Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine
“Your Life Style Is Your Medicine” is a podcast that focuses on how a person's lifestyle can be the key to health and happiness. Routed in the principles of lifestyle medicine, Ed Paget, osteopath, and exercise scientist, interviews area-specific experts on how lifestyle impacts well-being, focusing on purpose, physical activity, nutrition, sleep, and stress, which could lead to a longer, happier life. Edward now runs immersive lifestyle medicine retreats, with the purpose of helping others take back control of their lives to live longer and healthier.
Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine
Podcast Episode 57: Dr David Bilstrom
Why Autoimmune Disease Is on the Rise — and How to Reverse It Naturally 🌿
In this episode of Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine, I sit down with Dr. David Bilstrom, a quadruple board-certified physician in functional, regenerative, and integrative medicine. Together, we uncover the real root causes behind autoimmune disease — and how we can prevent and even reverse them by addressing the immune system, gut health, hormones, and lifestyle.
Dr. Bilstrom shares how immune system disruption connects to conditions like heart disease, dementia, osteoporosis, and even autism — and why treating the person, not just the symptom is the key to lasting healing.
🎙️ In this episode, we explore:
• The difference between the adaptive and innate immune systems
• Why autoimmune disease has become a global epidemic
• The hidden links between inflammation, hormones, and gut health
• The power of acupuncture and integrative therapies
• How to move from symptom suppression to root-cause healing
💡 Dr. Bilstrom is the Director of the International Autoimmune Institute at the Bingham Memorial Center for Functional Medicine, where he’s changing how chronic diseases are treated — and training clinicians to do the same.
👉 If you’re a health practitioner, learn more about his expert training programs at drdavidbilstrom.com/expert-courses
If you enjoyed this conversation, please follow, rate, and share the podcast — and let me know in the comments who you’d love to hear from next!
Welcome to the Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine podcast, where we do deep dives into topics of mind, body, and spirit. And through these conversations, you'll hear practical advice and effective strategies to improve your health and ultimately add health span to your lifespan. I'm Ed Padgett, I'm an osteopath, an exercise physiologist with a special interest in longevity. Today I'm joined by Dr. David Bilstrom, MD. He's a quadruple board certified physician in functional and regenerative medicine, integrative medicine, physical medicine and rehabilitation, plus medical acupuncture. He serves as the director of International Autoimmune Institute at the Bingham Memorial Center for Functional Medicine.
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SPEAKER_01:Bilstrom is on a mission to change how autoimmune and chronic diseases are treated by addressing the root causes and not just the symptoms. He trains healthcare providers across the globe to prevent and reverse autoimmune conditions in both adults and children. And this helps them to avoid burnout and build thriving practices on real healing. As a fellow of both the American Academy of Integrative Medicine and the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture, Dr. Gilström blends cutting-edge medical science with a patient-centered whole body approach. His work empowers patients to take back control of their health and empowers the practitioners he trains to deliver the results that last. Now, if you're a health practitioner and you're interested in learning more about his expert training programs, I really encourage you to visit dr davidbilstrom.com forward slash expert courses. And we'll talk a little bit more about his trainings in this episode. So, Dr. Billstrom, welcome to the show. Oh, my pleasure. So, for our audience, can you do a little introduction for your uh of yourself and tell them why we're going to be talking about autoimmune disease today?
SPEAKER_00:Well, autoimmune disease is in epidemic proportions everywhere in the world. Uh historically, it's kind of more the developed countries, but as time goes on, so many countries are becoming more developed. And with that comes this whole epidemic of autoimmune disease. But because the immune system is such a central mechanism and whether the body can stay healthy or get diseased, it really truly is tied in with the epidemic that we're seeing of so many different things, both in children and adults. Unfortunately, historically also, the only thing offered when people get these autoimmune diseases or kind of chronic diseases in general is a lot of medicines that just put a bandage on a symptom, but don't really take care of the underlying problem. And then people just keep getting one thing after another. And it can be, you know, a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth autoimmune disease. And it's just one thing after another unless you actually get at the heart of the matter.
SPEAKER_01:And what's your interest in autoimmune? How did you go from you know being a medical resident to doing what you do now?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I've always been interested in chronic health issues. Uh, my original area specialty was uh called physical medicine and rehabilitation. And then my subspecialty was spinal cord injury rehabilitation. And so pretty much all my patients when I first got out of training were paralyzed from the waist down, neck down, um, very complicated, very complex. They tended to be very sensitive to medications, where you know, something that uh a non-spinal cord injury person might not have a problem with, the spinal cord population wouldn't just have a problem with it, but it might kill them. And even some over just over-the-counter stuff might do it. And um, but also like every organ system is involved at the same time. So it's really complex. And with this population, though, you can kind of run out of options and you go, geez, what else we got? Um, and so I started looking for other options, and I kept saying, Well, wouldn't it be great if I could find options and wouldn't it be great if they actually turned out to have no side effects? You know, wouldn't that be lovely? And um first thing I found was acupuncture. You know, wow, this has like been around thousands of years, you can do just about anything with it. Super, super, super safe. Maybe it might help. Well, oh my gosh, it works so much better than I ever thought it would. That I'm like, well, what else is out there that I didn't learn in my more traditional training? And sure enough, 35 years later, wow, is there a lot of great science out there about how you can help folks that I just didn't learn in my original training? And unfortunately, still is not being really, you know, taught in the traditional schools is something that you have to kind of go out on your own. From there, I started treating everything, the the worst of the worst kind of stuff, including a lot of autoimmune disease. And the story I got regarding autoimmune disease was was just story after story, always kind of same. I had these issues, they kept getting worse and worse. I went to doc after doc after doc, on average, you know, five to seven doctors trying to find an answer. Uh, worse as time goes on, suddenly I get this diagnosis of this autoimmune disease. And I said, Well, how did I get it? Oh, we have no idea how you got it. Well, how can I make it go away? You can't make it go away. You're gonna have it forever. Well, what are my options? Well, the only option you have is a medicine that will suppress your immune system because you get your overactive immune system. It's not quite like that. It's more complicated, but more simple than just overactive. But the only thing we got is underactive. But it can actually give you new autoimmune disease as a side effect. It will increase your cancer risk. And they don't get told that they already have this profound increased risk of cancer when you get an autoimmune thing because of the immune system disruption. It's gonna increase your risk of a life-threatening infection that no amount of antibiotics could save you from because your immune system is so suppressed.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And going back to the uh it's very sad. It is very sad, 100%. It's 100%, and that's why we have and I want to just go back, circle back to the spinal cord injury patients. So because they're more sensitive to um medications, were they more sensitive to acupuncture?
SPEAKER_00:I I wouldn't say more sensitive to it, but uh it's just as acupuncture just works so great for so many things. And it and it kind of, you know, if you do it the correct way, uh the right way, you're actually impacting the body as a whole. So it's not like you're just doing it for a symptom. You're like getting at these central mechanisms that allow you to treat everything at the same time. So for me, that was fascinating. That's just so different than my original allopathic medicine training is here's a medicine for this symptom, one for this. Well, here's this acupuncture. You get at this central mechanism, you're fixing everything at the same time. And the whole concept is so foreign to me, but also foreign to patients. You know, so like a patient would come in for acupuncture with low back pain. Well, maybe I see 10 people with low back pain, back to back to back primary symptom, but everyone's different. You know, one low back pain and asthma, low back pain and and fatigue, low back pain and brain fog, low back pain and whatever. And I go, okay, well, so we're going to try to take care of this. Well, you can't treat everybody the same. It's not the same needles just because it's low back pain. You treat this the person, not the you know, the primary complaint. Well, then all these things get better at the same time. And it was really, it freaked me out that you could do that. It also kind of freaked patients out because you get kind of get a hey, you come back next week. Uh, how's your low back pain? Exactly the same, no different whatsoever. And I go, average is this uh intensity, yeah. You have flares five times a day to this intensity, yeah. Still still in the same place, yeah. And then, but I say, Well, what about your insomnia? You know, my notes tell me that you wake up four times a night and you've done this for 20 years. Oh my gosh, I slept through the night every night this week. Holy cow, I didn't I didn't even think of it. Well, what about your pooping? You were so constipated, you might go four to five days without pooping. Oh my gosh, I had a bomb woman every day this week. Gosh, I didn't even think, and I'm like, yep, we just nailed it. Your pain's the same, it'll get better eventually. But your body kind of picked out well, it's probably more important for me to fix this sleep issue and this pooping issue than this back pain issue. We'll get to that later. And then it's already working right away. And for me, it was like, well, that just is so phenomenal. That's also why I love what I do with this functional medicine, is you're really getting at these central mechanisms that are tied into everything, and you can get everything heading in the right direction at the same time. What a great concept that is, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01:And interestingly, you that reminds me of of osteopathy, which is what I do. The idea is to find these sort of core um what we call misalignments or whatever it is, that the thing that's that's causing a problem in the body. And the symptom of those could be sore hips or back, whatever it is. But once you start treating that area, generally things start getting better. And we have the same thing. People say, Oh, you know, yeah, my back's a little bit better. But uh, and then we say, What about the reflux? Oh, yeah, the reflux has gone well, because we were treating the spine by the diaphragm, and that's changed the reflux and so on. And you start to unravel people's in a good way, you start to unravel their health complaints. And they come in for one thing, and we eventually get to that, but you sometimes have to take a journey to get there. And that's something that's uh, you know, okay, it's bought broad brushes here, but physical therapy in general and uhlopathic medicine in general doesn't like to do necessarily. It likes to go straight after the complaint. But when you sit down and take that case history, like you do in functional medicine, and you listen to the whole person and all the complaints, you're like, okay, I get it. We've got to piece this together and we're gonna come up or up to your back pain. Maybe that'll be the last thing we get, but we're gonna do this whole bunch of other things first.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, because when you get rid of these kind of blocks that are preventing the body from fixing yourself, you can get rid of them, the body you know just rolls and starts fixing it like it's been trying to do the whole time. And then one thing I always found interesting is sort of what the body prioritized. You know, we may have priority, like, well, that little back pain is a priority, but the body's like, no, no, no, I'm gonna fix this first. And we go, why would you fix that? Oh, that's fascinating. And then it tells part of the story.
