Inflammation Is the Thief of Youth_ How to Turn Off Chronic Fire in the Body

[00:00:01] Welcome to Anti Aging Unraveled, the podcast where we redefine aging and empower you to age your way. [00:00:08] I'm Dr. Laurie and this show is rooted in the lifeevity philosophy. Living life the way you want to with energy, clarity, purpose and longevity. Here we break down integrative functional medicine, bioidentical hormones, peptides, metabolic and brain health, gut immune connection, and cutting edge longevity therapies. So you're not just living long, longer, you're living better. [00:00:34] If you believe aging should be intentional, personalized and on your terms, you're in the right place. Welcome to Anti Aging Unraveled. Let's unlock longevity and help you age your way. [00:00:47] Welcome back, everyone. I'm so glad to have you. Today I'm talking about a topic that is one of my favorites. [00:00:54] I talk about inflammation a million times a day. And today's topic is at the root of almost every chronic disease that I see in my practice. And the title is Inflammation is the Thief of Youth. How to turn off chronic fire in the body. And we're going to talk about causes and how to test for it. So let's just dive into this today. [00:01:15] And inflammation again. I say this every day, a million times a day. I really want you to hear this is. It is the thief of youth. It steals your energy, it steals your clarity, it steals your hormones, your skin, your metabolism, your brain, and eventually really your health span. So, you know, it's one of those things that we need to get on top of early. I know a lot of primary docs will blow off like a mildly inflamed CRP on labs or an autoimmune ANA and just say that there's no, you're not having symptoms of it. So you kind of have to wait until there's symptoms. To me, that's not acceptable. You know, people think it's normal aging or that it's their genetics or, or that it's just stress or bad luck. But in reality, what they're experiencing is chronic silent inflammation. The silent killer, low grade fire burning in the body every single day. [00:02:05] So today I wanna show you where the fire really comes from. [00:02:09] How the gut and the immune system drive inflammation. Why neuroinflammation is at the center of brain aging, the hidden role of chronic infections and environmental toxins. And most importantly, how do we test and turn the fire off? How do we find out what's really there? [00:02:27] So let's start with something really important. Inflammation is not all bad. Acute inflammation is how you heal. It's how you, you get better, right? You cut your finger, it gets red, it gets swollen, and then you get repair, just like what's going on in my thumb. You get an infection, you get an immune response, a fever, and then it goes away, it resolves. That's healthy inflammation. That's your immune system doing its job and fighting things off. And then there's a resolution at the end. The problem is chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is when the immune system never shuts down or shuts off. It's like having a smoke alarm going off in your house 24, 7, even when there's no fire or it's a perceived fire. [00:03:07] So over that time, there's constant immune activation. So what does it do? It damages tissues, it accelerates aging, disrupts our hormones, dysregulates the brain, and how it fires, and it shortens lifespan. [00:03:22] So this is commonly what drives, or what we believe, at least according to our science, drives autoimmune disease, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's and cognitive decline, metabolic dysfunction, cancer and accelerated aging. You'll hear me talk a lot about autoimmune disease being on a spectrum of cancer because we do see that people with autoimmune disease have a much higher risk of cancers long term. It's almost like the body decides to short circuit itself and it can't regulate the immune system appropriately, so the inflammation gets out of control. [00:03:55] So if you listen to my podcast, you'll hear me talk about buckets, and we're going to kind of dive into those three buckets today a little and how they play a role in this damaging inflammation. The first bucket is the gut and food sensitivities and just gut disruption. If you want to understand inflammation, you have to understand the gut. It all starts there. Food sensitivity and other gut irritants can cause the immune system to become extremely overburdened. [00:04:22] Inflammation will dominate, and then you're in trouble. It doesn't shut off. It's that smoke alarm. About 70% of your immune system sits on the other side of your gut. So that means it's not just a digestive organ. It's an immune command center. It's regulating the immune system, what it sees every single day. [00:04:41] When the gut barrier is healthy, it selectively lets nutrients in and keeps toxins and