transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] The nervous system and the immune system are completely integrated. So if we're stressed every day, your immune system is primed for inflammation, which is then causing more wear and tear on our bodies, and ultimately is feeding into chronic diseases. But if we start to consider how the immune system plays a role in driving these conditions, then we can start to get ahead of what is probably the biggest health crisis that we have.

Speaker 2:
[00:28] Hey guys, how are you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better Live More. I believe that today's conversation will transform the way you think about your immune system, what it really does, why it matters, and what we could all be doing to support it. My guest is Dr. Jenna Macciochi, one of the UK's leading immunologists and someone whose work I've admired for years. Since Jenna was last on my show back in 2020, she's been through some significant life changes, and that depth of experience is woven beautifully into her latest book, Immune to Age. You might think it's strange to focus on the immune system just as we're coming out of cold and flu season, but that's the thing that most of us get wrong. We think immunity is just about fighting infections. In fact, as Jenna reveals, the immune system is a key player in how we age, how much energy we have, and whether we develop chronic disease. Jenna calls it our wellness system, and once you hear why, you won't think about your longevity in quite the same way. Jenna gives one of the clearest breakdowns I've heard of how stress works in the body. She explains the close links between chronic stress, immunity, and inflammation. We talk about why midlife is such a critical turning point for your biology, and we discuss what self-compassion, good oral hygiene, and even martial arts can do for our immune health. What I love most about this conversation though is where else it takes us. Jenna and I go way beyond the basics, talking about identity, alignment, and even pondering the meaning of life. It's both practical and philosophical, scientific and surprising. And I think you're going to find it incredibly powerful. So settle in and let's get to know our body's all-important wellness system a little better. I wanted to start off by talking about our immune system, our misunderstood immune systems. Many of us think that our immune systems are solely there to defend us against infections. But in your new book, you make the case that the immune system is one of the central systems within our bodies shaping how we age. Why is this so misunderstood?

Speaker 1:
[03:26] Yeah, I think this is going to be my life's work to try and rebrand the immune system as much more than just infection protection. In fact, I like to think of it as the wellness system, and it's kind of our arbiter of our health across the life course. So we only think about it when we get sick. We're like, oh, I've got that fever. I've got a flu. I've got that seasonal lurgy that's going around. And I think we have to think about it a bit differently now. And that's kind of where my idea came for the book.

Speaker 2:
[03:56] The immune system seems to be at the heart of so many of the things that people struggle with these days, autoimmune disease, asthma, heart disease, Alzheimer's, cancer. And we're going to talk about that throughout this conversation. But of course, as you point out in your book, one of the hot topics at the moment is longevity. You know, how well we're going to age. Do you think that we can say that the health of our immune system directly correlates with how well we're aging and arguably can predict how long we're going to live?

Speaker 1:
[04:36] I think quite possibly. I think we're not quite there yet in being able to do that as a consumer test, let's say. But we do have ways to measure what we call immune resilience. And this is a sort of research-based marker that would allow us to determine if somebody's immune system was functioning well. And so I don't say something like boosted, because that's not quite the right word. We have all these different components of the immune system need to be balanced. And it's kind of like a rubber band, like it can respond when it needs to, but come back to baseline effectively and not kind of get triggered unnecessarily or in an unwanted fashion, like an autoimmune disease or an allergy. And you mentioned a few diseases that people might not expect to have an immune system component like cancer, heart disease, we have things like metabolic syndrome. Now, these all have components of immune dysfunction going on, which I think has long been misunderstood. And if we start to consider how the immune system plays a role in driving these conditions, where does it go awry, then we can start to get ahead of what is probably the biggest health crisis that we have.

Speaker 2:
[05:49] It's interesting, if I reflect back on my medical school education, I went to Edinburgh Medical School back in 95 and in 98, I took a year out to do an immunology degree. It strikes me as I look back that there was a fundamental flaw, that might be an understandable flaw, but a fundamental flaw nonetheless, which was to look at everything as separate. This is what's going on when the heart is not working, this is what's not working well when the lungs are not working, or the brain is not working. And I think our understanding as clinicians, as researchers, as scientists has really evolved over the years, where we're now seeing this as a connected system. And of course, the immune system lies at the very heart of it all.

Speaker 1:
[06:37] Yes, exactly. And I kind of see it as a network, so we call it the immune system. But unlike other systems in our body, you would be able to tell me where anatomically your digestive system is, or your respiratory system, because they're located in a specific anatomical area. But your immune system is everywhere. It's this network system that's sort of connecting it all. It's using your lymphatic vessels and your blood vessels to move around. It's interwoven with the barriers to your body, so the lining of your digestive tract, your skin. It's in your brain. It's everywhere. It's in the gut. And it's there because it's constantly sensing your outside world and your internal world and working together with your nervous system to feed all that information back and give you a sense of if there's danger, what needs healing, what needs repairing, and how well you feel day to day.

Speaker 2:
[07:30] Yeah. I really love the introduction in your new book. And I think in the introduction, you make the case that the immune system is made, not born, which I think is something for us all to reflect on. The immune system develops depending on our life experiences, depending on the inputs we give our body, that then shapes the immune system and how it functions. First of all, have I got that right? And secondly, if so, can you give us some sort of practical examples of what are the kinds of things that we can do that positively shape our immune systems?

Speaker 1:
[08:11] Yeah, I think it's broadly true to say it's made not born. We are born with certain immune functions, but then it develops much of our early life. So a little bit like the nervous system, like we're born with a nervous system, but a baby can't talk and think and articulate in the way that an adult does. It has to do a lot of learning and training after birth. And so the immune system is kind of similar to that. And because it's responsive to your environment, it will respond to what inputs we get. So I think childhood is a real window of opportunity. And this was kind of what sparked, partly sparked writing this book, because I wanted to think about life course health. And that's something we don't often do in research because it's really expensive to do a study of someone's entire life course. So we tend to get a snapshot of one point in time. And then we'll say that 25-year-old male data is the same as someone in their 60s. And it actually might not be. But childhood is an interesting immune window because we have this rapid immune development that happens after birth. And a lot of that is through exposures to germs. Now we used to have this idea that we had to have this kind of hygienic environment. So we have in the 80s, the hygiene hypothesis emerged, whereby hygiene was associated with allergies. And I think that was kind of misguided. And the word hygiene is not the correct word. That's later been updated to the old friends hypothesis by someone called Graham Rook at UCL in London. And this posits that your old friends are the good microbes that live in our environment. So we used to kind of think germs are bad. Like germs are always causing infection. But actually 99% of the microbes around us in the air we're breathing on the surfaces we touch are harmless. They're part of our environmental microbiome. And then inside our guts, on our skin, in our airways, we have our own microbiomes on our body. And these are at these barrier surfaces. And as I mentioned, a lot of your immune cells are also at the barrier surfaces. And they communicate. So a baby is born relatively sterile and then is consequently sort of colonized by microbes, healthy good microbes, that then train and educate the immune system. So this is probably one of the biggest inputs we have to the sort of trajectory our immune system has throughout life. But then I think we can continually nurture those microbes by the environments we go into, the food we eat, the things we do, that we know from the latest research, for example, gut microbiome research, which has exploded in the last 10 years, to try and continually nurture that good immune health. I mean, there's studies looking at frequency of cold and flu viruses in winter when you use like a dietary fiber intervention, because you're improving the microbes in the gut, they're improving how the immune cells are functioning in the gut, and then they're recirculating around the body and providing better defense to infection.

Speaker 2:
[11:19] Yeah. So, you're saying that there's some research showing us that if we increase the right type of fiber in our diets, we're going to get less infections?

Speaker 1:
[11:32] Potentially, yes.

Speaker 2:
[11:33] Yeah. But that's really interesting, isn't it? That this more holistic look at the immune system, which I guess takes us away or a little bit away from things like, you know, when you have a cold, take vitamin C, right? We can maybe unpack that later. I guess the strong sense I get from your work and in particular reading your latest book, Immune to Age, is this idea that it's everything we do.

Speaker 1:
[12:00] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[12:01] Everything we do, the food that we eat, how stressed we are, how much movement, is it the right kind of movement? Even the way we talk to ourselves, also impacts the health of our immune system. I guess, just to make the full link, if someone has tuned into this conversation because they want better longevity, they want to live well for longer, you can't go far wrong focusing on the health of your immune system, can you?

Speaker 1:
[12:34] Yes, exactly. I think it's like not getting too worried about the one night of bad sleep that you might have heard can deplete your ability to respond to infections. It's more thinking about in the UK, the lifespan is around 80 depending on where you live. Think about the life course and not just focusing on the one bad meal you had or the one bad night's sleep. I think we have to, to me, we've already had a longevity revolution and everyone keeps speaking about it. We have people like Brian Johnson and these people who are pushing boundaries of lifespan. But it wasn't that long ago that people would barely live beyond 50. That's really, really close in our evolutionary history. We've already gained all this extra time. But then I don't know about you, but everyone has not enough time. Whenever I want to see friends or do things, we all feel like this time purr. I think partly that's why we have to think about chronic diseases a little bit differently because these are now the biggest causes of poor health in the UK. Whereas perhaps a few generations ago, it would have been infections that would have truncated life. And we know that things like heart disease, one of the biggest killers globally, actually starts much, much earlier in life. Like those changes, those tiny, tiny changes that are happening in the arteries. And we can like think preventatively, instead of waiting until our doctor tells us there's something up with our blood pressure. And I think that there's a human mindset shift. We're still living like our evolutionary past, where you might die tomorrow, because like, you know, there's lots of dangers around, but we actually have a good chance of living quite long.

Speaker 2:
[14:21] Yeah. And it really tells us something about the human condition, doesn't it? This idea that, guys, we've already had it, or we've already had a certain part of it. But are we maxing out what we've already got? Exactly. You talk in the book about health span and lifespan and soul span, which I love. But can you sort of help us understand, you know, why did you come up with the term soul span? And what is it about the current longevity of revolution that we're not fully realizing as humans?

Speaker 1:
[14:56] Yeah, I think the way you put it, the human condition is quite interesting, isn't it? Because we're like, oh, no, now we need to live much longer. But no, wait, we're not enjoying the time we have. And so, as I mentioned in the UK, roughly depending on where you live and whether you're male or female, the lifespan is around 80. But the actual health span, so that's years lived in good health, is 60. So that's a 20 year delta. And that for me was like a massive wake up call. When I got to my early 40s, I was like, shit, this could be half over already. It's not the prelude anymore. Like sometimes we live like this is the warm up and then life will start. And it's kind of like, no, wait a minute, this is it, you know. And I want to make the best of the second half of my life. And I think that's where I kind of got into this idea of soul span, which was my way of thinking about time differently. We have two forms of time. We have linear time, which we'd mark the days off the calendar as we, you know, march through the years. And then we have this more kind of sacred time, which I felt quite inspired by nature because I wrote the book In Seasons of Life, because time is circular in nature. You know, we're just going into spring now. Things are starting to come out. Plants, things we haven't seen green on trees. And I grew up on a farm and everything was driven by the seasons. And you know, the harvest was only as good as the season before. And there was elements in the, you know, things like weather that would determine that. And we forget that we've made this linear time, but time is actually really relative. And in nature, time is circular. It's always breaking down and renewing. And we can tap into that. And I feel like, you know, Einstein was like time is relative. You go on holiday and time stretches forever. But I can go and sit in my back garden with a nice cup of tea. And I can make time slow down just by noticing, just by being aware, just by not scrolling on my phone, just by slowing everything down and looking at little details that I maybe hadn't seen before. And I found that quite amazing. I know it sounds very simple, but I got a bit fascinated by time after that.

