How To Support Your Immunity, Reduce Inflammation & Age Better with Dr Jenna Macciochi #648

31:54But it's just iteration over time, keep doing it. And then it becomes more normal and you start to accept it. You don't have to go wild and sort of big yourself up. But it's just like, oh, you've a mistake that that's part of life you know 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.

32:38Like 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 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. Yeah. I don't even like the terms physical health and mental health anymore.

33:19I've almost stopped using them. They slip in because, you know, you're conditioned a certain way, but people understand them. People understand them. So there's always the challenge between what's easy to communicate versus what is totally accurate. You know, you could make the same case with boosting an immune system. You know, 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.

33:56Yeah. 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. I mean, do you want to just speak to that for a moment? 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.

34:32But 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, you know, be resilient to whatever is going around. But, you know, when you turn the immune system on, that 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 rid of 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.

35:11It'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 motivating me to safety. But then 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.

35:48We 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. It says the practical things 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.

36:46Yeah, 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. You know, if your eyes are seeing danger, then it's telling your brain there's a danger, your nervous system's preparing for whatever that might need.

37:27And 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've 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.

38:01and that 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. 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.

38:48But 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. 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.

39:25Like 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 by our thoughts by a stressful email by all sorts of things yeah but by what we consume of course as we're recording this conversation middle of March um you know that the news has become quite alarming over the past week okay and flights been cancelled 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 yes right and I I had 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'd put X back on for some reason yeah 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 wrong and you know you do not need x on your phone yeah 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 yeah into my life about stuff that is largely out of my control.

41:25I just deleted 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. 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.

42:09For 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 um and one thing i found i mean i don't have the exact statistics so 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.

43:07Yeah. 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? Yes, completely. And 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 some antecedent to the diagnosis.

43:53and 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 is 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.

44:36And 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, you know, will come and go.

45:19Then 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.

45:59This is where science and spirituality, for want of a better term, 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 yeah you know because it was well eight years ago and I think about stress yeah my thinking has evolved somewhat since then and I think one way of looking at stress is thinking about it as resistance stress Stress in many ways only exists when we resist.

47:06That resistance is the stress. Whereas acceptance is the opposite of resistance. Yeah. Right? If you can accept everything in your life, I know it's easier said than done. Yeah. 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 start resisting what is, the stress just isn't there, at least not to the same degree. I think for me, it was there is a moment of being like, it doesn't mean I have to like it. Like I can resist this and be like, why is this happening to me?

47:44And 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 hands. But it doesn't mean I have to be like, yeah, I'm really happy for this. And 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, oh, yeah. And sometimes the solution to stress or chronic stress that may be impacting our health.

48:23I think it's not 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 but the four-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 for 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 four to six 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 into 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.

49:22She never thought she had time. She was always doing things for her husband and her children, never for her. And 15 minutes of meantime 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. That's incredible. I always 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.

50:02It stands to reason that her symptoms may reduce somewhat. It didn't go away. She still had the condition. But it was way more manageable. 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 like a sense of safety and love and compassion. 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, like you're, you're giving yourself something that you didn't have before that you deserve, which is just peacefulness, a nice bit of fresh air.

50:42Um, and I think that's a really, yeah, incredible, but so simple. And, um, 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.

51:25But 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 mum.

52:12And I think that it was, you know, when you sit in meditation, you're suddenly like, oh, my hips 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 yeah i've noticed from your instagram page that you've taken up jujitsu yeah over the past few years and i think in one of your posts i think he said something to the effect of this idea that jujitsu 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.

53:01Can you speak a little bit to what those two things have done for you?

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55:10they're both really significant I wanted to do a martial art for quite some time I was 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.

55:54Like 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. And 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, you're all of that stress chemistry still happening, but it's, it's physically in your body.

56:39And 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 jujitsu and I was like, this is great. You're learning technique. It's all very like a calm, 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.

57:15And 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 fawn, 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 function I had that I didn't know how to use.