microbes, inflammatory molecules out when it becomes compromised. [00:04:51] What many people call leaky gut, I hate that term, but leaky gut, there's gaps in the cells and the immune system, basically in the lining of the stomach. The immune system starts to get constantly exposed to things that it was never Meant to see. [00:05:05] So one, food sensitivity turns into two, turns into four, turns into six, or you get new autoimmune diseases that just kind of stack on each other. [00:05:13] This leads to immune activation, cytokine release, which are cells that signal inflammation. So then systemic inflammation. And here's the key point, the inflammation doesn't stay local, it goes all over the body. [00:05:27] So we're going to talk about neuroinflammation next. But the inflammation can be anywhere. [00:05:32] It can be in the joints, it can be in the sinuses, it can be in the brain, it can be all over. It becomes body wide inflammation. And a lot of people notice it, especially they're not getting stomach issues when it hits the brain. So let's talk a little bit about neuroinflammation and what it affects. So memory, focus, mood, sleep, motivation. [00:05:57] So the question really is, right, how do you distinguish between hormones and gut and inflammation and brain on fire? And in all honesty, you can't sometimes. So it's really about dissecting this story and really making sure you're in the right time frame and that you're listening to the patient's timeline. [00:06:16] Patients come in saying, I have brain fog or I don't feel sharp anymore, I feel anxious or depressed for no reason, it's not myself. [00:06:24] And it can be hormonally driven, it can be gut driven, but it can also be both. [00:06:29] Right? [00:06:30] So we wanna make sure that we address the root causes, which is why I almost always start in the gut. These are not neurotransmitter deficiencies. It's not like a lack of serotonin, which I have a big problem with, throwing SSRIs and serotonin reuptake inhibitors on people when we don't know if they truly have a serotonin deficiency or not. [00:06:52] So this is inflammation activating the microglia cells, the little immune cells of the brain. And we get this chronic inflammation, which can also be a central driver of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, generalized depression and anxiety disorders, and ADHD symptoms. So again, we put people on medications for these things without really understanding the root cause of where it's coming from. [00:07:17] So again, my buckets, what are my buckets of inflammation? My first bucket is gut food sensitivities, inflammatory stuff in the stomach. Okay. My second bucket is the immune system, actually chronic infection overburdening that immune system. [00:07:35] So it can be a parasite or a lyme or CO infection, things like that. The last bucket is environmental toxins. So we're going to talk about these three Buckets. But if we can empty those three buckets and take down the inflammation as much as possible, your overall body burden of inflammation will be much lower. Which brings me to why this is being done during liver detox month. Because it is a great way to lower these buckets and get rid of generalized inflammation. It's just to do a liver detox kit to get a really good start on the biggest sponge of your body, which is the liver. All right, so let's talk a little bit about chronic infections. This is a big one I have dealt with since COVID primarily, but also before that with a lot of Lyme. [00:08:20] Many people are carrying chronic low grade infections that never fully resolve. They quietly stimulate the immune system for years and years and sometimes decades. And it can be something like Epstein Barr, which is like the monovirus, it is Lyme. Other infections that go with Lyme, herpes viruses, so the cold sore virus, molds, chronic underlying molds, and gut pathogens and parasites. So you might not feel sick, but your immune system is constantly working on suppressing these bugs, which turns on your inflammatory pathways consistently. [00:08:55] So one is called NF kappa beta. We turn on cytokines, which are cell that attract other cells. So it basically starts an inflammation response and also puts a big oxidative stress on your cells so they aren't able to clean out and detoxify the way that they should. So over time, the immune system is exhausted. We get things like autoimmunity, we accumulate new bugs. We also start to get cancers and other things that go wrong with our immune system, maybe eczemas as well. And we start getting accelerated aging processes, so just aging more rapidly. All right, let's dive into the next bucket. Environmental toxins, it's like putting gas on the fire. Let's just say we already had a leaky gut or a gut that wasn't right. And now we're surrounded in this modern day era with modern life, with all these inflammatory