Everyday Habits for Building Immunity

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Transcript: Everyday Habits for Building Immunity

Season 5, Episode 1  | April 19, 2022

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Welcome back to another episode of Life Time Talks. I’m David Freeman.

And I’m Jamie Martin.

And we’re joined today with Mr. Paul Kriegler. We’re going to be talking about immunity and building it. First, we want to give you a little bit of who Paul is, registered dietician, personal trainer, has worked with Life Time for over 13 years, and throughout college he competed in track and cross country, and has since finished several marathons as well as three Ironman triathlons. So Paul has also served as the Director of Nutritional Products at Life Time, and consults on a number of other scientific health related topics, all underneath the roof of Life Time. Welcome back, Paul.

Good to be here.

How are you? What’s new with you?

I’m doing great.

Good. What’s new? Gosh.

Yeah. What’s going on?

Since last time I was here with you?

Yeah.

I bought a house. I got engaged. I’m going to be a parent.

Wow.

I didn’t know that. That was like breaking news.

Triple trick. Congrats. Right here, exclusive, right here.

Probably not, but exciting. That’s awesome. All right, so today we’re talking about building immunity, which starts with our immune system. So let’s just explain right from the start what is our immune system and its role in our health.

Sure, yeah. The immune system the way I view it, and the way I’ve learned about it, and understand it, is it’s a collection of processes and signals that the body has throughout all of its organ systems that helps protect us from invading pathogens, so things that might make us sick or put our health at risk. And that whole complicated web of systems and signaling processes is designed to help us restore baseline function or homeostasis no matter what that threat is.

And there’s two primary parts of the immune system when we break it down. One is the innate immune system, which is the physical barriers that we have, so it’s our skin, our mucous membranes, and the chemicals that help support those physical structures, like enzymes. There’s mechanical processes like sneezing that help us expel any invading pathogens that we encounter before they can get their way into our bloodstream and into our body where the rest of our immune system, the other half, is our humoral or adaptive immunity, or rather our adaptive or cell mediated immunity. That’s the part of the immune system that actually learns what each pathogen looks like, or what features of that pathogen are, and we can build specific structures or specific cells that kind of tag those antigens, they’re called those pathogens, and identify them so other cells in the immune system can go destroy them or disrupt what they’re trying to do.

Does the immune system– it seems like has memory. So like if I get infection one time and I get it again, my body then knows how to respond, right?

Yeah, it appears to be so. Yeah. For most illnesses that we have lived with for a long time, there seems to be a reasonable amount of memory immunity. Or maybe you might get sick again from a similar bug, but the second time around doesn’t seem to be as severe or as long because your body knows how to deal with it.

Great.

We got a lot of environmental factors and things that we live within that can lead to a compromised immune system. So what are certain things that we can do to be proactive? I mean, we’re going to walk outside. We’re going to come in contact with someone who might have a cold or whatever it may be. What are certain things that we can do to be proactive in our day to day to build our immune system?

Yeah. It really comes down to simplifying modern life into the things that are modern life. So the biggest factors, if you ask– to break it down in simple terms, we need healthy nutrition to just maintain healthy structures and healthy function of our physiology. So we need to have a high quality nutrient dense diet. So diet quality is a major controllable factor that we should all be paying attention to to maintain proper immunity.

We need to get outside. Part of that could be ventilation, it could be direct sunlight. There’s a lot of impacts that sunlight, natural sunlight has on us beyond vitamin D even, that probably helps regulate our circadian rhythm and other processes and systems in our body. We need to sleep way more than most people do. So at least seven hours a night tends to produce the best immune resilience, which is a challenge for a lot of people to get.

We also need to manage our stress. Stress is something that’s very healthy in short bursts and not all the time. However, that’s not always consistent with modern life that we’re living. So we have to actively manage our stressors. We need exercise. Our body does up regulate certain immune processes and abilities when we place little calculated amounts of stress, vis a vis exercise on it, and then allow it to recover. So it’s this learning process of encountering stress or encountering a pathogen, and then recovering and repairing and learning how to respond to that stressor.

I think I’ve covered most of them. So it’s eating a high quality nutrient dense diet, getting adequate rest, getting outside in nature, exercising, and I think even moving more consistently than we do. We do have a very sedentary population. A lot of our jobs and careers are not active anymore. We’re sitting in front of keyboards, and screens, and that sort of thing. We’re not moving around in a non exercise sense as much as we used to.