SPEAKER_01:It does, isn't it? And I always try and think about why the body broke down in that area as well. Like it's prioritized other things for over this area and it sort of chews up the back pain because it does the back, because it doesn't think that's as important as a hip or or whatever it whatever it is. And you know, I don't think there's answers to those questions, but I always try and sort of think uh figure it through from an evolutional point of view, from an anthropological point of view, like why does the body do what it does? But anyway, oh, we're getting sidetracked. We need to get back to autoimmune. Let's um so in my experience, when I treat patients, I ask men questions about autoimmune, and they're like, no, no, I'm good. Every now and again I might find someone who has a thyroid problem. But with with women, many, many more women uh have autoimmune problems than men, from what I've seen. And I believe that's true across the board. But can you explain why that is?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so uh 80% of all people that get autoimmune disease are disease are women, and um uh there's two main reasons. One one is genes. Um, we used to think that genes we have, genes make up long strands of uh genes make up DNA, and then the DNA, the chromosomes in our cells tell the cells what to do. And we used to think that whatever genes we have, good, bad, otherwise, we've gotten from parents and grandparents, we're kind of stuck with them. And people might go, geez, I hope I got the good genes from my parents and grandparents, because they got some bad ones. I can see their cancer and their dementia and these other kinds of things. Well, it turns out it's not so much what genes we have, it's which ones get turned on and turned off. So this is epigenetics, the things that influence gene expression without changing the genetic code. And when they were gonna sequence the human DNA, the human genome, uh, 10 years, 12 major university settings. Hey, we're gonna find the genes that cause every disease, and then we can go in there and zap it and fix the disease. Well, then they get done with all this and they go, Oh, well, mainly it's not what genes you have, it's which ones get turned on and turned off. Yeah, there's a few rare diseases, you know, 50 people in the world, because there's a bad gene, we can zap them and help them. But if everybody else is like, well, everybody's got tons of bad genes. Everybody's got tons of good genes. It's just which ones get turned on. And so when people aren't feeling well, they're flipping their genes the wrong way, turning off the good, turning on the bad. Well, it turns out uh uh women have two X chromosomes, and guys have one X, one Y. That's what makes us men or women. Well, it turns out there's so many bad chromosomes, uh I'm sorry, bad genes on the X chromosome that for a woman to be optimally healthy, she has to be able to shut down 85% at least of all the genes on the second S chromosome. Otherwise, there's this excessive X chromosome influence on the body. And so you look at that and you go, oh my gosh, women have to shut down almost an entire chromosome and every cell in their body to be healthy. Guys don't have to do that. And it can be very challenging, but it's one of the reasons why women end up with all these uh autoimmune disease, kind of more complex uh uh health issues, somewhat in general. Now, fortunately, the science is real clear what throws off the ability to shut that down, what we can do to undo that, but also there's really a wonderful uh way of educating us on how this whole autoimmune thing works, including vitamin deficiencies and infections and such things. And then the other thing, which I call the most dangerous disease in women, is called uh estrogen dominance. Every once in a while I might hear it called progesterone deficiency, but what this is estrogen dominance is a woman has too much estrogen, not enough progesterone. And both estrogen and progesterone uh women have receptors for these uh hormones on every cell in the body. So every cell needs these guys. But it's a real good example of how balance is so important. You know, here's this one great thing, here's this other thing. Uh, knowing how they're doing individually might be very important, but potentially how they compare to each other might be even more important. And you see that a lot in the body. And so if a woman ends up with more estrogen compared to progesterone, this estrogen dominance kicks in. Oh my gosh, not only is it a big reason why women get 80% of all autoimmune disease, but it is a humongo driver of cancer. And this is a good example of cancer is the flip side of the same coin as autoimmune disease to both immune system issues. Um, so if a woman gestrogen dominance, she has a uh 5.4 times greater risk of getting breast cancer before menopause. Not just twice the risk of breast cancer or three times, but more than five times, but also a 10 times greater chance of dying of a malignant cancer, one that starts here and metastasizes there, the bad dudes. 10 times greater risk of dying of malignant cancers in her lifetime. And you're like, oh my gosh, this stuff is so terrible. Um, what is so important that what people miss is not only how terrible this is, and we got to make sure we fix it on what's there, but people may not know well, what does estrogen dominance look like before it gets to cancer and autoimmune disease? And this is where we want to educate people. And there's kind of two major areas where this estrogen dominance shows itself long before you get there. So ideally, we have plenty of time to turn around the things that happen that tell us they got in the first place, long before they end up with cancer and autoimmune disease. And that's hormonal menstrual things and rev without calm things. So hormonal menstrual things that show up because of estrogen dominance, bad menstrual flows, menstrual cramps, premenstrual syndrome, ovarian cysts, polycystic ovarian syndrome, fibroids, endometriosis, infertility, all these kinds of things are estrogen dominants. Wow, it is so hard to stay healthy nowadays. What woman doesn't have those things? A couple of generations ago, uncommon to have those things. Now everybody's got it. And then this rev with alcohol, because estrogen revs, progesterone, calms. And so if you get estrogen dominance, you have the rev without column. So it shows up as women who uh tend to be worriers, more anxious than they probably should be. It can lead to panic attacks. It's a big one for driving sleep disruption, insomnia, because you got the rev without column. And so you look at that and you go like, well, geez, in this day and age when it's so hard to say, happy what woman doesn't have some of that rev without column stuff or the hormonal menstrual things. Um, the problem is people don't know that's estrogen dominance. And the another problem is they just use maybe a bandage medicine to put to kind of quiet the symptoms. Oh, here's a birth control pill that'll kind of quiet this hormonal menstrual stuff. Oh, here's Xanax or sleep meds, like ambient, quiet the symptoms. But when you realize that's estrogen dominance and what it's going to lead to if you don't fix it, um, you want to fix the estrogen dominance and then all the hormonal menstrual stuff gets better. Now they're so chill and they sleep like a baby. Oh, now we've done our due diligence to do this, and now we've also done our due diligence to prevent the cancers and the autoimmune disease long before they're there. Let's prevent them before they get there, and then we don't have to worry about reversing them.
SPEAKER_01:Is anyone in the mainstream medical field testing for estrogen dominance?
SPEAKER_00:Typically not. And it's really interesting, even when you get all these hormonal menstrual things, you know, this hormonal, people really aren't testing it. It's just sort of like, oh, well, here's the birth control pill. Or if it gets bad enough, well, here's a hysterectomy, you know, that kind of a thing. Both the S both the birth control pills and the hysterectomy just make it worse, even though it may, you know, hey, I don't got that symptoms of bad flow because I don't have a uterus any longer, um, is it actually makes it things worse, which is is is not a good way to go. Now, you know, if you if you can't get through your day because of these hormonal menstrual things, well, maybe a birth control pill is gonna put the bandage on it, you can get through your day. But now, ideally, what that should do is we say, okay, well, now let's go back and do our due diligence to figure out why you got this hormonal menstrual thing. Let's fix it. And then you don't even need the birth control pills simply because you got terrible cramps or bad flows or ovarian cysts, and now you avoid the downsides of birth control pills, which are are numerous. Um, you know, there's reasons to use it for birth control, but you don't want to use it not birth control stuff because you get all the downside with no the upside.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Okay, can you take us back then? Let's say we've got uh, you know, um uh a pre-pubescent 12-year-old girl, full of energy, full of life, um, you know, eats relatively well in this North American model of eating, uh so the best it can be. But then she goes through puberty and things start to change. How do you go from like what we think, what I think is like a good setup to becoming estrogen dominant? What's what's the sort of the the uh the background of that?