58:03And 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 like 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.

58:30So it was kind of like a relearning 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 it's so interesting Jenna the way you've articulated the benefits you got from jujitsu is 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 your nervous system was almost a bit stuck 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 and it was um it was intense and emotional and 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 yeah 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 how long have you been doing it for now it's been about two years now about two years and then from that I've also got a community uh it 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.

1:00:15And 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 uh it's humbling but it's just it's been such a tonic it's unreal Tommy Wood has been on the show uh several times including just a couple of weeks ago and Tommy's this incredible medical doctor who's um 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 because rather than yeah there's nothing wrong with wanting mastery and 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 yeah that was one thing i thought about the other thing i thought about was so much of the advice that's given these days And online, in books, is about solo pursuits.

1:01:54It's about, you know what, you're overly stressed, which is true for many, if not most people. These things can help you. yeah right 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 and that's all great yeah 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 yes which i think we lost in covid i think society has forgotten this yeah and i think there's a hangover from covid that hasn't fully been returned yet yeah because we learned that we can do our yoga on youtube yeah you know we can do the pilates workout on this online course yeah okay great and it ain't the same thing yeah as doing it in a community because nourishing relationships in and of themselves lower your stress 100 % irrespective of what you do and actually yeah i want to talk to you about meditation and its impact on the immune system but i've actually two weeks ago was on a four-day meditation retreat i'm never meditating in a group before i didn't know i could meditate for that long i was a bit nervous before i went can i meditate kind of most of the day it's one of the best things i've done and i 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 you know 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 well there was a really interesting study actually when i started getting into jiu-jitsu started looking at the research obviously like a true nerd and um there's a really interesting study showing like the the um oxytocin response so this is a neurochemical that is to do with love and bonding but not just um the romantic love but You know, it could be people, friends, the favorite barista at your coffee shop and that you get this boost of oxytocin when you're grappling with someone in jujitsu.

1:04:12And that 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, like neurochemical imprints of being around people. And that, again, your immune cells have receptors for those chemicals on the surface, too.

1:04:51So 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. Wow. 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. So you can also detect the brain. But imagine the ECG on like a medical TV show people might have seen.

1:05:32You 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.

1:06:06And 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.

1:06:46Yeah. Makes me think now back to the case study I shared with you about the lady with Crohn's. How much of that improvement also came from her doing a salsa dancing class in a group? for sure yeah and you're up close with someone yeah yeah you're getting all their body language this one component I probably hadn't thought about as much but I did think about when you mentioned jiu-jitsu because I did think there's a lot of close contact yeah right and um there's a there's a chat called professor francis maglone 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 oh yeah in the modern world and you know just to be clear we're talking about safe yeah consensual touch yeah okay but he has done a lot of research showing how important that safe consensual touch is yeah the human beings yes mother child for sure but also beyond that.

1:07:55We need it. And there are certain receptors that actually only get triggered when you give it that touch. 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 you know who's really upset. It's kind of an instinct almost. 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 yes exactly and you trained i think to become a performance breathwork instructor yes 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 jujitsu has done for you which sounds profound can you briefly mention what you feel meditation has done for you?

1:08:54Is 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. Well, meditation that 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.

1:09:36I'm just going to sit. And it was just after the kids gone to bed and 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've 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 it's, you know, 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.

1:10:18And 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 onto everything and thinking this is, you know, the end of the world. It was, 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, that's it. But then I was very interested in, in breath work, having gone to various different, you know, courses, classes, events, and touched on different styles and forms.

1:11:05And 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 in your lungs.

1:11:49So when you're inhaling, you're changing the anatomy and then you're exhaling, it's changing again. And the exhale is activating the parasympathetic, so they're more rest and 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 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.

1:12:27I'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 and 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 into 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 because I think it's just nice to sprinkle that into daily life.