Speaker 2:
[17:14] No, I love it, Jenna. It's exactly the kind of stuff I spend a lot of time thinking about these days. And it was quite striking. I'd be thinking about reaching out to you for a few months. I keep thinking, I must get Jenna back on at some point. And then I got your latest book, Immune to Age, and I was gripped from the introduction. I thought, this feels like a different Jenna to the Jenna who came into my studio back in 2020. And then as I started reading and listening to some of your other more recent interviews, I thought, wow, you've been through some quite significant life changes since I last saw you, which I think is beautifully reflected in your writing. Let's talk about that as much as you're open to share as to what has changed in you since our first conversation. But also, it makes me think of almost the middle part of the book, where you talk about mid-life and mid-life being this really important stage in our life, where you actually say, don't you, beyond the age of 40, there's a meaningful change in your biology at 40 as well as perhaps your psychology. So can we sort of go, I was going to go into this a bit later, but I think now seems like the right time to go in there.

Speaker 1:
[18:37] Yeah, yeah, I think it was the Queen's, when the Queen died, I can't remember exactly when that was, and I was kind of just on my laptop and there was this, lots of news stories about it and this little online calculator. It was like a fun, playful, you type in all this stuff about your age, demographics, et cetera, and a number would pop out to tell you about when you might live too, because obviously the Queen lived a very long life, so a lot of the news stories were around that. So I was just mindlessly doing this, and then this number popped out, and I was like, oh my god, my life's half over. And it took something as silly as that for me to be like, there's so much that it feels misaligned. And I think that we only have time and energy, those are kind of the two units of stuff that we have to work with. And when you're not, the only word I can think to describe it is alignment. Like when you're living in alignment, you're, what you believe in, what you enjoy, and your value system, and it's all wrapped up in your day to day, and I just felt really misaligned. And then sort of from that point onwards, I threw some grenades into my life and like left my job, left my marriage, like just blew up everything. I wish I don't know if it was the right thing to do or not, but then kind of dug myself out of the debris. And it was the biggest teacher, I think, but it made me make changes that made me feel more aligned. And then by virtue of that, I got more energy, I felt more alive, I had more space to slow down, I had less need to mindlessly scroll or distract myself. I would be able to sit in the garden and look at the trees and like notice the leaves and do that all season round. And did a lot of meditation too. And it was after years of wanting to meditate and being I can't was like, I can't not. But I'm pleased to have gone through. It was all very hard. But I and the book kind of was birthed out of that, which is why I, you know, science is stories that started off as stories. You know, people living in villages sharing, don't eat that plant. It might kill you or use this as a medicine to cure you. It was sharing stories that we've now built into this, you know, peer review system and evidence based. But there's something very human about stories. I found myself numb to people telling me information. We get so much information now, but we've lost agency over our lives. And I think I had to regain agency and sort of switch off all the information for a while. So I tried to weave some of my own personal stories into the book as well, alongside the science and stories about scientists who've shaped a lot of the discoveries that I discuss.

Speaker 2:
[21:21] Yeah, thank you for sharing that. It definitely helps me understand how and why the tone of this book, I would say, is quite different from your first two. And it's certainly where I'm at in my life. So I very much resonate with this, as I said to you when you walked into my house this morning, that there's less of the what, there is plenty of what in this book in terms of what can you do to help improve your immune system health. But there's a lot of the why. I mean, why should you care? Why should you do these things? Why in a limited time budget, why should you spend your time actually doing these things? And as you as you eloquently put in the introduction, it's the conversation around longevity is both science and philosophy.

Speaker 1:
[22:08] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[22:09] You can't just look at it through the lens of science or, you know, these, this is how you should eat. This is how you should move. You know, this is how many hours sleep you should get. Okay, great. Helpful.

Speaker 1:
[22:19] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[22:19] And if you don't have the bigger why, if you're not living in alignment or figuring out why should you do those things, purely on a behavioural change aspect, I think this is one of the main reasons why people can't make habits stick in the long term. I think about behavioural change in two levels. There's, you know, tricks for habits, right? Make it easy, stick it on to an existing habit, you know, design your environment in a way that supports the behaviour you want. Those things are very, very helpful. And I think there's a much deeper level to behaviour change that we don't think about enough. And I really strongly have found that people's behaviours will always end up matching the person who they believe themselves to be.

Speaker 1:
[23:11] Yes, 100%. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[23:13] So you can try every January to change things. But if you don't fundamentally change how you see yourself, how you value yourself, as you say, living in alignment, you may find that that's the reason you can't make these habits stick, because there's a slight disconnect.

Speaker 1:
[23:29] 100%. And actually, in my second book, I remember reading this study. It was actually a weight loss study, but I think it is useful to illustrate the point. And they looked at people who went on a weight loss journey and then successfully maintained that weight loss versus people who didn't manage to. And one of the things that they found was most consistent was that they changed their entire perception of themselves. They gave themselves a new identity. So that whole story that we... I mean, everything is a story that we tell ourselves, but they managed to completely change it. I am not the person that does that. I am the person that does this. And then they changed their life around that. And I think we can be told like, this is what healthy diet looks like, but we still don't manage to do that. And that's because of those deeper layers of like, we need to unpick and unpack.

Speaker 2:
[24:21] Your behaviour matches your beliefs. You know, how you view yourself, the identity which you hold has certain behaviours that are attached to it.

Speaker 1:
[24:31] Yes, 100%.

Speaker 2:
[24:31] Right, the only way. I, you know, and I think this doesn't get spoken about enough because it's much easier to talk about, you know, little tricks for habits. And I do as well, and they're helpful.

Speaker 1:
[24:43] Yes, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[24:45] Up to a point.

Speaker 1:
[24:46] Yeah, exactly, that's kind of where I've got to, especially with the social media and the amount of information and health and wellness information. Like, I'm not sure it's actually helping people. I think people need to get, regain agency. And I think that's by really having those conversations with yourself, getting to know yourself. And to be, for me, that could only happen in stillness when I wasn't distracting myself with busyness or the phone or another project, it was sitting with yourself. And I, you know, many of us think about meditation being like getting into this calm Zen place, but it's not, it's really observing how nuts your mind can be. And then observing it again and again and again until you start to be able to get control of that sort of monkey brain. And then, you know, not sort of sleepwalk through your life, which is, I think, you know, where I got to, where you are unconscious to your behaviours.

Speaker 2:
[25:38] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[25:38] And then you see them and you can't unsee them. And slowly, by just repetition, you get there.

Speaker 2:
[25:45] Well, come back to your personal story maybe a bit later. I do want to talk about practical things that people can do when it comes to improving the health of their immune system, because as we've already said, the immune system sits at the heart of probably everything you want from your health. You can make a case that good immune system health is necessary for that. We just spoke there about identities. So why do we start by talking about self-compassion, how we talk to ourselves, because there's some really interesting researches there showing how people who are more compassionate to themselves have better functioning of their immune system. Hey guys, just taking a quick break from this week's episode to ask you a small favour. On this show, I'm always looking to improve things. Make sure I'm booking the most interesting guests, having conversations about the right topics, and building relationships with the most aligned sponsors. But in order to do this, my team and I need to know a little bit more about you. So we have created a super short survey that I would dearly love you to fill out. It will only take you about 2 minutes to do so, and I would honestly really appreciate it. All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com/survey. That's drchatterjee.com/survey. Today's episode is sponsored by Vivo Barefoot. One of the simplest ways to improve your whole body health is to start with your feet. Most of us don't realize this, but 95% of us are born with healthy feet. And by adulthood, 77% of us have foot problems. And a big reason is the shoes we wear. Modern shoes are rigid, narrow, and over-cushioned. They disconnect us from the ground and weaken the very muscles that support our posture, balance, and movement. That's why I've been wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes for well over a decade now. They're the opposite of conventional shoes. Vivos are designed for fit, flex, and feel. To let your feet do what human feet have evolved to do. When you free your feet, you free your whole body. And studies have shown that wearing minimalist footwear like Vivo's can increase foot strength by up to 60% in just six months, improving balance, natural posture, and the way in which you move. If you've never tried barefoot footwear before, Vivo make it really easy to do so. They offer a 100-day money-back trial so you can wear them, live in them, move naturally. And if they're not for you, you just send them back. No risk at all. So if you're curious to reconnect with your natural movement in 2026 and give your feet the freedom they're designed for, try Vivo Barefoot and get 15% off your first order by heading to vivobarefoot.com/live more, free your feet and the rest will follow.

Speaker 1:
[29:14] This is a really lovely study that was done, and it resonated with me, and certainly was my introduction to self-compassion, which is sort of having a sense of common humanity, how we speak to ourselves, sort of having the compassion for yourself as you would for a good friend. And there's several different techniques that you can find to sort of help you develop this. But they're looking at blood markers, so a sort of empirical readout of your immune system. And particularly, they were interested in unwanted inflammation. So inflammation is your immune system's sort of weapon of defense. So when it wants to remove something from your body, or heal or repair damage, it will pull out inflammation. So it's very, very useful. It keeps us alive. It's the reason we haven't died out as a species. But over time, that can get a bit leaky, and your immune system will react to things it shouldn't with inflammation. And as much as it's helpful, it has a bit of a collateral damage, you know, that's flowing through your blood vessels, that's going to be like causing a bit of oxidative stress, like there's a sort of collateral damage to unwanted inflammation. But by teaching self-compassion, and I think this intervention was done over six or eight weeks, they found that they could help people lower unwanted inflammation. Because if your sort of thoughts are wrapped up in how your body is physically behaving, then your mental health and physical health are to me now one and the same. I can almost can't speak of them separately. And if you think of the nervous system, is there to protect you and keep you safe. Your immune system is there to protect you and keep you safe. These two systems are integrated and working together. So if you're always in fear, always like speaking in the negative voice to yourself, your immune system is getting that message that there's something bad, like I need to be prepared for danger or damage. I need to keep this person safe. The only weapon I've got is inflammation. I'm going to whip that out. Whereas when we're more compassionate, we get a sense of safety and the immune system can calm down and come back into balance.

Speaker 2:
[31:24] Yeah, it goes back to what we said earlier, doesn't it? That the immune system is built and it is shaped through the inputs that we give it via the way we live our lives. And that also includes the voice inside our heads.