SPEAKER_00:So I kind of look at that as does it start immediately with the first onset of Mences, Menarch, or is it come a couple years later kind of a thing? And so um there's ever so many things before that that can disrupt the system. Early use of antibiotics, recurrent use of antibiotics, excessive stress. Um, you know, uh, was there complications during the pregnancy before the person's even born? Uh, was there a complicated delivery? Did they end up in the ICU for a few days with a lot of bad bugs running around that could have gotten the gut? Uh, all these different kinds of things, adverse childhood events, you know, things like divorce of the parents or substance abuse and all these other kinds of things. Um, and so um, if cycles start early, um, I'm usually thinking that uh there's a lot of trouble with toxicity. Some gut disruption made it hard to get rid of toxins. And there's so many environmental toxins that act like estrogens in the body, such as BPA that comes from like soft plastic water bottles, for example. And there's such a buildup of estrogen-like toxins, like these plastics, that can fool the body into thinking it's time to start your menstrual cycles when you're five years old. I've seen five years old, six years old. Uh, 10 is too early, too. And you go, oh, this must be a toxicity issue. They started their cycles too early. If you start sort of at a regular time, let's say, or maybe you start early and it's really bad right away with all these bad menstrual things. I'm usually thinking cortisol has gotten thrown off. Something's created enough stress in the body that the stress hormone cortisol is kind of in this fight or flight, life or death mode. Now, it could be emotional stress, like um these adverse childhood events and these kind of things. Uh, it could be the physical stress, disrupted gut, right? Antibiotics or other kinds of things there too. And cortisol, when you look at the hormone symphony in women, if one hormone's off, it likes to throw everybody else off. So cortisol loves to throw off all the other hormones, like the hormone symphony. So if it starts right away, I'm going, oh, something created enough stress and disrupted cortisol, it was just gonna these natural things are gonna happen right away. Um, it could be the toxicity, though, too. Toxins create physical stress, all this. And so you kind of look at toxins and gut health and all these other kinds of stuff. If it was okay to start with and then it comes later, then I'm usually thinking gut, because what tends to happen is um you're making estrogens and they keep away inflammation, they keep you healthy. So, like estradiol, one of the estrogens that the female body makes, but also male body makes, uh, prevents heart attacks and strokes, prevents cataracts and macular degeneration. The eyes need estrogens, prevents osteoporosis, it prevents fine lines in your skin. The gut needs estradiol to be happy. Every cell needs it. You make a healthy estrogen like estradiol, it gets rid of inflammation. But once it's been in the system for a while, it gets dinged and it gets beat up, and now it's irritating and toxic to the system. So you got to run your detox pathways, requires the right nutrients. Dump them into the gut so you can poop them in the toilet. Well, if the gut's been disrupted for reasons of stress, anxiety, uh uh antibiotics, motrins and advils, birth control pills, whatever they are, uh, toxins can't leave through pooping. They reactivate and recycle back into the uh bloodstream and they build over time. And so you can get this estrogenomice. Usually the young women are still making progesterone, but they have way too much estrogen, but they tend to be the old toxic ones. And that's the classic estrogen dominance to start with. Now, of course, this is going to stress out the body, right? Cortisol is getting stressed out about this deal. And then over time, when cortisol is stressed out, eventually you stop making progesterone, and now you got to kind of get that double whammy where you don't have enough progesterone and you have way too much estrogens, and then um uh yuck, all these things happen. But that's kind of what I kind of my thought process with all this. Okay.
SPEAKER_01:So there's a there's a lot to unpack there. So we've got past traumas, stuff that's happened in really early childhood. Then we've got potentially got uh uh environmental um aspects, plastics, and you know, we're living a more polluted world now, and then we've got gut stuff. So what we haven't talked about, and I want to come back to the gut stuff, we're gonna put a pin in that. But what we haven't talked about is what is an autoimmune disease. I think we both kind of assume that we know, but maybe some people that are listening don't know. And what are sort of some common names? And before you answer that, I also would love to hear your philosophy on sort of the the naming of autoimmune diseases, even though they are all labeled as autoimmune disease. There's probably some history that you could tell us about there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So uh what when I finally decided about 10, about 12 years ago, that's you know, we got to change the way autoimmune disease is dealt with worldwide. Uh this is just too sad. And uh fortunately, we know so much more about it now than we did back then. And and every day I'm like, oh my gosh, this is bigger than I even thought it was 12 years ago. So historically, autoimmune diseases have been uh uh the part of the immune system uh called the adaptive immune system that makes antibodies, specific antibodies to attack specific things. And now the specific things that we typically want to make antibodies against are things that are not us that are going to hurt us. So, uh, like an infection, like a virus gets in us, we get a cold virus, and we feel like crud, right? So like a truck ran over us. Well, you don't need that virus in there doing that for the next 20 years, right? You want your adaptive immune system to make an antibody specific for that specific virus, kill it, knock it out of the body, the cold goes away. You expect it to happen within four to five days, hopefully quicker. You don't want to stick around for weeks, but uh, it doesn't stick around forever. Um, we might make antibodies against cancer cells. Hey, one of our cells is turned cancerous, it's not us anymore. So, sort of basically, we try to kill that thing that's not us because we don't need that in our system. Well, when things get uh messed up in the system, the immune system might actually start making antibodies attack on our own body parts. And we're basically self-destructing when that happens. And it is never gonna be a good idea to self-destruct. We want to be healthy, do not start self-destructing, right? And so um we're making antibodies against specific proteins in the body. Now, we may make those antibodies against the thyroid and then cause Hashimoto's or Graves' disease, which are autoimmune thyroid diseases. We could make them against the cartilage in our joints, rheumatoid arthritis. We might make them against parts of our brain, multiple sclerosis, autism. 70% of all autism is one particular autoimmune disease. So it really depends on uh, you know, what antibodies are made against what body part that's your autoimmune disease. And so then to your point, I think you're making we we have you know hundreds of names for autoimmune diseases based on the body part being attacked. The way I look at it is not early hundreds, it's really one disease that can attack any body part. It just depends on which body part ends up being kind of a weak spot. Okay, for some reason, this body part with a weak spot, that's where the immune system attacks first. But this is where also it's so easy to get a second and third and fourth, and I've seen women in her 20s with like six autoimmune diseases already. I've seen eight-year-olds with five autoimmune diseases already. Um, if you don't fix why you're attacking one body part, you just keep going online to new body parts. And I think that's a good example of how they're all kind of one disease they can attack any body part, it's so easy to get multiple. Now, every one sort of has some unique, cool thing to it that is a little different, which I find fascinating, but it's all kind of the same. Um yeah, so it's it's so common for this. Some of the ones I mentioned, including ulcerative clias, Crohn's psoriasis is a skin one. Um, but we now know that the immune system is so much more important than this stuff than we even knew 12 years ago. And and part of this is our knowledge of the adaptive immune system. Part of it's also the other part of the immune system called the innate immune system, which is designed to get rid of excessive inflammation that would create tissue damage. Well, it turns out that so many diseases are tied into this immune system's disruption that we didn't know were immune systems. So this is not only like autism, like I mentioned, but also there's uh an autoimmune and immune system disruption component to heart attacks, strokes, dementia, Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, thinning of the bones. You kind of name the chronic health issue. You know you got a disrupted immune system. Which I go, this is even cooler than I thought 12 years ago. That's got like everything, not just those.
unknown:All right.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you said two things that I actually haven't heard before. Uh, and I can't, I can't let the first one go yet. Uh, that's the autism being an autoimmune disease. So we're gonna come back to that. Oh, that's a that's a fascinating one. I love to talk about it. Uh, this um concept of inflammation being an autoimmune disease, because I think it's it's it's getting out there into the into the public uh zeigeist now that inflammation is a driver of disease. And I think people are getting that, oh, yeah, heart attacks, inflammation, um, you know, uh even um dementia, inflammation. That seems to be out there in the popular press. But what isn't talked about is the inflammation is a auto is an autoimmune disease. Can you explain that just a little bit more?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so um it's it's more technocleric. Excess inflammation drives chronic disease. So whatever body part you have that's not happy, you know there's excess inflammation there. Now, doctors may order two blood tests uh called uh sedate and CRP, which are inflammation markers. And I don't run those because if you got a health issue, you got excess inflammation. Okay, whatever those lab tests say. Okay, and they're very nonspecific. If they show up positive for inflammation, you're like, well, we already knew that. If they show up negative, we go, I know you got inflammation. Um, now we might we use inflammation to do good work in the body. So actually, our immune cells will make inflammation to kill cancer cells. Inflammation is a signal that our body needs to fix something. So, like we sprain our ankle, there's inflammation. Our body should come in and fix the damaged tissue. Now, excessive inflammation is counterproductive, including like you sprain your ankle, you might want to put some ice on it because there's so much inflammation being produced. These chemicals, inflammation producing chemicals, are flooding the area and they're gonna leach out to non damaged tissue and damage them on top of the original damage. We don't want that. Stick some ice on it, kind of a thing. Um, but when you get excessive inflammation, that damages tissue like the ankle. But also excessive inflammation within the blood vessels, narrowing of the blood vessels, heart attacks, and strokes, inflammation being produced within the bones, osteoporosis, excessive bone loss, these kind of things. And so the immune system is really trying to balance inflammation. Not too little, because we need it to kill cancer cells right there, but not too much either. And um but this is chronic disease of all kinds.