Yeah, it’s just that movement on a daily basis. I want to go back to– you mentioned getting outside. We have an article on Experience Life coming up it’s called making peace with microbes because the fact is we need them in our bodies. And so you think about our microbiome and those effects, what about like immunity in our microbiomes, or immunity and gut health? Because there is talk of a large portion of our immune system living in our digestive tract.

Yeah. Yeah. The microbiome– so other parts of our body have microbiomes as well. The most well-known and probably the most diverse is in our gut. It’s in our large intestine. And it’s the most involved with immune function, because it’s part of the first barrier, or the first encounter pathway that we have with most of our pathogens that we either breathe in or ingest. They go into our airway and our digestive system, and technically, the digestive system is an external part of our body. It’s a barrier between our bloodstream and the outside world.

We happen to house that microbiome in the large intestine. And that has more than just the physical barrier, and like the enzymes, and the chemicals that can neutralize or kill pathogens that do enter, but it also has some pretty powerful signaling to the rest of our body, our brain, even to our bone marrow where most of our immune cells start as stem cells. The health of the microbiome has an incredible body wide impact on multiple other organ systems.

Yeah. It’s complicated.

It is. And when we think about the complications over the years, things continue to evolve, the body continues to evolve. When you think of it from an immunity standpoint of all the different things that you mentioned, your diet quality, getting outside for sunlight, sleep, managed stress and movement, lifestyles have changed over the years too. So what have you seen that’s probably been at the most decline? I know you probably can throw a dart and hit either one of these here. But what would you say is what you see usually be compromised the most that leads to compromise immunity?

I think it’s diet quality.

Diet quality?

Yeah. I’m biased. I’m a dietician.

Makes sense.

But that’s probably the biggest radical shift in the developed world, is our diet quality has suffered the most.

And you’ve talked about that before coming in like the– even when we are getting whole foods potentially with the nutrients we’re getting from them are not what they were probably 50 years ago, just because of the way food is produced in order to feed all of us.

Absolutely. And the way we select the foods from– let’s take animal foods, for example, in the US, most people eat meat. They don’t eat from nose to tail. They’re not eating all of the vital organs. They’re not eating some of the most nutrient dense parts of those animals anymore. So the way we’ve started to choose our foods, even if they’re produced differently, we’ve kind of partitioned them into the parts we like the most, not the most nutritious parts. But you’re seeing some of that swing back the other direction.

So what have you personally experienced when it comes to your own immune system? Even in these past two years, for example, as far as anything you are exposed to, and how you handled it whenever you did come down with like any kind of sickness?

Are you asking if I had COVID?

Maybe.

I did, yeah, I ended up– at the beginning, it was really scary for everyone. We didn’t know a lot. But even those first few weeks it started to become clearer and clearer that it wasn’t affecting everyone the same way. So it’s really interesting, if you take the flip side of the observation of why do some people get exposed and not get sick, we should study them.

What’s going on there?

What’s going on there? The frontline health care workers that worked long hours with patients who– they didn’t know what those patients had. They might not have had the protective gear that they wanted or needed, or probably should have had or– but for some reason, not everyone got ill. And if they did get ill, not everyone got critically ill. So what I’ve observed and I think what’s being borne out in the data as we get more and more of it is being healthy at a metabolic and system level, like a cellular, tissue, organ system, macro level matters a lot with regard to whatever pathogen we encounter.

And I think that’s more empowering for people to hear as well, which means the choices they make from meal to meal and day to day have the biggest impact on their ability to be resilient no matter what they have to encounter in their life. And that doesn’t– that’s not just infectious disease, it’s everything else, too. So I think it’s more important to tell people that message that the choices they make at the end of their fork have a huge impact on who they become.

I think it’s what’s interesting is just that to hear that we have some semblance of control, or we have some semblance of control over our health, and our immunity, and those things, and what can we do. And you’ve outlined some really great options already. These will go back to the pillars of health that we talk about all the time at Life Time. We talked about them pre-pandemic, about the things that we can do to just optimize and live our best, healthiest life. And really, it’s borne out to be like these things do really matter, and we’re just going to continue to talk about them like a broken record because they matter a lot in all these different things that we do.