Speaker 1:
[31:41] Yes. And I think when we get that awareness, and then it feels really kind of Icky to change that because you're so used to this sort of negative self-talk and then to switch to something more positive. But it's just iteration over time. You keep doing it and then it becomes more normal and you start to accept it and you don't have to go wild and sort of big yourself up. But it's just like, oh, you've been in a mistake. That's part of life. Chalk it up, take the learnings and then move on. And I think when I went through some very difficult chapters of my life, it was like, you could easily spiral into like, oh, I've just destroyed everything. What's the point? Or you can be like, wow, there's a lot to learn. I've got another opportunity to take those learnings forward and keep going. And that was kind of like night and day for how I felt, for my ability to get out of bed in the morning and function and show up for myself and my children and my health. Like, it's the difference between physical pain that I experienced in my body because I was not feeling safe. So I was like bracing all the time. And someone who's really fit and active, I started suffering with back pain and just from like not realizing that I was always bracing for something dangerous to happen. It affected my posture so that I'm not feeling confident because I'm like slouched like this. And even if we just roll our shoulders back, you feel more confident just by moving your body. So it's this, I can't even separate mind and body anymore. To me, it's like they're the same.

Speaker 2:
[33:16] Yeah, I don't even like the terms physical health and mental health anymore. I've almost stopped using them. They slip in because you're conditioned a certain way.

Speaker 1:
[33:25] People understand them.

Speaker 2:
[33:26] People understand them. So there's always the challenge between what's easy to communicate versus what is totally accurate. You could make the same case with boosting an immune system. This idea that boosting your immune system, which I think you're not a huge fan of as a terminology, I understand why. At the same time, I think the flip side to that is, is that I think a lot of people understand it as being, I want to improve my immune system function. So if I sleep eight hours compared to five hours, and my natural killer cells go up by 40 or 50 percent, I think, I would say it's reasonable to say boost that because I think you boosted the number of natural killer cells. But I understand also that we want to talk more about balance. Do you want to just speak to that for a moment?

Speaker 1:
[34:18] I'm always really compassionate when people ask me, it's usually like a friend or maybe someone on my Instagram or a journalist. And I'm like, I know what you mean. But if you quote me as saying boosted, everyone's going to come after me and be like, you can't boost your immune system. But I'm like, I know what you mean. You want to, you know, we're going into winter. You want to avoid colds. You want to be resilient to whatever is going around. But, you know, when you turn the immune system on, it means you're usually turning on one of the different flavors of inflammation to remove something. So that's good in the short term. You might have a virus, get through the virus. You might have an injury and you want to heal and repair that tissue. But then you need to turn it off again when that process is finished. And if you don't turn it off in a timely fashion, then it's going to linger and you get problems because inflammation, as I said, is inherently damaging. It's just meant to be a short term. It's like the stress response. You know, I want to run to safety and my heartbeat is racing and like blood sugar is filling my veins as is motivating me to safety. But then, oh, now I'm at the other side of the road or wherever. Everything needs to be able to calm back down to baseline in a really nice, timely fashion. And if it doesn't, then you end up, you know, in some sort of anxiety spirals. It's a similar thing with inflammation. Like you don't need to have the immune system in one state all the time. It needs to be responsive and then it needs to come back. It's like the nervous system needs to respond and come back. We have to be able to, you know, we don't know what danger is around the corner. We don't know what healing and repair we will need, but we need to be able to be ready and then also back to baseline.

Speaker 2:
[35:59] It is a practical thing and that we can think about doing to support our immune system health. We've just mentioned self-compassion being one of those. You just mentioned stress and the stress response and also how over the past years, it sounds as though you've introduced meditation into your life. Perhaps let's move on to stress and think about what is the impact of chronic, unmanaged stress on our immune systems and then what are some of the practical things we can do. Like for example, you do meditation. I'd be interested to know if you think meditation has a positive impact on your immune system.

Speaker 1:
[36:46] Yeah, I think stress is just this pervasive thing that is everywhere. Whenever I speak to friends, it's like we're all stressed all of the time, but nobody quite knows how to stop it. And a lot of the tips inherently are usually useful and have some evidence, but they're often kind of in a self-care bucket and it makes you as this self-isolated human that's meant to do it by yourself. And we're actually living in this kind of wider ecosystem of stressors. As I mentioned, the nervous system and the immune system are completely integrated. If your eyes are seeing danger, then it's telling your brain there's a danger, your nervous system is preparing for whatever that might need. And then your immune system is also being told, right, that you might get injured, you might have an infection, something might happen, there might be tissue damage, you've got to be ready. So it's primed for inflammation. If we're stressed every day because of our, you know, home situation, because of a work situation, or family events, or things out of our control, then your immune system doesn't know any different. It's just like, right, I got primed for something dangerous to happen. That priming is this inflammation, this unwanted inflammation, which is then causing more wear and tear on our bodies. And that's ultimately is feeding into chronic disease. Something we haven't mentioned is that these chronic diseases, which now replace infectious diseases as the biggest causes of poor health, all have unwanted inflammation as one of their core features. So if we can have a handle on that, it's going to hopefully interrupt the tide of those developing across the life course.

Speaker 2:
[38:26] Yeah. And I guess just a point to highlight for people is that they will have heard on this podcast, on many occasions, me or my guests talking about chronic unresolved inflammation and why it is one of the root causes of most of the chronic diseases that we struggle with these days. But they might not have drawn the link to the immune system. Where does that inflammation come from? Well, it comes from the immune system, right? So actually, if you're going root, root, root cause, yeah, go to chronic inflammation, but then you actually have to go one step deeper and go, yeah, that's because the immune system, for whatever reason, feels that it needs to propagate an inflammatory response because of what it is sensing.

Speaker 1:
[39:13] Yeah. And the sensing part is the nervous system, which is talking to the immune system. And I just think when you start to piece that together, to me, I can't think of it differently anymore. Like, that's why I can't think of mental health different from physical health, because if I imagine a scenario, oh my God, this is going to happen at work and this is terrible, then I'm basically telling my whole body there's a danger and telling my immune system to be on red alert, but it's all just my thoughts about what might happen before I go to work, for example. So I think it's, sadly, we're in this kind of modern world where we're stuck in all of these situations where there's lots of imagined concerns and fears that compromise our sense of safety. I think we always assume the word safety is like an inherent danger, like I'm about to be hit by a car, but I think our sense of safety can be compromised by our thoughts, by a stressful email, by all sorts of things.

Speaker 2:
[40:12] Yeah, but by what we consume. Of course, as we're recording this conversation, middle of March, you know, the news has become quite alarming over the past week, okay? And flights been canceled, like people wondering about the end of the world, all kinds of things. And we have to be aware that the content we're consuming is sending that signal to our immune systems.

Speaker 1:
[40:40] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[40:41] And I was really good for a while. I sort of had deleted X and Instagram from my phone. So I would only look at them on my laptop. And then I think, because I was traveling in February, I put X back on for some reason. And after this all sort of started to go down, right? In the news, I was finding myself on X for God knows how long, just trying to stay up to date with stuff. And I thought, okay, Rangan, you know, you do not need X on your phone, okay? You know, again, not trying to tell anyone how to live their life. For me, I was realizing that I don't need 60 to 90 minutes of negative inputs into my life about stuff that is largely out of my control. I just delete the app. And even though that hasn't changed anything that is going on in the world, my experience of day to day life is completely different.

Speaker 1:
[41:35] Yeah, and I think it goes back to our earlier discussion on time. Because if I get to the end of the day and I realize how much time I've spent mindlessly scrolling, when I could be living more deeply in the moment, more present with myself, with the world around me, then that means by the end of the day, I've had very different inputs into my body. In terms of our kind of information diet, you know, we talk a lot about what we eat, but you know, what we're exposing ourselves to and in the content that we're exposed to, is also having a physical effect on our health.

Speaker 2:
[42:09] For many years, Jenna, I would specialize in seeing people with autoimmune disease. This is out with where I was in general practice at the time. I'd also see people for an hour, an hour and a half, who had complex issues that they couldn't get resolution for. And I used to really enjoy that. And one thing I found, I mean, I don't have the exact statistics, it was almost 100% of the time, was when I did a timeline on people who suffered from any autoimmune disease, whether that be lupus, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, whatever it might be, I can tell you it was amazing how many times in the six months prior to them getting a diagnosis, there was a significant stressor in their life. Whether it be a divorce, bereavement, job loss, I'm not saying it was the only cause, but it seemed to be the trigger that tipped them over the edge. You've been studying immunology for many years, does that make sense to you through the lens of the science of the immune system?

Speaker 1:
[43:29] Yes, completely. It sounds like what you've experienced with your patients is starting to be reported now in the literature, and it's an anecdote that we hear time and time again for people who have autoimmune conditions. They'll also often say that stress will flare up their symptoms as well as perhaps being an antecedent to the diagnosis, and again, that's because we have this really integrated response between the stress response and the immune system. And also if you think about it, when your stress response is activated, everything's going to be amplified in the immune system. So if you already have some immune responses that are happening, so for example, in rheumatoid arthritis, there's an attack on the cartilage in the knee, then you're just amplifying the conditions for this. Immune cells are metabolically active, so the stress is affecting our metabolism, it's affecting things like blood sugar levels. And that doesn't cause inflammation, but it will amplify what's already there because of the metabolic profile of those immune cells. And also things like cortisol, when we have a heightened cortisol, which is one of the main stress chemicals, it downregulates the cortisol receptor, so we can't resolve the stress response as well. So we kind of get stuck in a loop. And then you have layers on top of that, things like vitamin D deficiency, which is really common in winter, which will again, lessen your ability to close the stress loop. And suddenly you get into this messy network of all these different things happening under the surface. And all of the symptoms are flaring for that person. I think if you can manage as much of the unwanted inflammation as possible, stress will come and go. Then that's the best case scenario. And actually, there's some really interesting literature that the people who have chronic diseases, but fear the best in terms of their sense of their own well-being. So how they feel in themselves are the ones who've kind of made peace with this lifelong condition, this awful diagnosis that they've had. And I think that they're no longer kind of resisting, because for so long, it can be like, but why me? And what's going wrong? And what have I done? But when you have a sense of acceptance of how things are, instead of wishing they were different, that seems to allow people to feel a better sense of well-being.

Speaker 2:
[45:59] This is where science and spirituality, for one of her better terms, start to really combine and become one, right? Because these concepts of acceptance are things that spiritual teachers and philosophy would have talked about for years. So it's really fascinating to hear how that actually can actually transform or certainly have an impact on people's physical symptoms because these things are not separate. They're one and the same. And now I spend a lot of time thinking about stress and what stress actually is. And you can look at it through multiple lenses. You know, my second book back in 2018 was all about stress. And whilst I still stand by everything that was in that, I would probably write it differently today, because it was, well, eight years ago. And I think about stress. My thinking has evolved somewhat since then. And I think one way of looking at stress is thinking about it as resistance. Stress in many ways only exists when we resist. That resistance is the stress, whereas acceptance is the opposite of resistance, right? If you can accept everything in your life, I know it's easier said than done, that working on how you go about cultivating the skill of acceptance literally will transform your stress response, because the stress comes from the fact that you're resisting what is. And when you stop resisting what is, the stress just isn't there, at least not to the same degree.

