8 Pillars for Building Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | If you were to think about the major pillars of remaining healthy, especially when one

00:00:08.520 | is exposed to colds and flus from kids, in your case, also in the intensive care unit

00:00:14.240 | where people are coming in specifically because they're sick, often with infections like

00:00:18.980 | colds and flus or worse, you need to take specific precautions to avoid getting sick.

00:00:25.180 | What do you think of as the fundamental layer of keeping a healthy immune system to avoid

00:00:30.880 | getting sick?

00:00:31.880 | And then we'll talk about how to get over and move through being sick more quickly.

00:00:36.640 | Yes.

00:00:37.640 | Well, the question is, how do you avoid getting sick in terms of infectious diseases?

00:00:43.480 | And as it turns out, the answer to that is actually the same in terms of avoiding getting

00:00:48.560 | sick for anything.

00:00:50.320 | And it sort of goes to the pillars, as you call it.

00:00:54.000 | In my mind, there's actually a physician that I know very well, just outside of Stanford,

00:00:59.000 | actually, in a place called Weimar, Weimar University, Dr. Neil Nedley.

00:01:03.320 | And he's actually coined this mnemonic called "New Start."

00:01:08.800 | And each of those letters, to me, in my mind, is something that I go to when I want to improve

00:01:13.560 | health in people in general.

00:01:15.900 | So "N" starts for nutrition.

00:01:18.040 | We can talk about nutrition and what that does to the human body, obviously, as natural

00:01:24.040 | as possible, staying away from processed foods.

00:01:26.480 | That's something there.

00:01:28.320 | Exercise is "E."

00:01:30.200 | And when I'm talking about exercise, I'm talking about the understanding that we have regarding

00:01:35.840 | exercise, not to build muscle, necessarily be stronger.

00:01:39.800 | I'm talking about exercise in terms of health.

00:01:42.100 | And that has more of a J-hook type of picture.

00:01:45.880 | What I mean by J-hook is if you're not doing any exercise, you're going to have higher

00:01:49.840 | levels of inflammation.

00:01:50.840 | As soon as you start to do some exercise, even mild to moderate exercise, the amount

00:01:56.560 | of inflammation in your body starts to come down.

00:01:59.480 | But as you start to do more and more exercise, you do have to be careful in terms of your

00:02:04.640 | general health.

00:02:05.640 | This is exactly what happens with athletes.

00:02:08.880 | They have to be very careful that when they're doing that type of elite athletic exercise,

00:02:12.820 | that they're not sick on the day of performance.

00:02:14.840 | And so that's an issue.

00:02:15.840 | So I'm referring to just mild to moderate exercise is good.

00:02:20.440 | The next one would be "W," water.

00:02:23.640 | So this is something that's really interesting.

00:02:25.240 | Obviously, it seems pretty obvious.

00:02:28.120 | But not only the use of internal water, but external water.

00:02:31.180 | So in that area, we can talk about sauna, cold plunge, things of that nature that can

00:02:35.360 | actually help with our immune system.

00:02:37.080 | That's a whole interesting area of discussion.

00:02:39.840 | It involves the innate immune system.

00:02:41.480 | It involves interferon.

00:02:43.240 | There's a lot of history and data that goes back over 100 years on how that's been used.

00:02:47.880 | "START," S-T-A-R-T.

00:02:50.040 | So S is sunlight.

00:02:52.080 | I've been a real proponent of getting people outside into the sun, and we can talk a lot

00:02:58.040 | about that.

00:02:59.040 | There's a lot of interesting research, not only in terms of sunlight, in terms of influenza,

00:03:03.700 | but also COVID, and just about any natural disease, a lot of interesting information

00:03:08.280 | there.

00:03:09.280 | "T," stands for the old term called "temperance," which you may recall is a term that we use

00:03:15.080 | to prevent us from taking in toxins into our body.

00:03:18.380 | That's a whole other discussion.

00:03:20.000 | So staying away from things that would make you sick.

00:03:22.320 | "A" is air.

00:03:24.440 | And when I talk about air, it's not just what we focus on, which is keeping bad things out

00:03:28.600 | of the air.

00:03:29.600 | So having fresh air.

00:03:30.600 | But there's a whole discussion to be had in terms of air that has good qualities in it.

00:03:36.360 | So there's a whole area of research that looks at, for instance, phytoncides, which are chemicals

00:03:41.040 | that come off of trees.

00:03:42.920 | You may have heard of forest bathing.

00:03:44.440 | They've done a lot of research in Japan on this.

00:03:47.360 | And getting out into nature, there are actual chemicals that are in the air that you can

00:03:51.320 | breathe that actually have an impact on your innate immune system.

00:03:53.920 | Finally, "R," and we'll get into "R" and "T" at the end, "R" is rest.

00:03:59.080 | Now this goes without saying, but people who have good sleep habits are going to have much

00:04:03.880 | better immune systems, whether you're talking about the antibody response after a vaccine

00:04:10.080 | versus just the number of times per year you're sick.

00:04:13.840 | There's very good data, very good research that shows that getting seven, eight hours

00:04:17.840 | of sleep a night is going to be very beneficial for your immune system.

00:04:20.920 | It has to do with cortisol and beta receptors and all sorts of things.

00:04:24.960 | And the last "T," which is trust.

00:04:27.680 | And for some, it is trust in a higher power, trust in God.

00:04:32.400 | These are the sorts of things that can help us relieve stress.

00:04:37.080 | If someone else is helping you, if someone else is there, "T" would also include community,

00:04:42.160 | people that are around you.

00:04:43.460 | These are some of the less tangible ways of measuring it.

00:04:48.240 | But when someone asks me a question, "What can I do to avoid getting sick?"

00:04:52.520 | And as you just asked me in terms of influenza, there's a lot of specific things we can talk

00:04:55.840 | about, but that's where I start out with the pillars of health.

8 Pillars for Building Your Immune System | Dr. Roger Seheult & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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