They matter even more now.

Yes.

Right?

Yeah. And so I guess that would be a question, this kind of takes us a little bit off track, but how do we help people who don’t necessarily have access or resources to some of the things that we– to be able to take advantage of the things that would help the most? It sounds like, OK, these things are easy to do, like eat better, all these things. But for some people in a stressful time, it’s hard to make those choices. Being healthy is hard to do. There’s a lot of obstacles in our way without a pandemic in place. So how do we help more people just start with one thing?

Yeah. If you have to force rank, in that big article I wrote about the ultimate guide to supporting your immune system, in the beginning, I laid the foundation of– there’s a lot of pieces to consider. There is exercise, there’s sleep, there’s nutrition, there’s supplementation. You can’t just do one. You have to address all of them. And if you can’t address one of them, or optimize one of them, that’s probably OK. But then what you need to do is maybe compensate in another area.

So look at– if you can’t change much about your diet or your food quality, then do your best to sleep really well. That’s free. Do your best to manage your stress. Do your best to get outside. A lot of the factors that go into living well and building immune resilience don’t cost a dime. They do take time and effort but they don’t cost money for most people. So what I would say is you have to balance what you can control and pursue that in the name of optimal health or optimizing your health.

Yep. Absolutely.

And you mentioned as far as the metabolic diseases that we face, and then I remember reading and some of the notes that we connected with you on prior to, around aerobic exercise and some of the benefits around aerobic exercise. So when we talk about intentional movement, when it comes to aerobic exercise, we probably know because we do it. But how would you tell the listeners right now what aerobic exercise is and how they can start to implement that in their day to day?

Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m sure you talk to some other podcast guests too. But maximizing your VO2, which is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can consume to produce work. It’s the best predictor of mortality, all cause mortality and longevity. And you can– the most of the benefits of becoming more aerobically fit happen– going from deconditioned to just average fitness, that’s– you get 80% of the benefit of that better aerobic fitness just by getting off the bottom tier.

So building aerobic fitness also has a component of your VO2 as a weight based formula. So if you have extra weight, it’s going to benefit if you go on a program that helps you minimize that excess weight, so get to a healthier body weight for your frame. Or another way to put it as losing excess body fat that doesn’t serve you a healthy purpose. Because if you create that healthier physique, the process of getting to that healthier physique or higher fitness level or higher fitness capacity is going to produce all kinds of offshoot benefits.

The process of getting there means you have to train on a regular basis. It means you have to eat a little bit differently. And it means you have to recover from that training. It means you have to make peace with certain things that are hard so it builds stronger mindset. So that whole process includes a bunch of little mini lessons for your immune system to learn from, for example. You’re putting a little stress on your metabolic systems which does technically stress out your white blood cells a little bit. In the short term, it depresses them. So going through an aerobic workout, you can measure some acute depression of white blood cell activity. And then it rebounds and it becomes healthier and more robust. So it’s that process of building fitness through calculated stressors that end up creating a more resilient person.

Interesting. OK, so that was kind of on the exercise aerobics side, we have another episode this season with you on omega 3, as you mentioned anti-inflammatory foods. We also know that’s one of the nutrients that we can be deficient in. There are others that affect our immunity. Can you speak a little bit to what those might be and how we can either test for them and then start to optimize them and their certain nutrients?

I think the biggest one that is easy to test for is vitamin D. And technically, it’s not a vitamin, it’s more of a prohormone. Vitamin D– the body, if it’s given sufficient sunlight, it can make all it needs. The problem is we’re not outside enough. And if we are outside, we’re wearing sunscreen which blocks the formation of vitamin D. So I think that’s the most important one for people to right size.

In fact, this whole time, we should have been measuring people’s vitamin D any time they showed up for any test. Because if we addressed the apparently super high rate of vitamin D insufficiency or deficiency, we would have corrected a lot of other metabolic and mood based health problems in this country. So hindsight is 2020, but vitamin D is incredibly important. Omega 3s, because they’re difficult to get, as we covered in the episode on omega 3s, through the diet and most people just don’t simply don’t consume enough and you can’t make it in your body. So omega 3s are extremely important.