Speaker 1:
[47:37] I think for me, there is a moment of being like, doesn't mean I have to like it. Like I can resist this and be like, why is this happening to me? And then I can be like, well, it couldn't be any other way because it's not, this is literally how reality is and I can't change it. And it's like you put the hot coal down and you're no longer burning your hand. But doesn't mean I have to be like, yeah, I'm really happy for this. I think when I kind of put those two things together and I notice it now with the kids, like when my kids get frustrated because of something and it's usually because they're resisting whatever it is and then they kind of eventually get to the point of acceptance. And then it's like, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[48:17] And sometimes the solution to stress or chronic stress that may be impacting our health, I think sometimes it's not as hard as we think. I think sometimes it can be challenging for sure. I always remember a case of a lady, a middle-aged lady with Crohn's disease. I'm pretty sure I used this as a case study in my first 4 Pillar Plan years ago. And I always remember how she had really bad Crohn's. She didn't like the immunosuppressants. They gave her bad side effects. And I was seeing her from a more holistic approach, let's say. And one of the times she came to see me, the recommendation for me was to have 15 minutes to herself every day. And she went away for 4 to 6 weeks. And in that time, she would have 15 minutes to herself every day, which from recollection was after she dropped her kids off at school, before she got on to work, she'd go for a 15 minute walk in the park. That was it. The other thing she brought into her life was a passion that she'd always wanted to do, which was salsa dancing. And she had never done it. She never thought she had time. She was always doing things for her husband and her children, never for her. And 15 minutes of me time every day and going to a salsa dancing class once a week, brought her Crohn's disease symptoms down by over 50% and it was sustainable. I would remember that because I'm like, wow, no one's teaching us at a medical school, but it totally makes sense through the lens of the immune system and stress. If her having time to herself is lowering her stress, if her doing something that she's passionate about, we also know that has a positive impact on your stress response and your immune system, it stands to reason that her symptoms may reduce somewhat. They go away, she still had the condition, but it was way more manageable.

Speaker 1:
[50:12] Yeah. And I think to be able to do those things, go and enjoy a salsa dance class or something you enjoy, but you just put it off for whatever reason. You need to give yourself a sense of safety and love. I'm allowed to do that. I can find, I can carve that out in my busy week, where sometimes we jump from task to task. That 15-minute walk in the park, you're giving yourself something that you didn't have before, that you deserve, which is just peacefulness, a nice bit of fresh air. And I think that's really incredible, but so simple. And, yeah, I hope we can start to sprinkle this in alongside all of the amazing medical treatments and things that we have available, which has given us this really long lifespan that we now potentially have. But I think to really have a depth of life and not just be chasing some horizon, optimizing for the sake of it. And actually, one of the things that blew my mind was, you know, we're always looking at all these longevity hacks. You know, there's protocols everywhere, there's morning routines, like, you can really indulge in that content online if you want to. The latest hacks, the equipment, the technology. But one of the best ways of sensing how long you might live is actually how much you can sense your own body. So by that, I mean like being able to be aware of your heartbeat, being able to respond to signals. So simple examples include things like your interception. So when you're hungry, when you need to go to the bathroom, like those, we can override them easily. But the more you're able to sense what your body's telling you, the better able you are to sort of live well, feel well, stay well. And I find that quite fascinating. And I think we can only do that if we're still and calm and with ourselves. Because I certainly can override all of my basic needs if I'm having a really busy day and running around as a working mom. And I think that it was, you know, when you sit in meditation, you're suddenly like, oh, my hip's niggling. And like, I'm fidgety and I want to, dopamine wants me to pick up my phone. And like, you suddenly become aware. My heart's racing. My breathing is all in my upper chest. Like, and then you're aware. You're like, oh, right now, I can sort of start to fix those things.

Speaker 2:
[52:33] Yeah. I've noticed from your Instagram page that you've taken up Jiu Jitsu over the past few years. And I think in one of your posts, I think you said something to the effect of this idea that Jiu Jitsu has healed your nervous system. We're talking about stress. We're talking about the impact it has on our nervous systems and therefore our overall health. Meditation is something you brought into your life. And so is Jiu Jitsu. Can you speak a little bit to what those two things have done for you? Today's episode is sponsored by AG1, a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over seven years. Now, this is the time of year when our immune systems are under the most pressure. Between spending more time indoors, travel and seasonal bugs, it's natural to look for extra ways to support our immune defenses. But most people don't want to juggle multiple pills. They want something simple, effective, and easy to stick with. AG1 is a daily health drink that provides key immunity-supporting nutrients, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc, and selenium, all of which contribute to the normal function of the immune system. These nutrients are included in highly bioavailable forms, meaning they are much easier for the body to absorb and use. Backed by clinical research, expert formulation, and continuous improvement, AG1 has been in my own life for around 7 years now, and each batch is independently tested for quality and safety. That's how they guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. The best thing, of course, is that all this goodness comes in one convenient, tasty daily serving. For a limited time only, get a free AG1 Flavour Sampler and AGZ Sampler to try all the flavours, plus free Vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 Welcome Kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers. See all details at drinkag1.com/live more.

Speaker 1:
[55:10] They're both really significant. I wanted to do martial art for quite some time. I've always been very active, and I was just kind of curious about it. I don't know anyone who did it. I had a car accident a few years ago, and I just had to recover from those injuries before I could take up a sport, which is historically quite littered with injuries, because you're effectively wrestling other people. And I found a local studio and started going down there. And this was kind of in the midst of like, you know, coming out of the marriage and all of my personal stuff. And I kind of realized that I didn't... Talking about the nervous system as like fight or flight is what most people would be familiar with. Like you're faced with danger, you're going to fight, or you're going to run away. And your nervous system is helping you be motivated to do one of those. But there's other parts to that conversation that are less spoken about. I think they more apply to women, generally speaking. And that's freeze and fawn. So if you can't fight, because maybe you're smaller and you wouldn't win, and you can't flight, you can't run away for whatever reason, you might freeze. And you might try and appease the thing that is causing you danger. And it's still a stress response. You're just, you're still bracing. You know, all of that stress chemistry is still happening, but it's physically in your body. And I mentioned earlier, you know, dealing with back pain, because I spent a lot of time in this freeze-fawn response, like everything bracing. And I didn't even realize this was just how I went about my day. My whole diaphragm not working properly, like breathing in my upper chest, like my heart rate elevated. So I went to Jiu Jitsu and I was like, this is great. You're learning technique. It's all very like, come brilliant training partners. You're learning how to do the technique in a very safe way. Your partner is very passive so that you can understand the movements. And then you have rounds of sparring at the end. And I just completely froze. Like I, like my body had forgotten that I could have this fight response. Because I think there's a certain amount of adrenaline when you're very new to a martial art that you need to go and spar with someone. Because you're like literally six minutes trying to fight, to choke, you know, submit the person. And it was kind of after that I realized that this is what I'd been experiencing. I'd been in this freeze-fond but stuck. And my nervous system didn't know how to fight. And it was like just in that safe environment with this amazing community of people that I reconnected with a bit of my body that I, a function I had that I didn't know how to use. And I think this is really important because when we speak about the nervous system, it's always like you have to regulate, you have to be calm, do the calm breathing and the calm self-care routine. And it's like, no, no, I have to be able to fight when I want to fight, come back to baseline, be calm when I need to be calm. I need to be able to respond to what life throws at me because I don't know what's coming. I need to be able to run away if I need to, fight if I need to, freeze or fawn if I need to. I need to do all of these things and have access to them. And I realized that I didn't. So it was kind of like a re-learning of how to use my fight response because we have these for a reason. And I think it's important that we get activated for those six minutes of intensity and come back to baseline. And I think that a lot of the messaging around telling people to be calm all the time, it's like you just need to maybe not be calm because if someone's stressed, telling them to be calm is quite hard.

Speaker 2:
[58:54] It's so interesting, Jenna, the way you've articulated the benefits you got from jujitsu is that it wasn't there, you know, it could easily be, and I'm sure this is part of it, you know, this is something I do for me. I've always wanted to do it. And that is true. And also this idea that your nervous system was almost a bit stuck.

Speaker 1:
[59:16] Yeah, I mean, I thought I was going to be sick. I was like, and I'm in the middle of like, you know, having a round of sparring. I could feel myself not wanting to practice the technique. I could feel myself wanting to freeze and just let them do whatever they wanted to me. And it was intense and emotional. It was, I didn't have to go back. Like I could have stopped at any time, but almost like exposure therapy, like I needed that. I needed to expose myself to things that I didn't know how to do or was avoiding. And I think so much of the time we avoid things, because we want to keep safe and it feels safe to avoid, but we're almost kind of giving ourselves a front row seat to future pain in that way.

Speaker 2:
[59:58] How long have you been doing it for now?

Speaker 1:
[60:00] It's been about two years now.

Speaker 2:
[60:01] About two years.

Speaker 1:
[60:02] And then from that, I've also got a community. I don't know if it's normal in the martial arts community, but the gym where I go, like everyone's supportive and friendly and it's so welcoming. And like, so I get more and more out of it as I keep doing it. And also, I'm not very good. Like it's really, really like a tough learning situation. Like I can go to the gym and I know what I'm capable of and I can go for a run and I've done like various half marathons and things, but then to be completely like a newbie and just be like, I can't remember my left from right. You know, it's humbling, but it's just, it's been such a tonic. It's unreal.

Speaker 2:
[60:43] Tommy Wood has been on the show several times, including just a couple of weeks ago. And Tommy's this incredible medical doctor who's, you know, works in pediatric neurology and he's got a PhD and he's just so knowledgeable and so grounded in the advice that he gives. And Tommy has been saying for years that he thinks one of the main things that drives a decline in brain function as we get older is that we're not stimulating the brain with new things. So he's a big fan of us becoming a beginner again at something, right? Rather than, yeah, there's nothing wrong with wanting mastery in something and trying to get even better. But I think for our brains, it's very, very good every few years to try something brand new where we aren't very good. And then we learn because the brain then has to grow stronger to learn those new things. That was one thing I thought about. The other thing I thought about was so much of the advice that's given these days online, in books, is about solo pursuits. It's about, you know what? You're overly stressed, which is true for many, if not most people. These things can help you. But the onus then becomes on us to find time to meditate, to find time for our workout, to find time to cook or whatever it might be. And that's all great. And I think we do need to find some of that individual time in our lives. But there is also something really beautiful about doing things in a group, isn't there? Which I think we lost in COVID. I think society has forgotten this. And I think there's a hangover from COVID that hasn't fully been returned yet. Cause we learned that we can do our yoga on YouTube. We can do the Pilates workout on this online course. Okay, great. And it ain't the same thing as doing it in a community. Because nourishing relationships in and of themselves lower your stress.