1:13:54Have you seen any research on breathwork 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 breathwork can help lower the chronic stress. Or have you seen anything sort of direct? Yeah, I think there's definitely the stress link and meditation is probably more studied. And there we do have like really amazing tangible differences in, you know, actual empirical data, measuring blood markers, looking at symptom scores and things on people when they're taught and implement different meditation techniques.

1:14:33I 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 sort of depends where you're starting. if you're finding meditation hard, it's like, it's a process and a journey, I think. One thing I've always loved about you, Jen, is I feel you've always taken a very holistic approach to health and well-being, which you don't always see with scientists.

1:15:20And it really, it feels as though you've really taken that on more and more over the last years, how you just described, you know, 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.

1:16:04So it's these little micro things that we're not thinking about enough, are we? Yeah, and it just takes a little bit of awareness. And I think it also takes repetition. Repetition. You know, just like if I'm 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'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.

1:16:35So those are like an easy win. It's just, you know, little things like setting an alarm so that every 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 their 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 slump. Exactly. You know, and it's just like, OK, I need those nudges.

1:17:09And just accepting that I think is really useful. We mentioned self-compassion. We've taken a bit of a dive into stress. What about diet and our immune system? you know, 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? Yeah, it was funny. I was a, I had a doctor's appointment the other day and, and they were like, so what are you? And I was like, what do you mean? What are you? They're like, are you, 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.

1:17:44Where's your badge? 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.

1:18:29And 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 that's probably a good thing you know um 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 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.

1:19:14And I think my philosophy is, don't worry about one or two bad days of the overall pattern is good. And I think that's what we've 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.

1:19:55It'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 olecanthol is a polyphenol in olive oil that has a similar shape to ibuprofen. So when we're taking it 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.

1:20:35And olive oil is kind of this sort of 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 um 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 like 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 shotting your olive oil instead of tequila but actually to get the full benefits have it you know as your Italian grandmother might use it to prepare her food.

1:21:20A 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. Yes, I think for all kinds of normal home cooking, it's so high in polyphenols, it stabilizes 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 likepeen in the tomatoes. And we know that that's really important for your skin defense against UV in summer.

1:21:58So there's a great reason to enjoy these foods in season and take them with olive oil. 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? 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 system, so vitamin C, zinc, vitamin D.

1:22:42But 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 of part of the Cosmos trials, where the headlines in the news was multivitamin pill increases lifespan or something. And when you actually look at the study, it found that when they did this multivitamin 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 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 Well, I think that's the key point, isn't it?

1:23:40So 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-priced so they don't have time to make these home-cut meals. So they are relying on takeaways and deliverers. 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.

1:24:27So 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 scientific 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 yeah or is someone who perhaps is trying your best yeah in very challenging situations but is a bit deficient and therefore maybe might benefit from a volatile and a mineral.

1:25:14Do you know what I mean? Exactly. Yeah. 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. 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 and omega-3s always something that comes back particularly in the UK I think the mean is like pretty much close to zero for 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 It makes it really confusing for people.

1:26:11And 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. Are you a fan of increasing plant diversity as a way of nourishing a healthy gut microbiome? Yeah, definitely. And I think when we speak about plants, we need to make sure we're not just limited to fruit and vegetables. about 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.

1:26:51I eat 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 of course, based on what you're doing, if you had, you know, certain medications or periods of, you know, gastrointestinal infection or different hits to that ecosystem. And then suddenly you shove all this plant fiber on it and it's like, well, I don't know what to do with this. And your IBS is worse than ever, but you're like, but I'm eating healthier than ever.

1:27:26And 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 and 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, well, why is your body not able to tolerate it?

1:28:04Why 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's 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? And 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 where we're eating.

1:28:49One thing I find quite useful is to eat at the same time every day, if possible, because we have this like migrating motor complex, which sort of clears out the gut in between meals. And then you get like Pavlov's dogs. It's like, oh, I always eat lunch at one. You can almost feel the digestive juices turning on because your body's always preserving energy. It's not going to be ready to digest just food 24 seven 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, you know, then you layer that onto people's busy lives, working shifts in the hospital or, you know, all the different things that people juggle.