The whole class of B vitamins, other fat soluble vitamins, like vitamin A, vitamin E, vitamin K, those are all involved in maintaining healthy mucous membranes, so that physical barrier that we have to rely on because we can’t remove ourselves from the environment that has pathogens in it. Being in a sterile environment is not good for us either. So we need adequate vitamin status to maintain healthy resilience in a mechanical or physical sense.

B vitamins and certain minerals like zinc, selenium, copper, iron, magnesium, all of these are needed to help build and proliferate white blood cells and other immune cells. So the process of building new tissues that respond to pathogens, and then the nutrients needed to resolve the inflammation that’s created when our body puts up that fight against a pathogen, it all comes down to nutrition and nutritional adequacy. So you need adequate amino acids from protein to build all those physical structures. You need all the vitamins and minerals that help you actually do that building process and help with different cells sending signals to one another so they can coordinate their efforts, and ratchet up the inflammation when it needs to and ratchet it down when it doesn’t need as much inflammation. So it’s a very complicated system, but the process of optimizing it maybe isn’t as difficult as we make it out to be.

Like you said, it can be on our fork with some supplementation in many cases.

So let’s, with that you mentioned the several things right there, testing for them. So I can identify like might I have a deficiency here, how do then I work with somebody to optimize these things? We do have lab testing at LifeTime, and we can also work with a health care provider. Any, what would you recommend for people there with testing or to ask for if you’re working with a health care?

For sure ask for vitamin D.

Right.

I don’t know why it’s not standard in this country. It’s so vitally important for many other reasons but ask for vitamin D. Ask for the inflammation marker, c-reactive protein, high sensitivity c-reactive protein. There’s a handful of other nutrients that you can measure directly reliably measure directly in the bloodstream or in the body’s tissues. Sometimes magnesium is a helpful one.

The others you have to infer from what else is going on in the blood pattern. So how the white blood cells are differentiated, how the red blood cells are forming and recycling themselves. So some things are easy to measure. Some things are more difficult. And that’s why it’s just important to annually do a comprehensive panel, you know, like the lifetime comprehensive or all in one panel. It’s expensive at face value, but the value of that information is so immense. And it can help people really digest and connect their lifestyle to the choices they’re making from meal to meal to what’s actually going on in their physiology and then give them the power to change it. It’s incredible.

Right.

Yeah, I was thinking to something that you said earlier as far as how resilient the body can be. And it’s a certain demographic of individuals, kids, during the past two years and what I’ve seen is the resilience as far as their immunity and the bounce back regardless if they were to get sick, how maybe it is because they’re getting outside, getting the sleep, getting the movement probably don’t have as much stress because they’re just being free each and every day. So what is it that you probably noticed in that correlation? Maybe it’s just the same things I just mentioned but why are the kids able to bounce back and what have you seen within their immune system. Is it because they’re continuing to develop and it’s easier for their immune system to like respond better? So what do know in that space?

Yeah it’s an interesting question. I mean there’s a couple of different things that come to mind and these are not scientific answers.

OK. Qualify that there for ya.

One is that as much effort as we put into keeping a clean environment for the kids, they do not exist in a sterile world. They’re crawling on the floor. They’re sharing things at daycare. So in a way they might be building healthy immune resilience just by chance of exposure.

Right.

Whereas adults, we’re rarely on the floor. We’re we’re not sharing things. We’re actually actively avoiding sharing, right. So that’s one factor that would be interesting to study.

The other is yeah they’re more robust. They have a faster rate of cell turnover. And they’re more anabolic by nature. So their chemistry, their hormonal milieu or I call it hormonal soup is such that they’re in like hyper growth mode. So if they cut their finger, they’re going to heal faster than an aging adult, right. So they’re just more resilient purely because their body is on hypergrowth mode.

A couple of other things are maybe on the more silly side is a kid has a runny nose, they’re not going to sniffle it back up but they’re going to let that thing run, right. So physically, they might be better at eliminating things they encounter in the environment in the mucous membrane before they have chance to set in and establish an infection. So they’re good at sleeping.

Yeah.

Most of the time. I was just going to say like most of the time. Hang on a second.

But it’s a fantastic question because we should be asking ourselves, what is it that that subgroup of the population is doing differently that’s producing different outcomes. And it’s probably a collection of different factors, right. Just like we see in adults, we see people with certain chronic diseases have a much tougher go at any illness, any seasonal illness or respiratory virus or whatever. And there’s some pretty clear trends that start to emerge when you peel back the layers of that onion.