Speaker 1:
[62:57] 100%.

Speaker 2:
[62:58] Irrespective of what you do. And actually, I want to talk to you about meditation and its impact on the immune system. But I've actually, 2 weeks ago, was on a 4-day meditation retreat. I've never meditated in a group before. I didn't know I could meditate for that long. I was a bit nervous before I went. I was like, can I meditate kind of most of the day? It was one of the best things I've done. And I really thought, I really experienced, oh, there's a benefit in meditating in the same room as 10 other people who are also doing it. So how much do you think, I guess you've already answered it, but what do you think community and doing things with other people, what's the impact that that can have on our immune system, would you say?

Speaker 1:
[63:41] Well, there was a really interesting study, actually, when I started getting into jujitsu, started looking at the research, obviously, like a true nerd. And there's a really interesting study showing like the oxytocin response. So this is a neurochemical that is to do with love and bonding, but not just the romantic love, but it could be with people, friends, the favorite barista at your coffee shop. And that you get this boost of oxytocin when you're grappling with someone in Jiu-Jitsu. And this has a bigger health benefits because it's very anti-inflammatory, it's calming, it's giving you a sense of safety. Because ultimately, humans evolved in communities. You know, we need each other. I don't go and grow all my own food myself. I might do something in the garden, but ultimately, I have to rely on many, many other people in the food chain to be able to eat. There's always been this aspect of our survival that relies on other people. And so, we need community. And there is, again, that neurochemical imprint of being around people. And that, again, your immune cells have receptors for those chemicals on the surface, too. So, you're feeling it, you're feeling the warmth of chatting to your neighbor as you leave for work. You feel like, oh, there's someone there in my community. But then your body's also experiencing this sort of sense of safety, which, again, is really good for your nervous system and by proxy the immune system.

Speaker 2:
[65:11] Wow.

Speaker 1:
[65:12] I also think there's something in the heart rate, you know, because we have that kind of electromagnetic field that our heart is emitting and it's much stronger than any other part of our body. You can also detect the brain. But imagine the ECG on like a medical TV show people might have seen. You can detect that outside of the body. I can't remember exactly how far it emanates. But I always think about it in terms of my kids. Like if one of them is out playing and they fall over, they start crying, you know, that real kind of hyperventilating crying, really upset and you bring them into your chest and you're calm because you know everything's fine. And your heart has this more powerful electromagnetic field than their little heart does. And you get this like phase lock response. So imagine two pendulum clocks on the wall. Eventually, they phase lock onto each other, which means they kind of swing at the same time and the little heart is using the bigger calm heart to help calm and bring themselves back to baseline. And then, you know, the kid is fine and they run off and play again. And so I think when we're around people, we're sensing as we sit here today, like your heart is giving off an electromagnetic field, so is mine. And if we're both calm, they're sort of going to phase lock into each other. If I was incredibly stressed, it might be very calming to talk to you as a friend if you were feeling very calm. So that's why it can be good to go meet a friend when you're stressed, who's maybe able to be that kind of strong calm beat that you can sort of benefit from being close to.

Speaker 2:
[66:46] Yeah. It makes me think now back to the case study I shared with you about the Lady with Crones. How much of that improvement also came from her doing a salsa dancing class in a group?

Speaker 1:
[67:01] For sure. Yeah. And you're up close with someone. Yeah. You're getting all their body language.

Speaker 2:
[67:05] This one I probably haven't thought about as much. But I did think about when you mentioned GJC because I did think there's a lot of close contact.

Speaker 1:
[67:13] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[67:13] Right. And there's a there's a chat called Professor Francis McGlone from the University of Liverpool. I've known Francis for years. He's brilliant. In fact, I think it's time to get him back on the show. He came on maybe episode 30, maybe like in the first year. But he was basically talking about how we have a touch deficiency.

Speaker 1:
[67:35] Oh, yes.

Speaker 2:
[67:36] In the modern world. And just to be clear, we're talking about safe, consensual touch, okay? But he has done a lot of research showing how important that safe, consensual touch is to human beings. Yes, mother-child for sure. But also beyond that, we need it and there are certain receptors that actually only get triggered when you give it that touch.

Speaker 1:
[68:01] Yeah. I mean, you go to hug a friend, don't you? It's like the natural reaction when you see people that you care about is to touch them or put your arm around someone and know who's really upset. It's kind of an instinct almost.

Speaker 2:
[68:14] Yeah. And looking at that through the lens of the immune system, we know that those things are anti-inflammatory. So of course, that anti-inflammatory component is mediated through the immune system.

Speaker 1:
[68:25] Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[68:29] You trained, I think, to become a performance breathwork instructor relatively recently. Under this kind of umbrella of stress and how it can negatively impact our immune system and therefore our health, you mentioned what jiu-jitsu has done for you, which sounds profound. Can you briefly mention what you feel meditation has done for you? Is there any research on meditation to your knowledge and what it does for our immune system? And also then let's talk about breathwork and how that can also potentially help.

Speaker 1:
[69:03] Well, meditation, I've kind of touched on in my life many times. And I don't know if I just didn't have the quite right teacher or, you know, hadn't grasped what meditation really meant. I do think there's a kind of perception that it's going to make everyone really calm and zen. And I don't think it's that anymore. I think it's being able to observe your mind and have a bit more agency over your mind. But then I had this real kind of rock bottom moment in my life where I was just like, I can't do anything. I'm just going to sit. And that was just after the kids had gone to bed. The house was quiet and I was just on my own. And I was like, I'm just going to sit and see how long I can sit. Because I'm literally, I'm out of options, I'm out of ideas. I don't know what to do with my next step, my next day. And from that came a daily habit that I just couldn't not do. And it's just never stopped. And I look forward to it. And sometimes I do it for longer. And sometimes it's in the garden. Sometimes I have a little area in my house where it's always comfortable with a little rug and stuff. So that when it's cold, I want to do it. And it's been really profound to just get to know myself a bit better. And to give myself space, like mental space, and be able to see the thoughts kind of flowing through and be like, ah, it's fine. They're just thoughts. Rather than like clinging on to everything and thinking, this is the end of the world. It was like, I couldn't not. And so after years of being on and off meditation, it just suddenly clicked into place. And yeah, that's it. But then I was very interested in breathwork, having gone to various different courses, classes, events, and touched on different styles and forms. And I just kind of wanted to know how I could use it in daily life. Like I think it's fine to go and do a really intensive workshop. But I was like, I've found the little things I can do every day are much more profound. And then maybe you build up to like a retreat or something. And so I came across the biomechanics of breathing. And again, this is kind of all wrapped up in like having this chronic pain that I'd been dealing with. And realizing that inherently when you take an inhale, this is kind of the sympathetic part of the nervous system, because your breath is kind of connected to your nervous system. And you have lots of mechanoreceptors on your lungs. So when you're inhaling, you're changing the anatomy and then you're exhaling. It's changing again. And the exhale is is activating the parasympathetic. It's more a rest than digest. So you have this constantly going on with every breath. And then you kind of get the overall bigger picture across the days and weeks. And then just the simple thing of like, I can change my exhale and change how I feel was just amazing to me. Because I was like, right, that's a real time tool. You know, you've got the meditation was kind of the future proofing tool. Like if I'm really stressed, I'm probably not going to sit down and meditate. I'm doing that when I feel kind of normal. And it's a future proofing so that when the stressful moment hits, I've got that space between how my brain responds. But the breath was like the real time tool. Like I'm in the supermarket and I get a stressful phone call. I can quickly anchor into my breathing. When I was trying to recover in the gym, I could use my breath to completely manage my pain. And that to me just blew my mind. And then realizing that the diaphragm is this amazing muscle that we don't think about as a muscle, we don't train it like a muscle. And thinking that just by having an awareness of my diaphragm, my rib cage expansion, whether I'm using all the accessory muscles in my neck and breathing up here or whether I'm taking a full deep breath, it can affect my performance in the gym or how, you know, my ability to do jiu-jitsu and stay calm in those rounds. Or just before a big stressful meeting or after a long day before I go to bed, I can do different breathing techniques. And so I did the practitioner training to deepen my own understanding. And then from that, now I've started to bring it in to other areas and do, I love doing workshops. Or even if I have a meeting at work, sometimes I start with a little breath work or something. So I think it's just nice to sprinkle that into daily life.

Speaker 2:
[73:55] Have you seen any research on breath work and or meditation and the immune system? Or is it more, we know that chronic stress negatively impacts the immune system, and we know that meditation and breath work can help lower the chronic stress?

Speaker 1:
[74:10] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[74:11] Or have you seen anything sort of direct?

Speaker 1:
[74:13] Yeah, I think there's definitely the stress link. Meditation is probably more studied, and there we do have like really amazing, tangible differences in actual empirical data, measuring blood markers, looking at symptoms, scores and things on people when they're tall and implement different meditation techniques. I do think it can be hard if you have a serious trauma, like to sit with yourself. I think that maybe sometimes you have to get a sense of safety in your body before you can sit with yourself, which I think then comes from things like little moments of breath work, helping extend your exhale, helping your ribcage placement, grounding your feet into the earth, like those little things that make the body feel safe before you can just sit there with yourself. So I think it depends where you're starting. If you're finding meditation hard, it's a process and a journey, I think.

Speaker 2:
[75:08] One thing I've always loved about you, Jenna, is I feel you've always taken a very holistic approach to health and well-being, which you don't always see with scientists. And it really feels as though you've really taken that on more and more over the last years, how you just described the breath and the diaphragm. And I've realized over the past few years that your posture plays a huge role in this, because if you've got a forward flex posture, you can have stuck ribs, you can have a stuck diaphragm. And I think a lot of us don't realize that actually, if you think about upstream causes, if you have got postural inefficiencies that you're not aware of, that is naturally putting you in a more stressed state. Your diaphragm isn't as free to move, so you're not going to get as many of those benefits. So it's these little micro things that we're not thinking about enough, are we?

Speaker 1:
[76:08] Yeah, and it just takes a little bit of awareness. And I think it also takes repetition. You know, just like if I am spending lots of days on my computer and realizing that I'm all like this and I'm just breathing in my upper chest. And by the end of the day, I just I've taken way more breaths than I should have or needed to, and everything has an energetic cost. So even breathing has an energetic cost. So if you're breathing at a higher rate because you're not breathing efficiently, you're going to feel tired at the end of the day. So there's like an easy win is just, you know, little things like setting an alarm so that every like hour I kind of reset everything. And do that repeatedly until it becomes programmed in. It's like, you know, brushing your teeth. You just, it's automatic. But you have like with my kids, I had to remind them to brush the teeth when they're very little until it became automatic. It's the same with anything like that. Like I know all this stuff intellectually about how I should sit at my desk and my breathing, but I'll still find myself like slumped. And it's just like, okay, I need those nudges and just accepting that, I think it's really useful.