things, pesticides, plastics, heavy metals, xenoestrogens, which are basically chemicals that look like estrogen and things that disrupt our endocrine system and make our metabolism not work. [00:09:57] They're all exposures and chemicals. They damage the powerhouses of our cells, our mitochondria, they disrupt our hormones and don't allow us to recycle our estrogen appropriately. They're going to activate our immune pathways and make them overactive and dysfunctional, and they're going to accumulate. They sit in the fat and brain tissue. Again, that brain on fire. When these toxins sit in the brain and you already had a leaky gut or you already had food sensitivities, things like that, or maybe you had a parasite. Then your brain has now two of these buckets in question. And your fat, as you gain weight, will store these toxins for years and years and years and years. And they won't be released until you actually lose weight or start to draw them out. And then these only sit in the bloodstream. We still need to get them out further. Again. Another reason for that. Liver detox kit. All right. Plastics and xenoestrogens in particular interfere with that estrogen signaling thyroid function. [00:10:54] So now we have poor metabolism, our hormones aren't recycling appropriately, and we need to be detoxed. We can stack one more thing on top of that, which is our heavy metal exposures. [00:11:06] Lead, mercury, cadmium, they will stress out the system dramatically, especially from a cellular and brain level. They'll build up in the, in the brain tissues. The cells will not be able to eliminate them effectively and create, it creates a very big oxidative stress on the system. [00:11:23] So that is why if you do a detox, the goal is to get rid of long term inflammation because we're constantly trying to get the stuff out of the fat cells out of the tissues into the bloodstream and excrete them. And we need to help that happen. Otherwise we can make you temporarily more inflamed. Right. So I get this question all the time, how do you actually know that inflammation is happening? [00:11:50] What are we looking for? You know, it's not just a feeling. It's not just fatigue or joint pain or brain fog, because as we alluded to, that can go for any hormone needs. But inflammation is measurable. And if we don't measure it correctly, we are missing root causes. And this is part of what I feel like primary care misses the boat on. And we can actually truly reverse inflammatory damage and inflammation if we find these markers early enough. So we're looking for a couple things, but in primary care, they're only looking at two markers, usually CRP or sed rate or ana. And unfortunately there's so many more markers. And even if those markers are abnormal, most docs are sending you to rheumatology and if there's no symptoms, then they're telling you it's fine. And we're going to watch it. They're not treating you to try to get rid of this inflammation. It's not normal to be fighting your own cells with a positive ana. [00:12:46] So we test strategically. We're going to get a big Picture view of your inflammation. Yes, we're going to get a crp, which is one of the most important markers. Yes, we are going to get a SED rate to know how the longer term inflammatory burden and how that's affecting you. We are going to check a ferritin level as an iron storage marker, but it's an acute phase reactant meaning it goes up with inflammatory signaling. So they will tell overall inflammation, but it doesn't give me the why or the how. [00:13:15] So to understand how aggressive it is, we look at cytokines again, cells that attract others. [00:13:22] They're immune signaling molecules, they're the language of inflammation. So when they when certain one goes up, we can actually tell what's going on in the body. [00:13:31] So IL6, TNF, Alpha, IL1, Beta, IL10, TGF, Beta. These are all cytokines that when we know are elevated. The immune system is in a pro inflammatory state. Really important for autoimmune disease, chronic infection, neuro inflammation, long haul infection or long haul Covid and any kind of post viral syndrome for that matter. There's also stool tests that we can do to start checking for the gut driven inflammation. [00:13:59] So we're looking for a very comprehensive stool test. We can get parasites, pathogens, bacteria, but we can also see are you digesting your foods, are you breaking them down appropriately? [00:14:11] Looking for zonulin, which is a marker of the permeability and leaky gut, so is calprotectin. [00:14:18] And we're looking for something called secretory iga, which is the immunoglobulins or the antibodies in the gut. Because if they're off, it should tell us something, right? Why are the antibodies inside your gut off? Either high or low should yield us very possibly diagnostic information like celiac disease or something similar. [00:14:38] So if the