SPEAKER_01:So what is it? So that how does that get classified as an autoimmune disease? Because I can sort of see that you explained it earlier, the difference between the adaptive and the uh the innate immune systems. And in my mind, and hopefully the mind of my listeners, a thyroid or uh a pancrus being attacked by its the own sort of little uh whatever hunter, the hunter cells or whatever they are in the in the blood, and they destroy it because they mistake it as uh as a something foreign. But how does the inflammation or excess inflammation fall under that autoimmune disease category?
SPEAKER_00:So what happens a lot of times is there's excessive inflammation in the body part, and the immune system doesn't just inherently know where that's coming from, and it goes to investigate. And it's kind of like when you get excessive inflammation in the body part, and then the immune system decides to investigate, you go, oh no, oh no, don't get you got the immune system of attention. Well, the immune system goes there uh seeing what's good, what's happening, and it might see damaged tissue, uh, the tissue damage, uh cells will die, pop, and then proteins are released. Well, the proteins that are there outside of the cell shouldn't be there. And the immune system goes, Hey, that protein's not where it should be. That could that's probably our enemy. You know, maybe it's a virus, maybe it's a cancer cell, but it's definitely not where it should be. It's our enemy, I'm gonna attack that. And then you go, oh no, now the body's attacking that already damaged body part, and it's gonna make it worse.
SPEAKER_01:Kind of I'm with you, I'm with you. So autoimmune being it's our immune system and it's all it's it's it's within ourselves and it's attacking our own body.
SPEAKER_00:Um it might be doing the right thing, but it's been given the wrong information.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm with you. Okay, so let's go back to autism then. Um, you know, I've heard many different theories about autism, um, but I haven't heard it being called an autoimmune disease before. So can you tell us about that?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah, yeah. So uh there's several articles I reference, including one that I like, which in the title uh it's prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. And I go, that's perfect. That's just what we want to do, right? Whether it's anything, but it really spells out that it's preventable, it is knowable, and it's treatable. And so with uh 70% of autism, it's this um thing called uh folate receptor alpha autoimmunity disease. So folate folic acid is one of the B vitamins, very important B vitamin, especially for brain, but also other things too. And uh on the brain, there's receptors for folic acid. So that folic acid, ideally, we get it from our blood uh our food, uh, can get to the brain, attach the folic acid receptors, and tell the brain how to function properly. While with this folate receptor, alpha autoimmunity, antibodies are produced that that knock out the folic folic acid receptors, just knock them out, they're not there. So you can have all the folic acid in the world that can't find a place to attach to do its work, and you get all this neurologic stuff. Um, there's an overlapping autoimmune disease of neurological neurological autoimmune disease of childhood, particularly. Uh, that's kind of like everything that's not autism but neurologic. And between the two groups, there's overlapping with seizures and migraines. The other overlapping one is called cerebral folate deficiency syndrome. And it's kind of like every neurologic thing you can imagine in a childhood that's not exactly autism. So it could be at four months of age, the baby becomes more irritable and doesn't sleep as well. It can be muscles are too tight, muscles are too loose, it could be the child's not very coordinated. I mean, that's actually an autoimmune neurologic thing, is coordination. It could be, you know, muscle twitches or you know, all the kind of kind of funky stuff. Um, so what happens is animal milk proteins. So animal milk proteins that enter our body, cow's milk, uh, camel milk, goat milk, sheep milk, those proteins are not human. Okay. They're they're so when they come in, the body goes, is that friend or foe? It's definitely not human. So it could be our enemy. Well, we just go, What's food, dude? You should just chill out. But things can happen. And uh we start making antibodies against those animal milk proteins. Cow and camel tend to be the worst, goat and sheep next. And we start making antibodies against those guys. It gets confused. Well, it turns out there's about a 94% correlation in the shape of the proteins in those animal milk proteins, 94% the same as the proteins on these folic acid receptors in the brain. So the immune system goes, Yeah, those are definitely our enemy. We're making antibodies against those guys. Hey, I see those exact same proteins up in the brain. That must be our enemy. I'm gonna attack those guys too. Knocks them out. And so um the kind of there's three key things to do to get this reversed. One is you get rid of animal milk proteins for a while. Okay, this is where um there's a genetic component because it can get passed down from generation to generation, but also this can happen when women stop breastfeeding and introduce cow's milk, dairy products, or other, like in other parts of the world, it might be camel milk proteins. Um, you get rid of them. Within three to 13 months, you'll stop making antibiotics attack in those receptors. They're gonna start waking up. You need to use extra folic acid in a usable form. Most most times you hear about methylated B vitamins, like methylated folic acid. That's a usable kind. So you use uh higher doses of methylated folic acid, or there's actually a prescription called um leucovorin, that's a phosphorylated version of folic acid, which also is active usable form. So this leucovorin, 25 milligrams twice a day, is typically the dose. Um, then you got to get that folic acid from the bloodstream to the brain. And it turns out that uh the blood brain barrier doesn't let everything get past it from the blood to the brain, right? Because there's toxins and other things that shouldn't get in there, infection. So there's carrier molecules in the blood brain barrier for folic acid. So you have to have the carrier molecules work as well as they can to get the folic acid now that's available through supplementation to the brain where it needs to go. Well, it turns out the uh folic acid carrier molecules in the blood brain barrier are vitamin D dependent. And when I learned that, I'm like, oh my gosh, one other area that vitamin D is uber important for, amongst tens of thousands of articles already out there. I go, oh my gosh, vitamin D is important for everything. So you have to have optimal vitamin D levels to get the folic acid past the blood brain barrier to the brain, so that when the receptors start waking up, you can you can stimulate them optimally. And this is where we this is knowable, this is fixable. Um, just recently, the last year, year and a half, I've started to see some neurologists put these kids on leucovorin, sometimes even higher doses than I do, 25 twice a day. I've seen 50 twice a day, 100 milligrams. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this must be getting out in the neural in the neurology literature. But the moms and dads will come in, the kid's been on this for six months, hasn't helped a lick. And I go, we need to check their vitamin D levels, right? And so we check it, and of course they're terrible because they haven't been started on supplementation optimized. You want like 70 to 90 on a bloodlit test. We start getting a vitamin D, bang, it starts working. And I go, All right, now we can get it where it needs to go in the brain, because we got those carrier molecules to be able to get it in there, and so um and fascinating stuff. I just thought that was the coolest thing, including I love saying that the worst is camp is is cow and camel, the second worst is goat and sheep, uh, because uh this is just how it works, but it's it's uh reversible. It's reversible. I've seen remarkable changes, it's really fascinating.
SPEAKER_01:So we're talking then about the core, like potentially a cause of autism being the introduction of um sort of uh cow milk and camel milk or goat goat milk. Well in in childhood, and then that being uh reverse sport, but does that cover all types of autism? Because I feel like some people will be like listening to this and they say, well, no, my my child didn't eat milk or they had this problem. Um, and there might be, you know, even severe types of autism. Do you think those could be helped with this?