Speaker 2:
[77:12] We mentioned self-compassion. We've taken a bit of a dive into stress. What about diet and our immune system? Where are you at these days? How do you think about it and how has that evolved since the last time you were on the show?

Speaker 1:
[77:25] Yeah, it was funny. I had a doctor's appointment the other day and they were like, so what are you? And I was like, what do you mean? What are you? They're like, are you low carb? Are you high protein? Are you keto? I was like, that's a strange question. But yeah, I was like, none of those things.

Speaker 2:
[77:43] Where's your badge?

Speaker 1:
[77:44] Yeah, like normal. Yeah, I just kind of try to drown out the noise around food, which I think is easier said than done and kind of anchor on. And I think I wrote about this a little bit in the book, like, you know, my sort of take my grandmother, for example, when she was a kid and what her diet might have looked like versus mine in the 80s as a child versus my own children now, the food landscape has changed dramatically across that time. And that means that my children's generation are on a very different trajectory in terms of their microbiome, you know, things like obesity rates and metabolic health of children. And so, I think that we need to take some principles from, like I think about the principles of my grandparents. I grew up on a farm when my grandparents lived there. And so, you know, there was no takeaway, there's no delivery. Even my parents have never used any of these services. And I'm like, it's probably a good thing, you know, and just that kind of like three meals that are really nourishing, that I know keep me going. I try and be kind of on it with food prepping and stuff and sharing meals with my kids and eating at home. And then, you know, you slot in around that, the busy days, the days where you just grab something and there's not really a great deal of choices. And I think my philosophy is, I don't worry about one or two bad days of the overall pattern is good. And I think that's what we started to see coming out in the literature is that dietary patterns over time are more important than worrying about one or two like superfoods. And the Mediterranean diet is a great example of that. It's really well spoken about probably because it's well studied. It's not the only diet pattern. But a pattern is just kind of the types of foods that are eaten frequently over time. The Mediterranean diet has elements in it where we know, okay, olive oil, really, really important for health. It's kind of stood the test of time, but we have a lot of research to back it up. And it's full of anti-inflammatory compounds. So things like olecanthal is a polyphenol in olive oil that has a similar shape to ibuprofen. So when we're taking a little bit every day using it as a food, it's kind of nurturing that anti-inflammatory response, but not in the way that the pharmaceutical drug does. And so they think that that's one of the key reasons the Mediterranean diet is so closely linked to longevity. And olive oil is actually the one thing that links all of the different cuisines of the Mediterranean, because actually they're quite different if you go from country to country. And olive oil is kind of this linchpin that pulls them all together. So I'm a massive olive oil fan. And it is safe to cook, and there's lots of studies debunking stuff about smoke point and that kind of thing. And there's a big trend to shotting it. And I actually did an Instagram video on that, because I was like, it actually works better if we take it with food, if we use it as it was intended, because of the way it helps us digest and absorb fat-soluble nutrients, the way that it sort of is assimilated with a meal versus taking it on an empty stomach. So it might look cool to be shorting your olive oil instead of tequila, but actually to get the full benefits, have it, as your Italian grandmother might use it to prepare her food.

Speaker 2:
[81:20] A lot of people, as you just pointed out, are concerned about doing high heat cooking with olive oil, but you're saying from the research that you've seen, that's not really something that we should be worried about.

Speaker 1:
[81:31] Yes, I think for all kinds of normal home cooking, that it's so high in polyphenols, it stabilises the oil, and it actually helps absorb some of the nutrients in our food. Like olive oil on tomatoes is a great combination for summer. I love the seasonality of food, and we know that the olive oil will help with the absorption of things like lycopene in the tomatoes, and we know that that's really important for your skin defence against UV in summer. So like a great reason to enjoy these foods in season and take them with olive oil.

Speaker 2:
[82:04] Apart from olive oil, for people who want some more specifics, you have mentioned that the Mediterranean pattern is one pattern. Of course, it's not the only pattern. What are the principles you look to follow or you advise people if they're saying, hey, Jenna, how can I eat in a way that supports my immune system health? Yes, olive oil, but are there some more broad principles that you advise people try and follow?

Speaker 1:
[82:32] Yeah, I think just you don't want to be deficient in anything. I mean, we hear about certain nutrients being really important for the immune systems of vitamin C, zinc, vitamin D. But really, you could argue that all the essential vitamins and minerals are important in having a healthy immune response. There was a really interesting study, I think, just came out this week on part of the Cosmos Trials, where the headlines in the news was multi-vitamin pill increases lifespan or something. When you actually look at the study, it found that when they did this multi-vitamin and mineral intervention, it was one of the biggest nutrition studies ever. Over two years, they got an improvement in biological age, but it was because these people were falling behind. They had shortfalls in key nutrients. So, you're actually just recovering the shortfall by giving them a vitamin and mineral capsule. It's not that the vitamin and mineral capsule is suddenly giving them a longevity advantage. So I think making sure you're covering all those nutrient bases across the life course, and obviously that can be hard in modern world.

Speaker 2:
[83:38] I think that's the key point, isn't it? So I saw that study as well. And I think it's really interesting because then the question becomes, how much of the population are being replete in vitamins and nutrients? And certainly from my clinical experience, I would say quite a lot of people are not getting in the right amount of nutrients for a variety of reasons. Yes, it can be cost. It can also be that they're super busy and time-precious, so they don't have time to make these home-cooked meals. So they are relying on takeaways and deliveries. Chronic stress that we've spent a lot of time talking about, a lot of people don't appreciate that chronic stress affects the way your digestive system functions. So even if you are eating the right food, if you're constantly stressed, you ain't absorbing the nutrients as well. And then of course you've got soil quality and how we know compared to 50 years ago, soil quality is different. So maybe in broccoli, for example, we don't have the same level of nutrients as we had 50 years ago. So I think there's some sort of research which helps inform us. And then there's the actual practical applications of it. You know, who are you? Are you someone who is low stress, who eats really good food three times a day, and is nutrient replete? Or are you someone who perhaps is trying your best in very challenging situations, but is a bit deficient and therefore maybe might benefit from a vaulting miso and a mineral? Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 1:
[85:15] Exactly, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[85:15] And I think that nuance, I think often gets lost online where people say it's either good or it's bad. It's like, well, it kind of depends in what context.

Speaker 1:
[85:24] I think that it depends is my most common answer to things when people ask me because I hate being dogmatic, yes or no. Like there's definitely a place where we could say in the modern diet and when you look at population studies, okay, you're like, okay, vitamin D, quite likely to be low, magnesium, omega-3s always is something that comes back, particularly in the UK, I think the mean is like pretty much close to zero for having enough omega-3s in our diet. And so you're like, well, there's a case for supplementing with these because there's a large population of people who are probably insufficient in them. And so I guess there's sort of personal optimal health versus that sort of broad public health message that, you know, it makes it really confusing for people. And there's so many different supplements out there that people often get confused and don't know where to start. But I think thinking about those real foundational nutrients, the ones where there is a high chance of being deficient, I think those are a really good place to start.

Speaker 2:
[86:26] Are you a fan of increasing plant diversity as a way of nourishing a healthy gut microbiome?

Speaker 1:
[86:33] Yeah, definitely. And I think when we speak about plants, we need to make sure we're not just limited to fruit and vegetables, but like nuts and seeds and whole grains and beans, pulses, legumes. But I do, you know, I often have these conversations and I wrote about it in the book where I get people saying, oh, I've just, I've changed my diet. It's so healthy now, but I still have all this like digestive feedback and issues and stuff. And I kind of think, well, you've got this whole ecosystem in your gut that you've been living with since you were a child. And it's been changing across your life course based on what you're doing. If you had certain medications or periods of gastrointestinal infection or different hits to that ecosystem. And then suddenly you shove all this plant fiber on it and it's like, whoa, I don't know what to do with this. And your IBS is worse than ever, but you're like better meeting healthier than ever. And so I think we do need to encourage people to eat more plant diversity, but people need to find where their starting point is and build up slowly. Because if you go from like eating very little fiber and then suddenly eating a lot of fiber, your body's going to tell you and you're probably going to be like, why am I getting these symptoms? That doesn't feel good when I'm doing the right thing. So I think it's about thinking of it as a garden, as an ecosystem. You don't just dump a load of seeds and expect it all to grow. You've got to sort of coax it delicately. And if your body is rejecting a certain plant food and the fiber is really irritating, instead of deciding that food is bad, it's like, why is your body not able to tolerate it? Why have you lost tolerance and how can you slowly get that back? And I think stress is a huge part of it. Even the clues in the name, we talk about rest and digest when we talk about the parasympathetic, don't we? And it's like, well, if I'm sort of rushing stuffing food in my mouth, because I'm between meetings and doing stuff with the kids and trying to juggle 50 things, which happens to me regularly, there is no way I'm properly in a way to receive that food and digest it properly. I'm barely chewing it, you know. So how is it going to land in my stomach if it hasn't had the benefit of me breaking it up with my chewing and all of the digestive enzymes in my saliva, you know, and then not to mention all that nervous tissue and the gut that forms the gut-brain axis, just being like, wait a minute, I don't know what we're eating. One thing I find quite useful is to eat at the same time every day, if possible, because we have this migrating motor complex which sort of clears out the gut in between meals. And then you get, like Pavlov's dogs, it's like, I always eat lunch at one, you can almost feel the digestive juice is turning on because your body's always preserving energy. It's not going to be ready to digest just food 24-7 because that wouldn't be efficient. So if I eat at the same time, I'm like, all right, yeah, I'm ready to digest this now. But then you layer that onto people's busy lives, working shifts in the hospital or all the different things that people juggle. And then you realize that the way our lives are created makes even these simple interventions like eating at the same time can be incredibly hard for people.

Speaker 2:
[89:33] Yeah. One of my favorite sections in the book was the section on midlife gut health. And what was really interesting about it and very thought provoking was this idea that midlife gut health serves as both a mirror for our past and a compass for our future. I've never heard it put like that before. Can you talk a little bit about midlife gut health? Why it's so important? Why you wrote those beautiful words? And also how it interacts with our immune system?

