk about
supplementation in a different video, but a base of nutrition
from colorful plant material then you can have a decent
balance of proteins and fats and kind of keep your

(08:27):
intake balance but also keep your insulin triggering as low
as possible. The other thing is if we have enough
caloric intake through our macronutrients, so the proteins, fats, and carbs,
and we have enough for our requirements but not more
than we need, we're also less likely to trigger excess
inflammatory chemistry in the body. As well. So we've talked

(08:49):
about hygienic things, stuff, your grammar, what I told you
about sleep, your movement as medicine also known as exercise,
and your diet. The next thing would be more of
a long term thing. But hey, you know, we're hopefully
all going to live longer than just a few months,
and so this is something we can all work on.
This is something you know, I've worked on on and

(09:12):
off for a long time, and that is just maintaining
a healthy weight for your body. And so the healthy
weight for your body is determined by your body. It's
a very individualized thing. So I'm not going to sit
here and tell you have to be a certain weight
or look a certain way or anything like that. A
lot of it has to do with your size. Also

(09:33):
is to do with your frame size. It can have
to do with some genetic factors, and also how much
muscle mass you have, because if you have a large
amount of muscle mass, you can look like you weigh
more than say standard for height and weight. But if
it's all muscle, you have a lot of margin on
the front side. If, on the other hand, you weigh

(09:54):
a lot for your height and weight standards, and it's
all fat. You're just going to have a lot of
that fat inflammatory biology going on in the body, and
that's going to be a negative for you. So anything
you can do to turn this ship. Now, as we
always talk about with movements, medicine, everything, we have to
be careful that, you know, we can't make ourselves, you know,

(10:15):
lose a whole bunch of weight in a couple of days,
as you know, without surgic clint invention, that's just not
going to happen. And it's better if you don't need
sturgical intervention in most cases. But if you're trying to
do it just by shifting your you know, movement, exercise, diet,
all of that, especially, you might need some you know,
specific help, et cetera. And you get to write counsel

(10:39):
you can start to lose weight. And so this is
a long game thing. This is about being healthier. So
it's not you know, losing weight can be helpful for
our heart, our whole cardiovascular system, can be helpful for
other inflammatory diseases, be helpful for a million things when
your immune system is a big thing about getting to
an optimum weight. So you know, we're not talking about

(11:01):
being you know, a beam pull or you know, being
overly skinny or anything like that, unless that's your normal
body habits, and then great, that's that's where your body is.
But if that's not, you just want to be to
an optimal weight that your your body has a good
mixture of muscle and a minor amount of fat, which

(11:21):
is a real healthy thing for your body. And then
the last hygienic thing, which we've got a couple of
minutes here for so that's good. I'll have a couple
of minutes to knock this out is toxicity through lifestyle.
So we're not talking really about detox, it's just more
of detox lifestyle things. So one of the things is
to decrease exposures. And we've had lots of audio and

(11:44):
video in the past on the channel about decreasing exposure
for toxicity, so you can go back and search those.
But the bottom line is the less processed foods you eat,
the less foods that come in a package that you
eat generally, the less foods that especially if you go
to the environmental working groups Dirty dozen, you don't eat

(12:04):
anything on that list that's not organic, the less exposure
you have. The other thing is is that the other
stuff we talked about, like moving your body around and
recycling your blood more every day. So the more I move,
the more I recycle my blood through as I said,
deliver and the spleen and all the other organs, the

(12:24):
more we actually will naturally sort of detoxify things through
the process. And then if our diet is rich in
things that are not inflammatory, and it has a lot
of those good flavonoids and colorful parts of plants, and
has decent protein and fat amounts in it that are clean,

(12:45):
we're again going to be promoting kind of a natural
detox the way that your body would naturally do it.
The other thing that's kind of cool, and I just
spoke on this at the American Academy of Environmental Medicine.
It's a wonderful meta education group in environmental medicine. Obviously,
in that group, what I was talking about was GI

(13:09):
tract toxicity and how we can lower it. One of
the things that I came across then is that we
have a lot of the foods that we think of
that are really good for us as far as a prebiotics,
So probiotics are very good for you. That's usually something
you would take in a supplement, or you might get

(13:29):
a little bit in some yogurt or something. Prebiotics are
foods that just help the natural floora in your GI
tract do the right thing. So many of the prebiotic foods,
such as you know, cabbage and asparagus and all of
those things you look up, it also turns out that
they have a lot of natural binding substances in them.
And what that does is, in addition to the vitamins

(13:54):
and minerals and amino acids and then the polyphenol, flavonoids
and all that other chemistry that these foods have that
are pre biotic, they also feed the probatics that you
already have in your body, the good ones, and then
sort of leaving behind, they have some natural binding chemistry
in them that gets cleaved off when you digest them,

(14:17):
and that will help if let's say your liver decides
to get rid of a little bit of some chemicals
environmental chemicals, those binders can help you eliminate them easier. Now,
of course you'd have regular vowel movements, you to be
well hydrated, all of that stuff. But basically speaking, all
of those foods that are quote unquote good for you
that are prebiotic that do all these other things. They

(14:39):
also have a detoxification help. Now, two things. One, there's
no medical advice being given here. I'm giving information and
check all this out with your healthcare practitioner. Also, remember
to like, share, subscribe, do the notifications because we kind
of got moved over somewhere where not a lot of

(14:59):
people are seeing the videos. And also share if you
can doctorrightnow dot com if you want anything else. But
we're gonna take a break here and we'll come back
with a new section.