SPEAKER_00:Um protocol. You know, when you look at chronic disease, it seems like the brain always gets dragged into the mess at some point. Oh, you know, like adults' brain fog or depression, anxiety, it always gets dragged into the mess. Doesn't matter if it's a kid or adult. Things are being long, the brains could be involved. And so there's a lot of reasons why the brain gets involved above and beyond this one particular autoimmune disease. Um, if people are interested, there's a video on my uh YouTube channel called A Two-Year Old's Story of Celiac Disease. So much more than gluten-free. And so this can kind of go back like in this young child. You got enough brain stuff. I like to check what they call it as a zinc-copper ratio, serum, zinc, serum copper, and a blood test. Any lab can run it. And the balance, another example of how balance is so important. The balance between zinc and copper is really important for brain stuff, inflammation in general. So you get the gut messed up, you can't get nutrients out of your food. You might get real low in your zinc level. The gut's messed up, you can't get rid of toxic things. People start accumulating levels of copper. Copper is really toxic to the brain, um, nervous system and kind of in general. And so you want each one to be a hundred, nice bounds. You move the decimal point, you get this ratio called 10 to 1. Um, well, here's a young boy in the story where he had gut and brain stuff, like development delay right from the get-go. 14 months into his life is so bad, they took him to a major pediatric hospital and they said, Oh, well, he's got celiac disease. You got to get rid of wheat. He's gonna be so much better. Well, they did, he didn't get better. He kept getting worse and worse and worse. 28 months of age, they say, sorry to tell you, he's got profound autism. Nothing we can do. So the chief complaint that I got wasn't so much his other stuff. It was, well, he'd have these fits 10 to 14 times a day where he tried to smash his head on the wall or the floor, and the parents would try to, you know, hold him back to for his own good. He tried to scratch their eyes out, and they came in with scratches all over them. Um, so you go, okay, well, you had to get rid of wheat, but we got to find out why wheat became a problem. Celiac disease is one of the few diseases that actually has a specific gene, but you can have it your whole life and it never gets turned on, you never get celiac. His gut turned on. You got to figure out why it got turned on, you know, going back to the root cause. Well, we did testing, like blood testing, and one of the things we saw was the infections that we always expect to see that got into his brain and his gut because his gut was so messed up. But also, because of the gut stuff, his zinc copper ratio was the worst I'd ever seen. Copper is supposed to be 100, he was 242. Zinc was supposed to be 100, he was like a 24. So he had rather than a 10 to 1 ratio, like a two to one ratio. And we go, oh my gosh, his poor little brain, no wonder it's so unhappy. Just this zinc copper ratio thing all by itself is a mess, let alone the infections, the B vitamin deficiency. There's other foods bugging them on top of the the weed, of course. Um, we fixed the gut, supplemented with zinc. Zinc came up, started absorbing zinc from his food better by fixing the gut and having the activated B vitamins to run your detox pathways. Copper came down a year later, it was totally fine. So that was you know, a kind of a an autism from a sort of a different thing. It wasn't sort of an immune thing, it was just his poor brain was getting totally whacked by what was going on. Um, a little bit like the full back pain. 10 people come in with that as a you know major complaint, autism could be. It's like, look, we got to treat them 10 different ways. Can't do the same thing for everybody because everybody's totally different, and sort of the same thing when it comes to this brain health and and and brain disease.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I understand it's an individual case-by-case basis. Um, but you've mentioned, and we haven't got there yet, but you've mentioned the gut quite a few times. So in that boy, for example, uh did you end up being celiac for for life, or was that reversible as well?
SPEAKER_00:Well, that's a really good question. Uh, and that's a question I've asked myself a lot. So, like with celiac, uh, we go, okay, well, it got flipped on. Well, you know, what the kind of thought being is forever has been, well, once it gets turned on, it's always turned on. Um, but you go, well, geez, this whole epigenetic thing, we can turn off bad genes, right? That's what we do every day with this kind of stuff. That's how meditation works, you know, and those kind of things. It works through epigenetics. We turn off the bad ones, turn on the good ones. So is it possible to turn off that bad gene once it gets turned on? It kind of seems like it should be able to be turned off, but common wisdom says no, but maybe nobody's really looked at that. Also, things like that MTHFR gene SNP that the predispose, we can't methylate things, methylation, V vitamins, detox, epigenetics. Um well, geez, we can probably turn that off, can't we? We're not stuck with it being there and disrupting everything, and we should probably should be able to, but nobody's really looked at that. So that's a really great question. Where it's like, well, we know we can turn off bad genes, but gosh, can we turn off those kind of bad genes?
SPEAKER_01:Be nice if it happens, and it seems like it might fit the picture. Yeah, maybe maybe those cases of spontaneous healing are actually epigenetic gene switches. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, well, let's let's let's delve into the gut then. So we've mentioned this a few times. Um, I always like to think of this the sort of the the history of a person, you know, they're a bubbly kid, uh, and then maybe they start eating too many candies, maybe they think a little too much ice cream, the digestion just doesn't just get worse and worse. They go into the teenagers, they start making their own food choices, bad food choices, and then they end up, you know, in their 20s or 30s of the psoriasis gets bad when they're stressed, they get joint swelling or whatever, and brain fog. What's going on in the gut? And then what can we do to to fix it in cases of autoimmune disease?
SPEAKER_00:And and and I think um uh a little bigger picture would be how can we fix it in a way that will fix everything? All right, well, let's go. Which is a big like, really? You can do that? And I go, oh, the body's so smart, right? And so uh a big part of the gut function is what they call the intestinal microbiome, the mix of the good, bad bugs in the gut. Uh, just like anything, we want a lot of the good, not a lot of the bad. And we don't want that kind of mix. Well, there's ever so many things that will throw that off. Uh stress throws it off, antibiotics, of course, motorns and advils, lots of other meds uh will throw that off. And uh when we lose that mix, the disrupted intestinal microbiome called uh dysbiosis is a huge driver of then damage to the gut dysfunction of the gut, which then uh because 80% of the immune system surrounds the gut, it throws off the immune system. But truly, the disruption of the intestinal microbiome will throw off the microbiome every place else in the body. And it turns out every body part has its own unique microbiome. So, like the palm of the dominant hand microbiome is different than the non-dominant hand palm, back of the hand different than palm, elbow crease different than axilla. They all got breast tissue has it, everybody has it. And so when you get this disrupted intestinal microbiome, it tends to create that leaky gut. And there is uh very specific things that we should get from the gut into the bloodstream that do work, like nutrients and proteins and other kinds of things. There's very specific things that we do not want to let into the bloodstream, like toxins, um bad bugs and those kind of things. And so disrupted intestinal microbiome, leaky gut, uh, toxins get into the bloodstream, start creating issues like those old toxic estrogens, old toxic copper we talked about, but also there's infections like Coxacy virus. Uh, they're called enteroviruses. Coxacci is one of them. And these enteroviruses, you really don't want to let them get from the gut, past the leaky gut wall into the bloodstream and go places because they start creating all these issues. Um, I think cocsacky uh virus is a real good example. Uh, I check it on every blood test of folks that chronic health issues. There's six different kinds, one through six. Coxacchi B, like in boy B4, if it translocates from the gut to the bloodstream, it likes to go to the cells in the pancreas that create insulin. And then it dings them, it hurts them, they stop making insulin. Here's type one diabetes, insulin diabetes. Coxacy B3 likes to translocate from the gut to the bloodstream, go the breast tissue, disrupts the breast microbiome and it drives breast cancer. And you go, wow, this is so cool. Now we're getting these connections that are involved with everything. Okay. Well, the original data um that came out in 2018 was that um there's more vitamin D receptors in the gut than any other body part. Every cell in the body's got receptors for vitamin D because it's so important for every cell in the body. But there's more of the receptors for it in the gut than anybody else. Because if a something's going to do work, it has to attach to a receptor on a cell to tell the cell what to do. Well, it turns out the vitamin D receptors can become resistant to vitamin D. So you could have all the vitamin D in the world, it can't attach and do the work. Akin to insulin resistance, where you have insulin hormone to control blood sugar, every cell in the body has a receptor for insulin. But if their receptors are resistant, they can't attach and do the work. It's almost like you don't have insulin, blood sugar goes up, you're moving to diabetes. Well, what the researchers said was this is how you fix it. And if you fix it this way, you fix the gut in the way that exactly what you want to do to get rid of autoimmune disease of the gut, also to Clias and Crohn's disease, but also they get rid of these really troublesome infections called H. pylori and C div that are recurrent and they just can mess things up more and more as time goes on. Well, you could do that. Well, how you fix that, how you make the vitamin D receptor sensitive again, is what I call the foundational triad. Daily vitamin D, daily probiotics, and daily use of a supplement called butyrate. And butyrate is made by the good bacteria in the gut, called the short-chain fatigue.