Speaker 1:
[90:09] Yeah. I mean, I think midlife in general is a kind of watershed moment. And perhaps we can linger on that for a bit. But the gut is hugely important to the immune system. We mentioned in the beginning of our conversation about the early life and how the gut starts to house this ecosystem that then trains and educates the immune system across the life course. So that relationship is still going on. But I feel by midlife, most of us have had several hits to our gut health, whether that be multiple rounds of antibiotics. We might be on PPIs because that's one of the most prescribed drugs. And we now know they're significant in how they impact the gut microbiome. We probably had periods of bad diet. I know when I was a student, I was not eating the best or drinking too much, which we know is not a great favorable environment for the gut microbes. So there's all these kind of hits. And it's often when people start to think, well, I will start to take care of myself now and start eating better. And their gut kind of rejects it. And then they're pulling in all the fermented foods because they've heard that those are good too, and kind of just overwhelming the gut. And the gut is not just about the microbes that are in it. They're obviously important. They are breaking down a lot of our foods that as humans we cannot digest. They have the enzymes to break them down. We get the benefit of that in absorbing all those breakdown metabolites that are then absorbed into our bloodstream and have wonderful effects. Many of them are anti-inflammatory, things like short-chain fatty acids, which our immune cells love. They help the immune system regulate. But then again, it also is about the gut barrier health. So the gut is this tube that goes from our mouth all the way to the other end. So it's very fragile. It's one cell thick and that's deliberate because its main function is to absorb nutrients. But the barrier therefore has to be somewhat permeable, but also resilient enough to keep stuff out that we don't want to go into the body. And with all these hits and knocks to the microbiome, then the microbiome's not able to keep the barrier as healthy as we'd like, because the microbiome digesting our food produces these metabolites that help keep that barrier intact. And that is going to raise the unwanted inflammation, because as soon as you have stuff in the gut, going through the gut wall that shouldn't, your immune system's on the other side going, right, right, alert, we got foreign material here we don't want, let's turn on inflammation because that's our weapon. And that is systemic, it's going through your whole bloodstream. So it can really be the source of inflammation. And I think at 40, it's this kind of watershed moment if we take it as being the halfway point in our life. And really evolution sort of designed us to not live much longer. Like evolution just wants us to pass on our genes and keep the human race going. And that's whether you as an individual want to have children or not, it's kind of like that's what you were optimized for. And we have this thing called antagonistic pleiotropy, which means that the genes that optimize the first half of your life and allow you to pass on your DNA can actually work against you in the second half of your life. So in the first half of your life, there's a lot of these antagonistic pleiotropy genes are in the immune system. And a child to survive, you know, most children would die in early life before we have all the medical care that we have today. So to keep them alive, they need a really fierce immune response to all the different infections as they're developing their immunity through the early years. But then the genes that allow them to do that actually in your 40s, 50s, 60s mean that you get much more easily triggered and have much more unwanted inflammation in the second half of life, which can accelerate your aging. So that's why for me 40 is that time. And I always think in terms of science, but also in how we feel, people start to feel that I don't have the energy I used to have. I have more aches and pains than I used to have. I don't recover like I used to. I can't quite drink alcohol like I used to. To me it's a wake up call to be like, listen to all that information and realize your biology is now working against you from this point forward. So you probably have to work harder with the anti-inflammatory inputs to enjoy that second half of your life and not just kind of surrender to this is aging.

Speaker 2:
[94:39] Yeah, I think there's going to be many people listening, Jenna, who totally resonate with that. And I think the point you're trying to make, I think, is that you might have got away with certain things in your 20s and maybe your 30s, but you're probably not going to be getting away with them in your 40s. So you're almost making the case that actually this stuff may not be actually starting in your 40s. Your lifestyle, it may have been driving this possibility in your symptoms for years, but you got away with it because of youth.

Speaker 1:
[95:16] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[95:17] I know in the book you split up the human life into four seasons, but you could also, I guess, look at it in two seasons, couldn't you? You could either go pre-40 and post-40. Pre-40, you might get away with stuff. Post-40, you're probably not. We even know from a lot of doctors who see women with menopausal symptoms, they will say that actually if used in the right way, this can be the best wake-up call you ever get. Because if you can now start to live a bit more in harmony with your rhythms, and the rest of your life, and as you would say, in alignment, you might, I'm not saying you won't need hormones, you might still do, but a lot of the time, women don't. I've seen that over and over again. A lot of the time, if you can balance what I call the four pillars, food, movement, sleep, and in particular stress, I have seen women's menopausal symptoms almost disappear, because the whole system is a lot more balanced.

Speaker 1:
[96:25] And this is why I think of time as circular, because my kids need to develop really good habits now. They have to have a good idea in their mind of what a healthy meal is and isn't, what foods should be consumed regularly and what ones should be less regular. Because if they don't, like when they get to my age, it's a lot harder to change. And my thinking when I was writing the book is that my kids are in a different trajectory to what I was on, just by virtue of how the world has changed.

Speaker 2:
[96:57] A worse trajectory.

Speaker 1:
[96:59] Potentially, yes. And I think we're starting to get hints of that in the data, and even things like the health span, where our current health span in the UK is around 60, and life span is around 80, that 20-year delta is actually starting to get bigger. So while we're able to keep people alive, we have amazing medical technology. We're not necessarily giving them a good quality of life, and the health span isn't improving. And so almost that has to happen first before we get to the, let's live to being 120. And so I think that all starts in childhood with kids, and things like them putting down bone density. That's where your immune cells are made, in the bone marrow. And we know that happens in early life through play, jumping around, you know, impact on the bones. Whereas if kids are more sedentary now, that's affecting it. Even things like muscle mass. We hear so much about midlife women. And as you said about menopause, like muscle mass is really, really important, protection from osteoporosis. But potentially that starts in childhood. And so I don't want to have a negative message that people are like, it's too late for me. But I think we have to realize that we're all connected. We need to take the wisdom we've learned now and feed it into the younger generations. And not just sort of like leave them to figure it out. We're like, no, no, look, this has to be a circular thing.

Speaker 2:
[98:21] Yeah, it was so profound what you just said. This idea that actually by telling the truth, we're going to make people feel bad and disempowered, is one I just don't buy. We should be telling the truth to people, right? It may be that someone is listening to this in their 40s, and actually for whatever reason, through no fault of their own, they didn't get the right inputs when they were a teenager. Maybe their parents didn't know, maybe they had trauma, maybe they didn't do enough stuff that was going to maximize their ceiling of bone density. And of course it would have been better if that not happened. But I think by saying that, it does two things. Number one, it empowers you to go, okay, well, maybe I didn't have the best start in life, but let me max what I can do now to make the most of what I have. The second point is that person now could be a parent themselves. I think, I hope most parents are certainly, this is how I feel, I want my kids to have a better life than I do.

Speaker 1:
[99:26] Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 2:
[99:28] I want to see them thrive and do things that I wasn't able to do or have opportunities that I didn't have. And so if I, for example, didn't have the right inputs to me as a child, I sure as hell want to make sure I'm giving my children that. So I think these conversations are important. I think sometimes, I don't mean at you, I think sometimes these days, maybe because of council culture, like, we're sometimes too scared to say truth. I was like, it's okay to say it. It's like, you know, yeah, you may not have had the best start, okay. But can you learn and give your kids something that you didn't have?

Speaker 1:
[100:07] Exactly. And I think that was a balance I kept trying to find in the book between like, oh God, sometimes when you look at the data, you're like, it's quite depressing. But also like, it's never too late to start. And as examples where I've spoken about it in the book and we've all heard of them, like people in their 60s and 70s suddenly taking up an activity and then, or doing amazing physical feats. Whereas they were sort of frail and aging a few years before. And I think that when we just start to have that narrative of it's too late for me, it's almost defeatist. We're not even trying.

Speaker 2:
[100:44] Yeah, and it goes to the flip side, doesn't it? You might have had the best teenage and adolescent life where your parents made sure you had all the right inputs.

Speaker 1:
[100:51] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[100:52] So you've had great bone density building, but you may be living a sedentary lifestyle and be doing nothing. And so it's still going to start declining.

Speaker 1:
[101:02] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[101:02] Right? So I think the message is empowering. Wherever you are, whatever your start was, it's never too late to start paying attention to your health and well-being. You made that case throughout the book. Just come out to gut health for a minute, because I do think that's a really provocative line. That health in midlife is both a mirror for our past and a compass for our future. I think in that chapter, you're sort of making the case that all the choices you've made, some you were aware of, some you were not aware of, have influenced your gut health. And it might be in your 40s that it's coming home to roost. And you have covered this, but I just want to make sure we've clarified it for people. They hear the latest podcasts on gut health. And as you say, they go all in fermented foods and kimchi and kefir and stuff and they're bloated. They got wind and they don't like the way they feel. I think your message is really be patient.

Speaker 1:
[102:04] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[102:05] Can you just elaborate on that a little bit? Because I know there'll be many people who've fallen into that trap before.

Speaker 1:
[102:10] And I completely advocate for all of these fermented foods and different plant diversity. And we have all the research coming out now to support that. But it is like go low and slow because you have to meet your body where it's at. You have to take the symptoms as the feedback and not be like, well, I just made this amazing bean casserole with like three different types of beans. And now I'm like bursting out of my jeans. I feel really uncomfortable. Maybe the dose is really the important starting point in just bringing these things in really, really small and allowing, you know, if we think about the microbes as digesting these rather than our body and our own ability to break down these plant foods, it's really the microbes. We might have lost some important communities. We know that we have the successive loss of really important keystone communities happening with each generation. And then we have layered on top of that periods of bad diet, different medications, infections. We might have lost some and the communities that are in there need to adjust and you have to sort of coax them out with some fertilizer, but low and slow. But I do think it's a really, really worthwhile investment to do. I just feel like the message can be quite simplistic online. And I see many people just diving in and then not understanding why the healthy food makes them feel unhealthy.

Speaker 2:
[103:41] Why is oral health so important for our immune systems?

Speaker 1:
[103:45] Oh, I feel like this along with olive oil are like my two big longevity things. This actually started when I was at Sussex University and I had this lady join and she was coming to do a research project with me and she was previously a dentist in South America. She was really interested in rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune diseases generally. She was retraining in biomedical science, but she had this dentistry background. We started looking at all the literature and there was this whole body of dental literature that I'd never come across because I'm not really living in the dental world and reading that. Then there's obviously the rheumatology literature, which is looking at the immune response in rheumatoid arthritis. And what we found was that people who go and have their teeth cleaned regularly, have really good oral health, frequently visit their dentist, they had improvements to symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. Because this oral environment again was sort of seeding that whole body unwanted inflammation because of the presence of less favorable bacteria, you could say. And when you're having that regular cleaning and you're taking care of your oral health, you're lessening the whole body inflammation, so you're lessening any symptoms. And then you can see that link now playing out in all sorts of things. So cognitive decline is another one where people who look after their oral health, regular hygienist, dental visits, they can see improvements in cognitive decline that's happening. So it's just amazing and it's upstream of the gut. So whatever we're breathing, swallowing, whatever is happening in the mouth, it's again, it's going to both our gut, but then through the gums into the bloodstream and affecting what's going on everywhere else. And wherever there's a bacteria, which we have our whole oral microbiome, that, you know, the immune system has evolved to detect bacteria. So if they're friendly bacteria, they have a good working relationship, but the minute they're in the wrong place and they slip through into the bloodstream, the immune system's on it going, we need to get rid of this bacteria, but it does that with inflammation.