1:29:24And 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. 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?

1:30:09Yeah, 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, you know, multiple rounds of antibiotics. We might be on PPIs because that's one of the most prescribed drugs.

1:30:41And we now know they're significant and how they impact the gut microbiome. We probably had periods of bad diet. You know, I know when I was a student, I was not eating the best or drinking too much, which we know is not, you know, 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.

1:31:16And 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 and 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.

1:32:10And with all these hits and knocks to the microbiome, then the microbiome is 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 is on the other side going, right, red 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.

1:32:43So it can really be the source of inflammation. And I think at 40, you know, 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.

1:33:26So 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.

1:34:03so 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 like oh 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 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. Yeah, I think there's going to be many people listening, Jenna, who totally resonate with that.

1:34:45And 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. Yes. Yeah. 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.

1:35:29Pre-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 particularly stress, I have seen women's menopausal symptoms almost disappear because the whole system is a lot more balanced.

1:36:25Yeah. And this is, you know, why I think of time as, as, as circular, because, you know, 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 on a different trajectory. to what I was on, just by virtue of how the world has changed. The worst trajectory. Potentially, yes. And I think we're starting to get hints of that and the data and even things like the health span, where our current health span in the UK is around 60 and lifespan's around 80.

1:37:10That 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 you know 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 well it's too late for me but I think we have to realise 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 Yeah, it was so profound what you just said.

1:38:24This idea that actually,

1:38:29by 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 force 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 had 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.

1:39:15The second point is that person now could be a parent themselves. yes I think I hope most parents certainly this is how I feel I want my kids to have a better life than I do yeah 100 % I want to see them thrive and do things that I wasn't able to do or have opportunities that I didn't have yeah 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 yes so I think these conversations are important and I think sometimes I don't mean at you I think sometimes these days, maybe because of cancel culture, like, we're sometimes too scared to say truth.

1:39:55Yeah. It's okay to say it. It's like, you know, yeah, you may not have had the best start. Okay. Yeah. But can you learn and give your kids something that you didn't have? 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 you know examples where I've spoken about in the book and we've all heard of them of like you know people in their 60s and 70s suddenly taking up an activity and then or you know doing amazing physical feats whereas you know they were sort of frail and aging a few years before and I think that it when we just start to have that narrative of it's too late for me.

1:40:41It's almost defeatist. We're not even trying. Yeah, and it goes the flip side, doesn't it? You might've had the best teenage and adolescent life where your parents made sure you had all the right inputs. 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, 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 make that case throughout the book. Just come back to gut health for a minute, because I do think that's a really provocative line.

1:41:19Gut 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, right? Yeah. And you have covered this, but I just want to make sure we've clarified it for people. They hear the latest podcast on gut health. And as you say, they go all in fermented foods and kimchi and kefir and stuff. And they're bloated and they've got wind and they don't like the way they feel, right?

1:42:01I think your message is really be patient. Yes. Can you just elaborate on that a little bit? because I know there'll be many people who've fallen into that trap before. Yeah, 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, you know, bursting out of my jeans, I feel really uncomfortable.

1:42:40Maybe 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.

1:43:25But 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. Why is oral health so important for our immune systems? 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 who joined and she was coming to do a research project with me. She was previously a dentist in South America. And so she was really interested in rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune diseases generally.

1:44:10And she was retraining in biomedical science, but she had this dentistry background. And 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. And 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.

1:44:59And 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 and all sorts of things. So cognitive decline is another one where people who look after their oral health, regular hygienists, dental visits, and 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's 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.

1:45:42And wherever there's a bacteria, which we have our whole oral microbiome, that 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. 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 yeah at the heart of them all we almost need the rheumatologists to be referring their patients to the dentists more regularly and vice versa if the dentist spot something in the gums and then maybe say go get checked out by your doctor 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 yeah from clinicians yeah I think you could almost say the way we've got it set up in many ways is misguided.