SPEAKER_01:It's a byproduct of bacteria respiration, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. And butyrate almost exclusively works through epigenetics. So it is made by our body, our good bacteria, to basically turn off bad genes and turn on good genes, every cell in the body. This is why it prevents and kills cancer cells five ways. This is why it does all the stuff it does. But use the three together, it makes the vitamin D receptors sensitive. And now with an optimal vitamin D level, it can test and do the work. And they said, Well, this is what you want to do for this stuff, but it looks like this is so important. This is probably what you want to do for everything. Well, six months later, actually, the same researchers came out with an article and they used nuclear weapon in the title of the article. They said, This correction of the gut this way is a quote-unquote nuclear weapon against metabolic syndrome, diabetes, obesity, and cholesterol issues, which is epidemic proportions. A couple of years later, the Harvard Journal of Psychiatry comes out and says, Well, geezy, if you can fix the gut this way, and I read that and go, Well, that's what happens when you fix the vitamin D receptor resistance. You can treat major depressive disorder with this, has such an impact on brain. Another psych journal comes out a year later and goes, Well, geezy, if you can fix the gut this way, it changes personalities. People become more outgoing and more social. I just did a huge um uh series of videos about breast cancer prevention. Because truly the key to breast cancer prevention, not just early detection. We can prevent 90% of all breast cancer before it ever starts. Well, here's this big article. They talk about how breast cancer happens, and they go, hey, the way you fix this, because it comes from a leaky gut gust disruption, is three things vitamin D probiotics and this thing called butyrate. Now, they never mentioned vitamin D receptor resistance, but they said this will fix that because of fixing vitamin D receptor resistance, right? And so you go, well, that's a cool central mechanism. But then also, what if you know that when vitamin D attaches to a vitamin D receptor, it produces a protein called the vitamin D responsive element. It goes to other genes and turns off bad genes, turns on good genes. All these genes are what they call vitamin D responsive genes. So by fixing it this way, you've actually turned off every gene that predisposes to type 1 diabetes and every gene that predisposes to autism, one shot just by fixing this. So you go, man, this is such a central mechanism. What happens is you build the good, get rid of the bad. The lining of the gut will stop making things that create inflammation. So this is where the gut it becomes this thing where people hear, so it becomes an engine of inflammation, the gut. Well, this the gut's so disrupted is it a lining of the gut actually starts making chemicals that create more inflammation. And then the gut's more unhappy, and then it makes more inflammation. Fixing it this way stops that production. And F-kap beta is one of the big ones that you stop producing. But then the gut starts making important proteins called antimicrobial peptides, AMPs, that will keep bad bugs down for good. Because now they got a protein made by the gut wall that stamp them down forever. Now you got that intestinal microbiome where you want it to, the gut's healthy like you want it to, but now you lock the gut in such a good place. It really does a lot to fix all this stuff. But also, this is what you want to do to prevent stuff like prevent breast cancer, prevent type 1 diabetes, autism, all these other kinds of things. So this is that central mechanism that can fix the gut in a way that kind of fixes everything.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. And so this isn't this isn't your discovery, right? This is a quite a well-known thing. It's been is out in the literature. People are using certain combinations. Is that right?
SPEAKER_00:Or is it 2018 is when it came out, uh, this original uh article. Uh, I did a blog post on my uh website, uh, part one, part two, vitamin D does it again. Uh, and I kind of just so floored that vitamin D and the receptors are involved this way. But then all this other data has come out, including this data on breast cancer. That's only about two years old. Some of it was like three years old. Uh, but all this data just keeps coming out about uh vitamin D receptors and their central mechanism here and how everything works. And um obviously vitamin D has to be there to attach to the receptors as well, but it is a really big central mechanism for how all this stuff works.
SPEAKER_01:And what's the sort of protocols? I see someone's listening to this, and I know they shouldn't be self-subprescribing, they should work with uh with a health professional. You know, people take how much vitamin D, what type of probiotics, and how much butyrate?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so you know, ideally when you're using things that should already be in the body, vitamin D should already be in the body from sun exposure. Unfortunately, it's very hard to do that nowadays. Uh, we should have good bacteria, probiotics in our body. You know, they get all disrupted by all these meds and stress and all this. Well, we should have the good bacteria that make the butyrate. It's already there. So all the naturally occurring things. And so when you tend to use naturally occurring things, the body tends to like it a lot. The body kind of goes, geez, I wish I could do that on my own, but I sure appreciate you giving it to me because that feels really good. Whereas we put things in the body that are not already there, which is typical of more of the medications that people are offered. The body really sees them as toxins. That's why there's so many downsides, so many side effects of medications that you're putting in the body because they're not already there. Um, so they're typically very well tolerated. Now, vitamin D, uh, everybody's different on kind of the the dose, a daily, daily dose they need. I usually say between five and ten thousand IU per day is a good place to go. Uh uh, vitamin D is so important, a little bit goes a long way. So if you're underdosing, well, at least you're better than where you were before you started. It doesn't matter, it's not going to make a big difference. Um, ideally, you want to like start a certain dose of vitamin D, wait six to eight weeks, and then test it on a blood test. And you want the blood test results to be ideally between 70 and 90. Uh, 25 hydroxy, 25 OH vitamin D. And any lab can run it.
SPEAKER_01:And you is that vitamin D and K3? Is that something you recommend?
SPEAKER_00:Or uh uh uh it's a vitamin D vitamin D3 is what I like to treat with.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, um K2.
SPEAKER_00:And then K2 ideally is made by the good bacteria in the gut too. Yes, to help it get absorbed. I usually don't use the K2 part because I'm like, well, we're gonna fix the intestinal microbiome. It's gonna start making these these other things like serotonin and GABA and melatonin and butyrate eventually. Well, it's gonna make the K2 also kind of a thing. Um, so you wait six to eight weeks, you test. And then for about for every 10 points you're lower than you should be, you add uh a thousand IU per day, and then ideally retest again in eight to ten weeks, get a good steady state, you're fine. Check it in six months to make sure that's still the right dose for you. Um probiotics. I like to alternate two different kinds about every three months until everything's great, then you don't need any more uh live probiotics, uh, where they have the live bacteria, but they can get decimated going through the stomach because of the acidity. So you tend to want to use ones that have high amounts of the good bacteria, so at least something gets past the stomach into the intestine to do work, and then alternate that with what they call spore-based probiotics. Uh, I like one called megaspore. And uh spore-based probiotics are the good bacteria, but in a spore form, and they can go past the stomach acidity and not get disrupted. They get to the intestine, that's when they open up and do their business, and that's works great. And then butyrate uh basically comes in capsule form. There's two different kinds. I like one's connected to a sodium molecule, one's connected to calcium magnesium molecules. Uh, they both have butyrate. Uh, the sodium tends to be is not an acid y thing, and it tends to be maybe more well-tolerated sometimes when people get really messed up guts, but it's also more well-tolerated by kids because it's not as stinky. Things that are acidic tend to be really stinky, and so that calmag butyrate, stinky, sodium butyrate, not so much. And um, but that combo is really nice. Now, ideally, you probably don't need the probiotic forever because once you get the good bacteria numbers good, you don't need anymore. You get good bacteria numbers good, you don't even need the butyrate anymore because you're making it on your own. Uh, I will say that um uh this butyrate is so important, but there's only one food source of butyrate, and that's butter. And this is why I think every culture in the world uses some kind of butter. Most cultures cow's milk, but it could be goat's milk, it could be yak butter in the Himalayas, right? Um, every culture uses butter because it's the only food source of butyrate. Okay. Doesn't that with the dairy though? Doesn't that sort of conflict with some of the dairy? Uh thank you for saying that, because uh the the things in foods that tend to create problems, these autoimmune diseases and sensitivity are the proteins. That's the ones that are the biggest issue, not the fats. And butter is 99.99% fat. It doesn't have the proteins that will cause issues. Now, every once in a while, that 0.01% that's protein, somebody might be so sensitive to cow's milk dairy proteins. That might be enough to bug them, but for most people, it's not. And so this is where like people could develop a sensitivity to sesame seeds, but not sesame seed oil.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:That kind of a thing, uh, because it's the fat, not the protein.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Well, talking of diet, so we those are three things that a person can take uh externally. I like what you said, if we can get the body to produce it internally, then that's even better if we can get it all naturally. But what about what a person eats? Is that something you should be looking at as well?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah. Um, and then we had a nice conversation before this, before we started recording how crummy some of the food is that's available. It's just so toxic and it's so highly processed that there's no nutritional value whatsoever. Um, there's no good cereal in the morning. You know, um, it really is just a hype, you know, when I was growing up, cereal, the healthy part of the healthy way to start your day. Well, it might be part of it, but that's not the healthy part. You know, kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01:Um, people eat oatmeal, like um you're gonna have uh steel cut oats, that kind of thing. Is that does that fall under that category of not healthy?