Speaker 2:
[106:06] Yeah. Just goes to show how interconnected the entire body is, right? It's better oral health, reduction in rheumatoid arthritis symptoms. Again, we said that right at the start, didn't we? These are not separate organs. These are connected systems and the immune system sits at the heart of them all.

Speaker 1:
[106:25] We almost need the rheumatologists to be referring their patients to the dentists more regularly and vice versa if the dentist spots something in the gums and then maybe say go get checked out by your doctor.

Speaker 2:
[106:38] Yes. It's almost as if, you know, if we were starting medicine today from scratch, which of course is impossible, we may not set it up in the way in which it's currently set up. We may actually go and actually I think it's reasonable to say this. If you look at both the research and the historical application of medicine from clinicians, I think you could almost say the way we've got it set up in many ways is misguided. Instead of organs that should perhaps be systems.

Speaker 1:
[107:14] We definitely should have a immunology as a kind of stand-alone that's touching base with all the other specialists.

Speaker 2:
[107:20] Yeah, I guess the only problem with that, what I agree with you is that if you then became an immunology medical specialist, you're basically doing everything. The inflammation comes from the immune system and the inflammation is at the heart of Alzheimer's and heart attacks and strokes and type of diabetes. So you're becoming the expert generalist.

Speaker 1:
[107:47] Yeah, I sort of see it like a tree, like all of these things on the branches, but there's just one big root.

Speaker 2:
[107:53] Or at the very least, even if you work in an organ speciality, you should have some training or professional development in immunology. Because frankly, a lot of doctors just don't have that.

Speaker 1:
[108:08] Yeah, and a good understanding of chronic inflammation, I think.

Speaker 2:
[108:12] Exactly. We've talked a lot about the practical things that we can do for our immune system. But I want to go back to one of the kind of main ideas in your latest book that I really enjoyed. You know, what is the point of all of this? You know, why should you make time to do these things? What is the point of life and how we're living our lives? You kind of start off the book in quite a provocative way, don't you? You know, in fact, do you mind if I read the first few lines to you? This is literally the opening to the book. Let's start with an easy question. Are you scared of dying? Why did you start the book with that question?

Speaker 1:
[109:00] I think I felt like I wasn't really living, but I wasn't obviously dead at the time when I was coming up with the book idea. And I think then there was this rise in longevity trends all around me, and I was kind of like, what's the point? And I think we're all inherently scared of dying. I think everything that we've talked about today, all of the stuff about our nervous system and our immune system, is to stop us from dying, is to keep us safe. So we don't injure ourselves so that we can heal when we are injured. I think we're all inherently scared of dying. But that should be the immunity to not have a life unlived. Like it's almost to inoculate us to enjoy the moment, because you really don't, none of us have the control over when we die. People with their optimization protocols and wanting to live in, to be 120, something could happen to all of us tomorrow. And I just, I really had this point where I can't have a wasted life. I can't look back in a decade and be like, I continued being so unhappy with so many things in my life. I have to make changes. And I guess I hoped for people reading it, that I had people since come to me and say, I did what you did. I threw loads of grenades and blew up my life. And I was like, I didn't really mean you to do that. But they were like, no, it's great. I'm a lot happier now. And I do think that definitely happens around the midlife point. But yeah, I think we're all scared of dying. And that's the point. And I think, you know, we give ourselves meaning if we need it, but we can also just enjoy the ride and sort of be more present, deepen our soul span, and notice the little things in the day and the beauty. You know, spring is unfolding. I could quite easily just, you know, get to summer and not even have stopped to sort of notice the daffodils. We rush through everything.

Speaker 2:
[111:12] Yeah, it's so beautiful the way you put that, Jenna. And it's kind of interesting, you know, time and the passage of time is this underlying feature throughout your book. And I'm just thinking back now, if someone had told me in my 20s to notice the daffodils, hear the birds, you know what? If I'm I, I probably did.

Speaker 1:
[111:37] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[111:37] I probably went in through one ear and out the other.

Speaker 1:
[111:39] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[111:40] I think there's certain messages that are right at certain times. Do you know what I mean? And I think that's something as a parent, I've had to accept with my kids. It's like, yeah, they're probably not ready for that message. I mean, I'll share it, I'll try and impart it, but maybe they'll get there when it's right for them.

Speaker 1:
[112:02] Yeah. You've planted the seed. And I think that's important.

Speaker 2:
[112:06] You know, I think one of the reasons I really enjoy the way in which you've written this book is because it does articulate the things that I'm thinking about. I feel that you can cultivate gratitude, you can cultivate calm, you can cultivate presence. I, like you, have meditation as a regular feature in my life. And the reason I couldn't do earlier is because I misunderstood what meditation was.

Speaker 1:
[112:36] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[112:37] And these days, I love it.

Speaker 1:
[112:39] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[112:40] And, you know, we spoke about the worrying news stories early on in this conversation and the impact that has on our immune system and our stress levels. But I always think back to the Dalai Lama quote when he said, if every eight-year-old on the planet was taught how to meditate, we'd eliminate violence within a generation.

Speaker 1:
[113:00] Yeah, it's beautiful.

Speaker 2:
[113:01] Which is beautiful and I believe it to be true. And you know, as we speak, Jenna, I've done something that I haven't done before, which is, you know, on all my channels, we're doing a March Meditation Challenge with in partnership with an app called The Way by Henry Shookman.

Speaker 1:
[113:16] Oh, I love Henry Shookman.

Speaker 2:
[113:17] Yeah, Henry did the meditation retreat I was on and Henry's been on the show twice. And that app, I think, is for me the best meditation app I've come across. So we partner with them. And at the moment, as of last night, there's 20,000 people we've got meditating on the way during March.

Speaker 1:
[113:34] That's amazing.

Speaker 2:
[113:34] And I hope that, you know, this has, you know, got 30 free meditations there for people. And my hope is that that's enough time to... Because I think two or three days is not really enough, even a week. You need to do it enough to go, oh, this is what it brings to my life. So I'm hoping some of them continue with the practice afterwards. And I think those solitude, stillness practices, they really help us with the meaning of life. You won't know this, but the first thing I underlined in your book and one of the first things was a quote from my mum's favourite poet of all time. So my mum, still now on her wall, has a picture of Rabindranath Tagore. He is my mum's idol.

Speaker 1:
[114:24] Oh, he's brilliant.

Speaker 2:
[114:25] And, you know, on page three of the book, you quote from him, you say, the one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.

Speaker 1:
[114:42] Oh, it gives me goosebumps. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[114:45] What does that quote mean to you?

Speaker 1:
[114:47] I think it's, you know, we have a responsibility to the future generations. We kind of, there's a lot of stuff, talk about the self and look after ourselves and self-care and stuff, but we're all this big network. And like you mentioned to your kids, you will plant the seed of these ideas in their head, knowing that, you know, the next two decades they'll go off and do their own thing. But you planted the seed and that's important. And the work you do, it's like making sure that it's benefiting the next generations because one day we won't be here and we have a responsibility to leave something behind for the next generation.

Speaker 2:
[115:30] What do you think the meaning of life is?

Speaker 1:
[115:33] I think it's to go and probably grapple with the human condition and understand that we only ever have the present moment. And that is so difficult. But yet somehow, that's what makes it so beautiful.

Speaker 2:
[115:51] Yeah. It's really interesting, Jenna. Since I last saw you, which was in this studio, maybe five or six years ago, I know you've been through significant life changes. And what's really interesting is that most people would probably say that if they had to make those kind of life changes, you said you left your job, you left your marriage, you're now, I guess, a single mother, right? They would probably think, well, yeah, but doing those things is going to make it harder for me to look after myself, because life is going to be busier and more stressful. The impression I'm getting from you is that it's been quite the opposite.

Speaker 1:
[116:36] Yeah. And I would say it's hard, but a different hard. And I think that comes back to when we talked about alignment. There's the hard of day to day of doing all the stuff on your own, but then I feel so aligned that have way more energy. So everything has a different texture. And maybe people can think of a time they've experienced that, like when you're so in flow and aligned, your capacity starts to expand. Whereas when you're kind of in this like fear, fear, safety mode, then everything is sort of shrunk. So it's like in biology, you have anabolic and catabolic. There's always a build up and a breakdown or the seasons of life. Like winter, everything dies and spring, it comes back. It's always sort of flowing. And if we can sort of find a way to lean in to the sort of opening up of our life, then we just have more capacity. And like, it's not just a simple case of sort of energy and energy. It's like, when everything's sort of coherent and synchronized and you're living in alignment, suddenly you can do so much more.

Speaker 2:
[117:48] Yeah. Jenna, it's been such a joy talking to you. I honestly think the book is such a beautiful book, so gorgeously written. Immune to Age, The Game-Changing Science of Lifetime Health. I didn't know it was also coming out of paperback very, very shortly. So that's super exciting as well. You've also got your Substack, haven't you, as well as your Instagram? And I know you really enjoy that. Can you tell people about the Substack and what they can expect from it?

Speaker 1:
[118:13] I mean, I do have a love of long form writing I've discovered. So while Instagram is kind of my little sandbox of ideas, and I share lots of personal stuff and lots of immune system stuff, that Substack I've leaned into is like, right, okay, now I can take people into the nuance with me. And it's been really fun. And it's such a nice platform for people like me who like writing, but I can't constantly be writing books in a little bit more detail.

Speaker 2:
[118:39] So they just look up your name, Jenna Macciochi, on Substack.

Speaker 1:
[118:43] Yeah, Substack, it's The Science of Staying Well, which is the title of my first book. So if you type in my name, it's all linked to my Instagram as well. But yeah, I'd love to see more people come over there and read my content and join in the conversation.

Speaker 2:
[118:58] Yeah, amazing. Jenna, final question. For someone who has been listening to this conversation, who has realized throughout it that they have neglected that immune system health for the bulk of their lives, but they feel as though it's too late to do anything about it. What would you say to them?

Speaker 1:
[119:21] It's never too late. I know that sounds really kind of contrived, but start with a bit of self-compassion. You know, if there's areas you've neglected, there was reasons. And you now have the opportunity to start to build up your capacity and start really, really small, like so small, and just little tiny increments and know that that repetition starts to become innate over time. So start with the self-compassion piece and then start with kind of looking at one area of your life and see it like a little experiment. You know, and really encourage people to be their own kind of citizen science, their own N of one experiment. You know, write stuff down, see what you notice, start to experiment, but very, very slowly and cut out the noise. You know, we have so much to compare ourselves to, and everyone has a different story. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not, you know, all of the shiny things we might be seeing on social media.

Speaker 2:
[120:25] Yeah. Jenna, I love that. It's been super fun talking to you. Thank you for making the journey up to the studio.

Speaker 1:
[120:31] No worries. It's been amazing. Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[120:37] Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatterjee.com/friday5. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics, happiness, food, stress, sleep, behaviour change and movement, weight loss and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, e-books and as audio books, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week, and please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.