Hi ,
We are hearing the word autoimmunity a lot these days. More and more patients are coming in saying they have autoimmunity. What does this mean exactly? Is it some sort of government rating that makes your car immune from smog regulations, or some sort of protection program for illegal immigrants? No, auto immunity means that your immune system is attacking you. The white blood immune cells have become confused. Instead of protecting you from bad bacteria and viruses, they are attacking your healthy cells.
This is not as crazy as it sounds, because your immune cells do this even when you are completely healthy in certain ways. Besides attacking the bad stuff entering your system to keep you healthy, another job of the immune cells is to destroy your old and dying cells that no longer work right. They tag the dying cells and then send in the cell-muncher-killer cells to melt down and burn up the tagged cells. This way you do not have a bunch of dead cells stuck in with all the healthy cells. So attacking your own cells is not completely out of line for these killer immune cells. The problem is when they start attacking healthy cells.
How do these cells know who to attack and who to leave alone? Immune cells do everything by feel. Even though we look at pictures of cells and think they are very nicely packaged little boxes and balls, in truth they are all covered with fuzz. This fuzz acts like Braille identification tags like luggage tags. Immune cells feel these tags and know who the good guys are. Remember the old cells? Their luggage tags got old and broken and consequently can’t be read properly. Anything that does not feel like a good guy is assumed to be a bad guy. Here is where we open a big door to problems.
Sometimes what happens is sticky stuff gets stuck on the luggage tags and makes them feel like bad guys. When that happens, the immune cells attack the healthy cells because they can’t read the luggage tags properly. The most common sticky stuff messing up the cells in the body these days is gluten and casein – the proteins from wheat and milk. Both can be used to make glue commercially, and inside the body they act the same way. It looks like lint collecting on a sweater, only here the sweater is the outer coating of the healthy cell.
When the immune cells attack healthy cells, this is called an autoimmune reaction. If the healthy cells happen to be your thyroid cells, this reaction is called Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. If it is the cells of your joints, it will be called rheumatoid arthritis. In your brain it might be called dementia or Alzheimer’s. In your pancreas it is called late onset type 1 diabetes. Virtually any cell type in the body can become a target, and some fancy disease name is given to it. It is the same process everywhere, but they give it a different name for each different cell type attacked.
Some of you with a bit of physiology training have thought of the big “Hey wait a minute!” in this story. What the heck are sticky things like gluten and casein doing floating around in the body in the first place? They are supposed to be completely broken down in the gut, not sneaking into the blood stream. Yes, you are completely right. They are supposed to be broken down, but too often they aren’t. And the gut lining should keep these trouble makers out of the blood stream – but too often it doesn’t. Our digestive health has become seriously compromised because of our western diet. We eat too much – more than we can digest properly. We eat a boat load of toxic oils, chemicals, and poisons that have no place in a human digestive system. Our GI tracts have become weak and punched full of holes so badly that foreign proteins like gluten and casein just float right in to the inside of our bodies. This is called leaky gut syndrome.
This makes our immune system crazy. It tries to attack all these foreign substances to make us safe. This is called an allergic response to simple foods as these foods that are supposed to never make it past the gut wall start sliding across into the blood stream. The immune system builds up and becomes a firestorm of attack troops trying to get rid of all the foods that don’t belong in the system. This firestorm is experienced by us as inflammation. Anywhere these undigested food particles collect, a mess of really angry immune start a chemical warfare battle to destroy the food invaders. Unfortunately there are a lot of healthy cells that get destroyed as collateral damage in this war.
Inside the gut itself another war is going on. In a healthy gut there are about 500 different kinds of good guy bacteria that cling to the gut wall like a nicely maintained lawn. When everything is healthy, the lawn is strong and dense and is able to keep weeds out. The good guy bacteria keep bad guy bacteria out of the gut by giving them no place to attach and start growing a colony. But in a leaky gut punched full of holes, the “lawn” becomes unhealthy and lots of “weeds” – bad bacteria, start growing. White blood cells living around the gut lining start squeezing through the gut lining to attack the bad bacteria. All this squeezing punches even more holes in the gut, allowing more bad things into the blood stream.
Everything mentioned so far can happen to a normal healthy person. The problem is that about 30% of the population is genetically sensitive to some component of wheat and other grains. This is essentially a genetically programmed allergy. This takes all the stuff we have talked about so far and makes it about 300% worse. The grain protein literally causes the gut walls to tear apart microscopically. So now we have a perfect storm. Overeating, poor digestion, chemical poisons, bad bacteria, and for about a third of the people, a genetic susceptibility all work together to cause a flood of bad food proteins to enter our blood stream triggering an all out immune war. All we know about it is our achy joints, memory problems, tiredness, and inflammation until we show up with an actual diagnosed autoimmune disease.
So what can we do about this horrible cascade of failing health? I went to a weekend seminar on just this subject a few weeks ago. Medicine has nothing but massively destructive drugs to suppress the symptoms, but absolutely nothing for the actual problems going on. Health researchers have found a few substances that calm down the inflammation like Turmeric, Resveratrol, and Vitamin D3. But the only thing really significantly impactful for autoimmune at this time is massive lifestyle changes.
I want to quote a line from the manual of the autoimmune seminar I took recently to demonstrate what I mean. The quote deals with promoting special immune cells that dampen the autoimmune response called TH-3 which increase in response to opioids released in the brain contrasted with its opposite the TH-17 cells which make autoimmune reactions build up and get worse.
“A positive mental attitude, love, appreciation for life, and a positive mental reflection all increase opioids that make a person feel “high on life.” Conversely, a negative attitude, violence, poor relationships, internal mental stress, all promote increased production of interlukin-6 which activates the TH-17 pathway and promotes autoimmunity.” – Kharrazian ©2014
Other major lifestyle factors are getting adequate sleep, getting the right kind of regular exercise (not over training), and maintaining a stable blood sugar response in the body. Autoimmune individuals must also avoid consuming any wheat or other grains, dairy, or other foods they are reactive to. Healing the leaky gut becomes a serious objective and may involve considerable work. But I like how the author of the seminar understood the problem and had seen in his patients that the real game changer was all about the attitudes of each patient.
So what is the big lesson from today’s article? If you want to heal from autoimmune or even to prevent autoimmune, get high on life. Appreciate life. Appreciate and love someone. Get connected in positive relationships. Enjoy what is, instead of obsessing on how you think things should be. The first will make you healthy, while the second will kill you.
Autoimmune disease has been called The Disease of the 21st century. Where do you want to stand with it?
Take care,
David