gut barrier is compromised, inflammatory molecules will enter the circulation and activate the immune system. Again we know this. So you can't fix leaky gut by itself with supplements. We need to remove some of the stimulating factors that are causing the inflammation. [00:14:56] Which is why it's so important to make some actual lifestyle changes as well, even if it's just temporarily. [00:15:03] So what about the brain? What are we looking for in the brain? Well, neuroinflammation hides, right? Patients are told when they have brain symptoms, they go get an MRI and their MRI looks normal, your labs look normal. It's just anxiety or normal aging and you're like wow, that's funny, I didn't have anxiety my entire life as a kid or an adult, I've never had Brain fog my whole life, but I feel like I could fall asleep at the computer. Inflammation is real, and we have to assess that through similar pathways that we would look at the gut. So we're looking for safety, cytokine patterns or inflammatory signalers. We're looking for something called homocysteine, which again, is an oxidative marker. We're looking for stress markers of oxidation in the cells and seeing if they can actually kick out the bad stuff. Right. We're looking for. To see if we can detox ourselves from the cellular level. If we can't, then we should assume that neuroinflammation is there. All right, because that's gonna be one of the first places that affects. [00:16:00] We're going to look for organic acid testing. We're going to look for mitochondrial function markers. How well do the powerhouses of our cell work and are they being again, our cells getting cleaned out? [00:16:11] So it'll help us understand that the brain is, if it's under inflammatory stress, even before cognitive decline starts. So we can halt this in its tracks before we actually have side effects or symptoms. Okay. And then last but not least, we're going to look for those chronic infections. We go through those buckets, right? [00:16:28] So we want to get an Epstein Barr panel. We have lots of bug panels, Lyme co infections, herpes panels, mold related illnesses. I'm a big fan of doing like the mycoplasma testing and really looking for the species of mold that make us ill. Right. We always are looking for chronic infections and underlying immune burdens. If the immune system is constantly fighting something, the inflammation never turns off. Right. So with that, we can look for those heavy metals and organic toxins, pesticides, plastics as well. So we can look for all the endocrine disruptors and environmental toxins. They are all available on alternative specialty labs. But if we don't know they're there and we're not acutely aware of them and trying to get rid of them, then how are we going to get you better? We need to test, not guess. Toxins activate the immune system pathway and damage our mitochondria, which is our powerhouses and energy drivers of our cell. Then inflammation starts at a cellular level. So we are able to test these things very, very effectively with alternative testing. Okay, so how are we going to treat this? It's so multifactorial, Right. We've got gut, we got the immune system, we got inflammation, we got the brain. You know, not all inflammation is traded the same way. So what I'm going to do is just go through the gut, the immune system, the brain, and we'll talk a little bit about chronic infection and we'll talk a little bit about things that you can use or that we can give you to help to heal this chronic inflammation and take it down because again, not treated all the same way. So with the gut we have to take down the inflammatory pathways, we need to heal up the lining, we need to bring that gut barrier back to normal, no more leaky gut. We also need to help with digestion, making sure everything's broken down efficiently. We need to restore the microbiome, make sure that the right bacteria are there for breaking down our foods. And we also need to provide immune support for this overactive or overdriven immune system. [00:18:30] So we can use glutamine and slippery elm and aloe for that healing of the lining. We can use a good probiotic with two strains. I like to just give you the last word of those, but it's sarcomyces, rhamnosis and boulardi. [00:18:47] Those two are very important and that's where all the data is driven for probiotics and spore probiotics. So a spore probiotic is really important for someone that's had chronic gut issues for a long period of time. Digestive enzymes and gallbladder support to help break down those foods. And getting on a good like colostrum immunoglobulin supplement to help again support that immune system and heal up the lining and the immune system from the inside. Peptides, great peptide for the gut is BPC157 with TB500. [00:19:19] Again calming immune support and actually sometimes leaving out on kpv, which is another great immune