SPEAKER_00:You know, it can be hype. Protein can be good in fiber, but there is a high likelihood that uh it's you know going to be full of toxic things, uh just additives and and and food colorings and these kind of things. Uh there definitely is healthy oats, right? Um, but not all of them are healthy. And so it's really easy to get a lot of foods in that have no nutritional value of a lot of toxins. Um in the United States, where I'm at, we talk about the SAD diet, the standard American diet. Now, unfortunately, that tends to be not just the standard American diet, the SAD diet, but this is part of the industrialization of the world where people start eating these processed foods versus the ones that the historically they've eaten, which have been healthy. Um, and you know, they that's part of this getting sick part. I remember I was in uh um, I've been in Thailand, fortunately, multiple times. And when I've been in Thailand, like let's say 20, 30 years ago, um, oh my gosh, the food's the best. I'd eat on the street. It's just so fresh. It was there's no refrigeration. It was picked that day, brought into the city at the top, and it is fantastic. Well, the the more well-to-do teenagers in Thai society, they're sitting there in the Kentucky fried chicken eating that. And you're like, geez, I just got this incredible meal for 80 cents. And the Kentucky fried chicken is like eight bucks, seven bucks, right? And and and I'm like, how silly, right? I mean, like, but but they're like, well, I have the money to pay for this, and this is what we do as a more affluent part of the society. And I'm like, oh, that's like the worst thing you want to do. Um, and and so all this fast food, how they process food, and that is so bad. And so it's very important to try to eat um as healthy as you can, not easy. Uh, the environmental working group is a group that puts out every year the the the healthy 15 and the dirty dozen.
SPEAKER_01:The dirty dozen, yeah. I'm familiar with that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the dirty dozen is like the 12 things that if you can, you probably want to go organic because they're so full of toxins. The clean 15 is kind of the things that just inherently tend to be cleaner, and you probably don't need to spend your money on organic that stuff, kind of a thing. So oftentimes it's picking and choosing because eating healthy, unfortunately, is more expensive. Uh, that's just how the system has been sort of rigged. But uh, you know, you do your best. I find that, you know, uh you do your best with that, and then you add some of these other things like do your meditation, your repetitive prayer, your deep breathing, your progressive muscle relaxation, get outside, get into nature. Oh my gosh, does that fix things? Get a couple supplements going that are ones that get at these central mechanisms that fix everything at the same time. Don't go one supplement for one thing, one supplement for one thing, get 20 things going and miss all the central mechanisms. You know, you'll save a lot of money and you'll do get a lot more bang for effort, the central mechanisms, and you start putting all this stuff together, and that's what's going to give you a really big bang for your effort.
SPEAKER_01:And my central mechanisms and supplements, are you talking about those three, the vitamin D, the probiotics, and the butcherate? For for example, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Those are kind of you know central mechanism stuff that can get at everything at the same time.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, go to the go to the core, go to the gut, and uh and most things will be taken care of. Okay. So let's say someone's listened to this podcast, and I mean, I'm hoping they've heard something new because I haven't heard some of this stuff before. So this is really, really good. Um, what would be, if they're a clinician, what would be their next step to finding out more about this, potentially from what you offer or or what else is out there?
SPEAKER_00:Well, um I want to change the way that autoimmune disease and chronic disease is dealt with worldwide. Not just a pill for every ill, a bandage medicine for everything, but also I want there to be somebody in every community that knows how to do this. Because if there's not somebody in your community that knows how to do this, you you'll you'll you'll you won't know that we know where this stuff comes from. You won't know that it's actually fixable because you're probably told by somebody that we don't know where it came from and it's not fixable. Um, and so I think education is really important. So I'm trying to educate both medical and non-medical people about this stuff. Um, you know, for medicine to change, it's it's gonna have to come from a demand of the um consumers. It's kind of like any big industry. Change only happens when consumers demand change. And I think this is the way the medical, when consumers are demanding change, no longer a pill for every ill, then medicine will change. This it started happening. Uh, we've got a long way to go. But uh, for non-medical people on my website, we have a free online educational email course, uh, which is seven emails, only about a six to eight minute reading each, one email a day for seven days. You can go through them as slow or fast as you want. But everyone takes a deep dive into why this stuff happens and then tells you sort of what you can do to turn it around. So here's epigenetics, here's the stress hormone cortisol, here's infections that do this, here's the gut, here's how foods can bug you, here's how environmental toxins will do this, here's this estrogen dominance, the hormone stuff. Uh, so you know, whoa, we know where this stuff comes from. And hey, I got some tools to actually turn around myself. Uh, but also uh we have a more advanced course for non-medical people, but also we have multiple levels of courses for medical people so that they can actually be educated in how to do this and then take that back to their community and really you know make a change in their community. Uh, because the community needs this, it is just rampant, whether it's autism, developmental delay, ADD, ADHD, you know, bipolar schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, all the brain stuff in kids, autoimmune disease, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, but then of course the adult populations are having such a hard time as well.
SPEAKER_01:And who are you pitching that to? Are you pitching to MDs? Um, could they get sort of um, I'm not sure what it's called in the in the US, but continued education units for taking your course? Or is it more um sort of uh uh outside their core curriculum learning? I'm not sure. Like, where does it fit into for health practitioners?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's really for anybody. Uh MDs, DOs, nurse practitioners, uh natural paths, chiropractors, uh, they all sort of have uh an ability to really, you know, make a big impact on this kind of stuff. Um, nurse practitioners kind of it as part of their training are more holistically minded. Like osteopaths tend to be more holistically minded. Now, in osteopathic medicine, now it's so, you know, basically MDs and DOs are the same. A lot of DOs kind of lose the manual medicine skills, which I think are incredibly wonderful. And I'm so happy to hear you do that, whereby you can be a DO and become a neurosurgeon and not do any of the stuff, you know, that you would do that if you weren't an MD, let's say. Um, but it is kind of different for MDs. Uh it's just a concept that they haven't they've been kind of trained differently nowadays. Um, and so it's a concept shift where maybe it's not that way for more holistically minded nurse practitioners, chiropractors, natural paths, these kind of things. But uh doesn't mean docs you know can't learn this stuff. And I what I find interesting is um I think you know, this functional medicine that I do and how I teach this, it's really the most scientifically based of the medical specialties. Uh I've I've lectured this for decades now, and every time I check, it's all the same numbers that 70% of what gets done in more traditional idolpathic medicine, 70% of what's done every day is not based on science. It's based on what they were taught in school that they assume was based on the science, because the person that told them that was really smart. But they were taught their teacher was taught by their teacher, and it's just this is how we've done it forever. This is what we know, but it's not necessarily based on the science kind of a thing. And whereas functional medicine is all science. That's why in my book, which is for non-medical people as well as medical people, I included a hundred different scientific references. So I think it's very important that people understand that this is not just some person's opinion. This is the science. Just like I tried to share with you the science on this vitamin D receptor stuff and the science on you know the intestine microbiome and the science on this folate receptor, alpha autoimmunity driving autism and neurologic issues, is absolutely fascinating. There's so much out there though, which is really cool because there's been this explosion of scientific knowledge over the last 20, 30 years. Um, you can't keep up with everything. So I can never blame any doc for not knowing this stuff because, man, in your specialty, if you could read like a couple articles in a couple of your specialty journals a month, good on you, right? Get to a conference every uh every year. But it's not like this might be in the neurology journal, but a neurologist might not read it because they're like, well, no, this is more uh gut, and that's not my area. My area is the brain. This is an article about gut, this is an article about autoimmune disease. Well, that's you know, not my thing except for MS. Um, but it's in their literature. And so when I talk about these studies, it's kind of in the journal of rheumatology, the journal of neurology, the journal of endocrinology. It's just that there are articles that might get passed over because they seem to be not quite what that person does, even though it's in their journal.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, isn't that crazy? So, you know, they talk about this delay of like 10, 11 years between the the science coming out and it being adopted by uh mainstream medicine. Right. Even if it is in the literature, it might not be adopted by mainstream medicine because they just don't connect the dots between those articles and what they do in the day-to-day practice.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. That is so that's spot on.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I remember one of my lecturers talking about um well, I think it was type one, it could have been type two, but I think it was type one, where they did this basically like uh clonic irrigation, but in the small in the small intestine, in the duodenum in particular, and then they repopulated it with some sort of bacteria and it reversed the the diabetes. And it was a small study, but at the time when it got published, it just wasn't the way that the big research was going. And just no, no one picked up on it. And it was like, this was fascinating. What happened, you know?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and there's a study on this thing called Tudka, uh, which is made by the liver. Uh Tudka is a bio secondary bile acid, but it's also um a chaperone molecule, the chaperone molecule, which then it's tied into why we get all these epidemic of all this chronic stuff. It's tied into every chronic disease. So if the liver can't make enough, um, bad things happen, including uh like preterm infants don't livers don't make as much tutka as term babies, so they're more like a type 1 diabetes. Kids at birth that get jaundice, the liver gets dinged, liver doesn't make tutka, they have a 25% increased risk of type 1 diabetes. Well, Harvard did the study now 16 years ago, where uh they took the mice model of type 1 diabetes and they gave them this real toxic chemical that killed all the beta islet cells, so they stopped making insulin, and they gave them this TUDCA. So supplement is on my website, it's in my store. I use it all the time. And um uh if you can give Tuk within 30 days of killing those beta islet cells, every pancreas woke up to make insulin again, 100%. And they wrote this article, and then it was in like the Harvard, sort of like the newsletter that goes out, and they go, you know, here's this inexpensive naturally occurring compound. We're always looking for things that might help type 1 diabetes, the total reversed uh 100% of the diabetes in this mouse model. If this uh supplement ever became available as a prescription medicine, we'd really have something. And I'm like, you guys aren't gonna use this until it becomes a prescription. Even you figure this out, and the and the company that made the tatka that they use in the study 16 years ago is Body Bio. It's the same one that's on my website. But they're not gonna use it unless it becomes a prescription medicine, which is so sad, but so like telling of the pharmaceutical industry impact on this stuff. But um uh yeah, this tutka reverses type 1 diabetes. Now, you also got to get rid of that cocsack virus that got in there from the gut. Uh, I use a Canadian broad spectrum antimicrobial called PA structured silver solution. Get it out of there, gotta fix the immune system because when the immune system came to visit to see what was going on there, um, the macrophages, type one, type two, type one causes inflammation, type two gets rid of it. The immune system comes to investigate, and then it gets kind of confused, and it actually turns itself into the pro-inflammatory version. And you go, the immune system shouldn't have come to investigate. That's just gonna make it worse, right? Like we talked about before. And you got to do these kind of different things, but uh um yeah, Harvard published this like 16 years ago, and then nobody knows it. Even Harvard doesn't use it. Uh uh that's really sad. But then this Tutka kills cancer cells on top of the it works through epigenetics and it does this uh uh chaperoning thing that's kind of good for everything. So I use I use this one a ton, um, including um just about every kid that I see with an autoimmune thing, uh, autism, juvenile rheumatoarthritis, you name it with the thing, uh, almost universally they're all moving to type 1 diabetes. So their pancreas isn't making insulin like they shouldn't. And oftentimes they'll actually have insulin levels of zero. But fortunately, there's one to three years after the pancreas basically starts making completely before you get a window. Uh in adults is three to seven years. Uh, you have this window. Um, and we haven't lost a kid yet. You use the TUD cook, get rid of the infections, fix the gut, this kind of stuff. And we haven't lost one kid to type one diabetes, even though they're all moving in that direction. Many of them are sort of technically there already, kind of. But uh, I think that's a great example of how you know the body is so smart and it can fix things so well if you give it the opportunity, even these things that you know you you know, well, you can't fix that. Honestly, you'd be surprised.