1:47:11Instead of organs that should perhaps be systems. Be systems. And we definitely should have immunology as a kind of standalone that's touching base with all the other specialists. 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. Yeah, I know. because 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. Yeah, I sort of see it like a tree, like all of these things on the branches, but there's just one big root.

1:47:53Yeah, 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. Yeah, and the understanding of chronic inflammation, I think. Yeah, 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. What is the point of all of this? you know why should you make time to do these things um what is the point of life and and how we're living our lives and you kind of start off the book in in quite a provocative way don't you you know um in fact 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 i think i felt like i wasn't really living but i wasn't obviously dead um at the time when i was coming up with the the book idea um and i think then there was this rise in longevity trends all around me and I was kind of like what's the point um and I think we're all inherently scared of dying I think everything that we've talked about today like all of the stuff about our nervous system and our immune system is 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.

1:49:56People 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, 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, you know, I've 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, oh, I didn't really mean you to do that. But they're like, no, it's great. I'm a lot happier now.

1:50:34And 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 we give ourselves meaning if we need it but we can also just enjoy the ride and sort of be be more present deep in our soul span 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 yeah it's so beautiful the way you put that Jenna and it's 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 in fact my mum probably did yeah probably went in through one ear and out the other yeah I think there's certain messages that are right at certain times do you know what I mean yeah 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 yeah maybe they'll get there when it's right for them yeah you've planted the seed.

1:52:04And I think that's important. 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 because I misunderstood what meditation was. And these days I love it. And we spoke about the worrying news stories earlier 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 quotes when he said, if every eight-year-old on the planet was taught how to meditate, we'd eliminate violence within a generation.

1:53:00Yeah, it's beautiful. 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 in partnership with an app called The Way by Henry Shookman. Oh, I love Henry Shookman. 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. Amazing. meditating on the way during March.

1:53:34That's amazing. And I hope that, you know, this is, 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 um you won't know this but the first thing I underlied in your book and one of the first things was a quote from my mum's favorite poet of all time so my mum still now on her wall has a picture of Rabindranath Tagore oh wow he is my mum's idol Oh, he's brilliant.

1:54:25And, 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. Oh, it gives me goosebumps. What does that quote mean to you? I think it's, you know, we have a responsibility to future generations. we kind of there's a lot of stuff talk about the self and look after ourself and self-care and self but we're all this big network and like you mentioned to your kids you'll 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 what do you think the meaning of life is i think it's to um probably grapple with the human condition and understand that we only ever have the present moment um and that is so difficult but yet somehow that's what makes it so beautiful 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 Yeah.

1:56:37And 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 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 yeah and if we can sort of find a way to lean into 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 out it's like when everything's sort of coherent and synchronized and you're living in alignment you suddenly you can do so much more yeah jenna it's been such a joy talking to you i honestly think the book is it's such a beautiful book so gaudiously written immune to age the game-changing science of lifetime health i didn't know it's also coming out of paperback very very shortly so that's super exciting yeah as well you've also got your substack company as well as your instagram yeah and i know you really enjoy that can you tell people about the substack and what they can expect from it?

1:58:13I 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, but 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. It's such a nice platform for people like me who like writing, but I can't constantly be writing books and a little bit more detail. So they just look up your name, Jenna Michoki on Substack? 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.

1:58:51But yeah, I'd love to see more people come over there and read my content and join in the conversation. Yeah, amazing. Jenna, final question. for someone who has been listening to this conversation who has realized throughout it that they have neglected their 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 it's never too late and i know that sounds really kind of contrived but um 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.

1:59:59You know, I really encourage people to be their own kind of citizen science, their own end 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. Yeah, Jenna, I love that. It's been super fun talking to you. Thank you for making the journey up to the studio. No worries. It's been amazing. Thank you.

2:00:37Really 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 Five. 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.

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2:02:39And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.

2:02:59Thank you.