kind of modulator for the gut. [00:19:28] Antimicrobials if we need to, if there's parasites or anything going on. And then of course diet, anti inflammatory, gluten free, dairy free, limited alcohol for about six to eight weeks. We need to take that bucket down and avoiding any foods that you know, you're sensitive to for a good six to eight weeks so that we can see what happens to your inflammation when we get that bucket gone. It doesn't have to always be forever, but in order to get that bucket cleaned out, we want to bring it down as low as possible. So that's the gut. Now we have the immune system on the other side of the gut. We need to support it, we need to make it stronger, we need to keep it from over responding. So we need to actually almost like immunosuppress it or immune Modulate it. Which means we use a lot of different tools for this. TB 500 and Thymos and Alpha are really good peptides for this. They will help the immune system work more efficiently and proactively but not too strong. So they're not. It's not going to overreact. [00:20:27] There's something called LDN which is basically low dose Narcan or naltrexone that's great for an anti inflammatory at low doses especially for neuroinflammation. And GLP1s which are the. The diet meds of choice that are peptides are great for systemic inflammation and decreasing that. [00:20:46] Additionally we give you our baseline support which will be vitamin D3 and giving you some omega 3s and sixes so that we have some really good. We can actually make membranes and mucous membranes and heal everything up and make our hormones efficiently. [00:21:00] So the peptides combined with some of the LDN or and some of our basic stuff is a really good add on for helping that immune. [00:21:09] Also the colostrum is a really good way too. The bovine colostrum. Immunoglobulin. Okay, I get this one probably more than anything. My. How about brain inflammation? Anxiety at night, brain inflammation. I really like celanx and C Max as peptides for this. It calms down anxiety, helps with focus. [00:21:27] Methylene blue is another one that I really do like for chronic neuroinflammation. Especially if we think that there's an infectious etiology. [00:21:36] It's very old school, it's coming back into favor. I love methylene blue have for a long time and I like combining that with a magnesium support at night. Magnesium is great for the brain and then of course Omega 3s as well. They're going to help to put actually back the membrane of the brain. It's one, you know, it's one big lining. We need phosphatidylcholine. We know Omega 3s and we need to clean out those cells. We need to get your cellular support back to where it needs to be. So we need to actually like detox your cells. So sometimes nad gives you some cellular energy or we can use some glutathione to help with clean out and detoxification and GLP1s again they're just going to keep popping up. That diet peptide is great for acute inflammation of the brain and shutting that down. All right, okay, so let's talk about antimicrobials and we talked about supporting the immune system. But what about if there's actually a chronic infection there's and I think that's really important to understand. Sometimes to get people better you actually have to, you have to use traditional methods. And sometimes we actually have to kill off a chronic infection with using antimicrobials like an antibiotic, an antiviral, an antifungal. And that's really important to understand, to at least get on top of it, not forever, but to get the immune system a chance to get on top of it. [00:23:00] And then we can use some herbal versions. We can use something called ivermectin, which is an anti parasite or a dewormer. I love ivermectin for chronic infection. I also really love the two peptides Ta Thymosin, Alpha 1, Ta 1 and SS31 are both great antibacterial, antiviral, anti parasitic, wonderful to add on to any regimen. And you can take them if you're already acutely ill as well. Mot c to give yourself some mitochondrial protection is another peptide that I really, really like. And I do believe everyone should do that at least two or three times a year. [00:23:36] And then other anti inflammatory supports like turmeric and things like that are really important while you're trying to get this infection down and get the chronic inflammation to decrease. So again, that lifestyle change will be really important to getting rid of chronic infection. [00:23:53] Right? Because we want to make sure that the inflammation is low regardless of what the infection is doing to our body. So we really try to get the other buckets down while we're addressing the bug bucket. And then there's overall longevity and anti aging. And I love this last little tidbit because this is where we actually address the inflammatory aging pathways, like the long term pathways that are actually causing