Right. I do want to bring up a topic. And I did not prep you for this, Paul, at all but there is the concept of immunity debt or immune debt where we have because we haven’t been exposed to as many things, we are at risk potentially for getting more sicknesses. RSV is an example of that happened this past summer with kids a lot. What’s your take on immunity debt or immune debt? I can’t remember which the exact phrase is.

Gosh, I mean it logically it makes sense.

Right.

If you’re never exposed to anything that’s going to challenge your physiology, then the body’s going to take the path of least resistance. It’s going to shut down anything that has to do with that challenge or it’s going to down regulate it.

Right.

So it makes logical sense to me. That the more and more sterile we get, some bugs going to find an opening and exploit it.

Well it kind of goes back to as well like the hygiene hygiene hypothesis, right. Like the cleaner we get, there’s correlations between the more sterile our world becomes, the rising rate of like autoimmunity in our world. And that’s a whole other topic we’re not going to necessarily get into that but it is like if our body isn’t exposed to things, what happens. So anyway, we can point to articles on that but more there.

Truth serum there. OK Paul, what is anything that you want to touch on that we might have missed before we take you into the hot seat?

Yeah, we didn’t dive into too much detail on the nutrition.

OK.

Let’s touch there for a little longer then.

I mentioned a high quality nutrient dense diet but that means almost nothing to people outside of Lifetime. So what does that mean? It means you’re getting enough energy. So protein energy malnutrition is common, more common in the third world where people are just simply aren’t getting enough food. And by nature of that, they’re not getting enough protein to maintain their physical resilience. Because every structure in our body, including our mucous membranes and skin and bones and muscle, is made from protein. It’s made from amino acids. So if you don’t have enough energy, your body is going to break down all of its expensive energy tissues, which first is skeletal muscle.

So building and maintaining optimal immune resilience follows the same principles as building and maintaining optimal strength resilience, physical capability. So you need to have adequate protein and adequate calories to do that. And as in whatever process you’re going through to get that protein and energy, it serves you well to focus on the most nutrient dense sources of that protein. And that happens to be –

As I went through nutrient by nutrient for that long form immune guide, it just baffles me that we aren’t recommending like liver and oysters and these really kind of for most people off putting foods because they’re so nutrient dense. They’re so powerful from a nutrition standpoint, calorie for calorie and what your body can do with those things.

So getting a high quality nutrient dense diet, especially when it comes to protein, minerals, and vitamins and that usually ends up being focused at every meal on the protein source. When possible, eat it first. So you have the best chance of digesting and absorbing and assimilating those amino acids and then focus a lot on produce. Fresh produce, frozen produce doesn’t matter. The deeper, the richer colors even better. Eat a pile of produce the size of your head every day. You really cannot overdo it in most cases. And if you can go organic for some things, great. If you can’t, don’t worry about it. But get plenty of protein and ample, ample produce because it’s also hydrating.

We didn’t talk about water or hydration either in great detail. But those mucous membranes, which actually are our first line of defense against most airborne pathogens, is incredibly reliant on hydration. And what happens every fall when the humidity from summer fades away here in Minnesota? Well one, we all go inside where the air is not humidified usually. And everyone complains about how thirsty they are and their mucous membranes dry out, and dry mucous membranes end up making you more susceptible to whatever’s in the air, allergens, pathogens, whatever.

So nutrient dense diet, really adequate hydration is super powerful. And then by nature of focusing on those things, usually you control your appetite enough to kind of downplay some of the cravings. Some of the junk food that can be really destructive to the immune system and our overall health. So added sugars, alcohol, artificial sweeteners all of these things are very disruptive to the immune system and how our body responds to various pathogens. So

And just to go on to that a little bit longer, that’s tied to inflammation, right? So inflammation. so you want to speak to that for just a second inflammation? Because that’s an important component of this.

Yeah. So if you have to mount an immune response, what comes with that as a natural default of that immune response is your body creates inflammation. It literally wants to kill whatever pathogens have entered through an inflammation process, which is necessary. However, if you have this kind of amped up baseline level of inflammation from eating more processed foods and added sugars and artificial sweeteners and more alcohol than you should, well your body has a tough time calming down that inflammation during that fight and after that fight, which means your body’s own tissues are going to encounter more damage than it probably needs to just as a byproduct of fighting off whatever you’re fighting off.