SPEAKER_01:And what is it, a supplement?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it just comes in a capsule form. Yeah, it's it's uh all caps, T U D C A Tudka, and um it's short for taurel, tauro, urso, deoxycholic acid. And so um secondary bile acids helps us digest fats and that kind of stuff. Um turns out though, so a big central mechanism to this epidemic of all chronic diseases is because the body's 80% protein, inside the cells is the endoplasmic reticulum that makes new healthy proteins. Well, the stuff we talked about, like environmental toxins and stress and stuff, creates inflammation uh within the endoplasmic reticulum. They call it endoplasmic reticulum stress. And um because endoplasmic reticulums where healthy new proteins are made, hormones are protein, you know, bone is 80% collagen protein, you know, so we're all just protein, protein, protein. But what happens is you get this misfolded protein response because of this uh uh inflammation stress within the endoplasmic reticulum. You take this long chain of amino acids, it should be a protein, misfold it, and it's just a glob. So it's not that protein, but it gunks up the endoplasmic reticulum even worse, creating more inflammation, more stress, more misfolding. And so what makes this TUDCA this super central mechanism and called the chaperone molecule is it chaperones the protein through the production process so they don't get misfolded. And what they see, and this is why if you Google like uh you know PubMed and all this with Tudka, well it helps reverse autism, all the brain-related stuff as a kid. It uh prevents type 2 diabetes and type 1 diabetes, it kills, it prevents cancer, prevents all gut stuff, and it prevents autoimmune disease, uh, prevents cataracts, macal degeneration, it prevents heart attacks and strokes, it prevents uh and can reverse dementia and Alzheimer's and and and MS and Parkinson's, it's tied into all this kind of stuff, including everything I didn't mention, because with this misfolded protein response being such a central mechanism in chronic disease, the Tutka is a chapra molecule, undoes all that. And um, so it's something I use an absolute ton in folks. And um invariably, kind of like the brain always gets dragged into the mess, the liver always gets dragged into the mess. Um, and uh can't make all these important proteins the body needs, it can't make glutathione, it can't make this tudka. Um, and so when you use the tutka, you're kind of giving the liver what it needs to be healthy so it can make all these other things, including eventually it makes its own tutka again. But um uh yeah, you might want to uh uh there's a couple of blog posts I uh wrote about it, but it's it's really fascinating. If you do Tudka and name some disease, you're probably gonna find some really cool articles about it. And would a healthy person take it? Like, do you take it? I do it every day. Yeah. Every day. Yeah. Um, you know, kind of like preventative stuff. Even though I was, you know, ideally this expert on autoimmune disease prevention reversal for five years before I figured out that I had Hashimoto's. Oh, you do? Like, oh my God, everybody has this. Even though I have it. Oh, everybody's got this stuff. And if you don't got it, you're probably heading that direction.
SPEAKER_01:So, what's your supplement stack? And it might, if it obviously is going to be unique to you, but do you feel like there is some core supplements that most people should be taking? And if so, do you take them?
SPEAKER_00:So every day I do the foundational triad. Uh, typically, if I'm trying to reverse disease on that butyrate, I would dose twice a day, like one twice a day for kids, two, twice a day for adults, once a day probiotic, once a day vitamin D. I do that every day. I just don't take the second dose of the butyrate because I'm kind of doing it more for uh you know prevention, maintaining health. I take my tudka every day. Uh kind of vary things depending on sort of what's going on.
SPEAKER_01:Umils, not so much.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I take a fish oil every day. Uh my wife and I both do, but uh she has Alzheimer's in the family. I have Parkinson's in my family. Right. We take a uh an omega-3, it kind of helps with with sort of everything, right? Inflammation all over the place. Um, and um that's that's my kind of go-to everyday stuff. You know, I think these kind of things are are getting at that central mechanism stuff so much, it really helps us kind of fix everything all at the same time. Um, because you know, you go, hey, you know, the tuca helps you make healthy new proteins, the gut. Well, you can make a lot of things yourself, including um, you know, a lot of the people I'll see that have the hormone deficiencies, the hormone imbalances, uh, like you know, women that aren't making estrogen very well, aren't making progesterone, aren't making pregnanolone or DHEA and all these kind of things. Um, well, the tuka helps you make healthy new proteins. And so if you fix the gut, you fix cortisol. Well, now the hormone symphony has a chance to really balance, but without adequate tuca, you can't make healthy new hormones with a protein. Use tuka for a while, they start making progesterone and estrogen and DHEA and pregnantalone all by themselves all over again. They use those things as part of the healing thing, but eventually they start making them on their own, kind of a thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, well, uh, people want to find out more about you. Your website is dr dr davidbilstrom.com. And in there, I believe everyone can find what they what they're looking for. But if you're a clinician and you want uh more in-depth training, you do that website forward slash experts course, and then that will take it. You're right, it does have CME credit. Okay, we got that.
SPEAKER_00:We got that. You have to submit all your scientific data that supports what you just are teaching. Yeah, and they go, Yeah, that's science.
SPEAKER_01:Here's your CME credits. Yep. That's it. Yeah, I do that for I have I teach a course for scoliosis, and I each each state in the US, I have to go to a different uh accrediting body, and then they look through everything, they accredit it, and then I go to another accrediting body for a different state. So I've been there. But okay, that's good. That's good to hear that your course has been through that process, been vetted externally, and meets the requirements for CME, uh, or we call them CEUs. But um that's really good to know because a lot of practitioners they might be interested in this sort of stuff, but they might not want to take any uh these courses because the hours they put in don't count for their continued education, which is something we have to do every year. So absolutely. Well, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. It's been a fascinating conversation, and I really appreciate the work you do. Oh, well, thank you for having me. It's been my pleasure. Thank you for joining me in my conversation with Dr. Bellstrom. Now, if you've enjoyed listening to and learning from this podcast, please leave a comment and you can also leave a suggestion for a future podcast guest that you would like us to feature. If you're an Apple, you can leave a comment and up to a five-star review if you're so inclined. Now remember, if you want my direct help, just send me an email, ed at epaget.com or visit my website edpaget.com. And while you're there, you can learn a little bit more how I can help you make your lifestyle your medicine.