destruction of our body over time. And there's some really great data on rapamycin for longevity as a drug. And I really, really like the data that's on rapamycin. Something that I would start using proactively for the anti Aging Process, GLP1s. Again they came up again for low decreasing inflammation overall helping the system to survive and be less inflammatory. A peptide called epitalon. Epitalon is a telomere maintainer, which means it helps prevent the DNA from degrading. [00:24:52] So if you can have DNA that is not broken down as quickly and is a little bit more stable, if you will, then you are not going to age as quickly. And I love epitalon with that Mott C for mitochondrial health. And then of course making sure that all of your labs, your nutrients and your minerals and Your vitamins are all optimized so that your body is working on all cylinders and, and that lifestyle precision, making sure we're getting rid of all the inflammatory foods in our diet, limiting alcohol, making sure we're exercising and getting the right amount of sunlight and things like that really do play a role in decreasing the inflammatory pathways. [00:25:27] So we want to reduce what we call inflamma aging, not just treat symptoms right. We want to make sure this inflammatory aging process is slowed down. We don't want to continue to age for things that really we have control over. [00:25:40] We do have some control over those buckets, guys. So, you know, getting those buckets as low as possible for at least part of the year and then cleaning the liver out while those buckets are lower gives our body a nice clean sponge. We've given ourselves a break from some of the toxic exposures, and then we slowly will build them up over time. But that depends on what you want to do, too. You might stay off of them because you feel so good, or you might decide to do detoxing the liver more frequently, which is totally possible. [00:26:09] So here's what I want you to remember. If you don't measure inflammation properly, if you don't test so test, don't guess, you will chase symptoms forever. [00:26:19] They all look alike. You know everyone. I get this question all the time. How do you know? We don't know until we test. [00:26:27] Stories tell us a lot. Timelines and details and listening tell us a lot, especially age, time of life, where you are, how things happen. [00:26:36] But testing is possible. It's just not going to be done through your traditional labs because they don't run those kinds of panels. It will be through a non traditional lab, which we have access to, and we can get that for you. [00:26:49] Inflammation has a source always, or multiple sources. [00:26:54] It always has a driver. It always leaves clues. [00:26:58] If we don't know what's going on, we can at least look at the context clues. Just like if we're reading a book that we don't understand or in another language, you look for context clues. [00:27:08] Again, testing gives us that context. When we identify where inflammation is coming from, how intense it is, and what systems are involved, then we can treat it precisely from a root cause perspective. And that's again where our lifeevity motto comes into play. We want you to live your life the way you want to live it, to the extent that you want to do so and age your way. And. And in order to do that, keeping inflammation to as low a level as possible will allow you to go run marathons, to go have a brain that works, to be able to get down on the floor with your grandkids. We want to keep that inflammation, or what I like to call the root all of all evil as low as possible. [00:27:50] So if this podcast resonates with you guys, please share it with one of your friends. Follow us on the Anti Aging unravel podcast or YouTube channel. We are on YouTube as well and also if you want to get started, just go to mydrlori.com and fill out the get started now our Lifeevity wellness intake and we'd be happy to get you started. There is no commitment just to do an intake and get some feedback from us and learn a little bit more about yourself. So again, thank you for joining us. Trying to do these weekly, so stay tuned till next week. Just remember, inflammation is testable and preventable. [00:28:29] Thanks for joining me on this episode of Anti Aging Unraveled, where longevity is personal and you're empowered to age your way. If you found today's episode helpful, be sure to subscribe to the podcast or our YouTube channel, Anti Aging Unraveled and of course, follow us on Social for more tools, insights and conversations rooted in lifeev philosophy, living life the way you want to take your next step, visit mydrlori.com click get started now and fill out your wellness or weight loss intake to begin your personalized longevity journey. Until next time, keep living with intention, vitality and purpose. Here's to longevity, life jevity and aging your way.