And that appears to be one of the major problems that critically ill patients in this recent pandemic have struggled with. And doctors have tried to find ways to identify the patients that are at highest risk for those inflammatory kind of runaway inflammatory conditions, which then causes your blood to clot and all those complications and then address them quickly while still fighting off that infection. You know, because you need the inflammation to fight the infection but you don’t want too much of it, so it’s this Goldilocks scenario.

But a lot of things in modern lifestyles, including sleep deprivation and poor food quality and unmanaged stress, just amp up our inflammatory response and make it harder for us to calm it down once we need it to calm down.

We need a whole episode on inflammation at some point, just inflammation. Because that is, and we’ve had a request for that. So Paul, you might be coming back just FYI.

I just want to make sure everybody understands said the size of my, you see the size of this head produce. Man, it was like 10 pounds of produce. You see the size of this head?

You’re welcome.

Yeah OK, I’m on it. I’m on it.

You could do it. Lots of greens.

I’m all for it.

Go for it. All right, Paul anything else before David asks you his questions? You know how this goes. And I will say we have tons of resources. The guide that Paul has referred to is going to be linked in the show notes for this along with other articles we’ve done on immunity. So lots of great resources at experiencelife.lifetime.life Paul has written several articles there, including this guide. So we’ll make sure all that’s there. So people can go more in depth if they want and download that article.

All right David.

All right, let’s do it. Here we go. You ready?

Paul Kriegler, hot seat. What is your personal definition of nutrition? You’re rewriting, right now. Webster, Paul Krieger, insert definition, nutrition.

Nutrition?

How you would define it.

Or nutritional lifestyle?

I mean now that you said it that way, let’s go with that. It’s a longer definition, whatever yeah.

I tend to think of nutrition like diet. People understand diet as a verb. It’s a noun. It describes a pattern of food choices.

Nutritional lifestyle encompasses your relationship with food, your interest level in food that you eat and how you want to learn about it and apply it to your life and how you want to enjoy it and not fight it. And so the relationship with food is a big aspect. How and where you eat has a big impact. So the nutritional lifestyle it expands beyond the food sources, the macronutrient balance, the micronutrient balance, the supplements you choose. It’s the whole group of food related decisions and relationships that you maintain.

So nutritional lifestyle, just to clear everything up, would be the verb though because that’s the actions that you’re taking to make it a lifestyle but nutrition by itself is the noun, just to be clear. I like how you did that.

Well nutritional lifestyle would be a noun too.

That is a noun?

I was going to say –

You’re not taking an action?

I think I should know that.

I was just saying because you’re taking action within lifestyle, but I don’t know.

Well there’s probably an action. The verbs are within that.

Yeah the verbs –

I mean if you want to get technical, right.

Yeah I got people on here. All right, here we go.

Next one if you came to a fork no pun intended we’re talking about the end of the fork but if you came to a fork in the road, would you go right or left? And why?

Whichever way the sun is setting.

Oh.

I love sunsets.

There you go. Look at you. All right, what would the current Paul say to the 20-year-old Paul today?

Oh, put down that beer.

[LAUGHTER]

I love it. All right. This might be going – this might, yeah this might answer the next question here. What has been the greatest lesson you learned thus far in your career?

Put down that beer. In the world – the world of health and fitness is on this ever ending mission of complicating the simple. So the most important lesson I’ve learned is if you can’t make it simple, it’s not going to happen.

Like that.

That is true.

I like that. OK last but not least, what do you want to leave as a stamp of impact in the year 2022?

I just want to be a good parent.

There you go. You got, you got some people you can lean into if you want to, not saying we’re good, I think we’re great. Let me finish. I said we’re great. Yeah, you got some people you can lean into over here, all right.

We appreciate you coming on again, Paul.

All right Paul, if people want to follow you, I know you have articles at the experience.life.lifetime.life. Anywhere else you want to point people too?

I think that’s the most active place I am. I do some posting in our Facebook group for the lifetime weight loss community but experiencelife.lifetime.life.

Awesome. Well thanks for coming on again. We always appreciate you and the insights you bring.

Thanks Paul.

Thanks for having me.

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