How to Boost Your Immune System (Podcast with Guillermo Ruiz)

In this episode, you’ll hear from researcher Guillermo Ruiz on how to boost your immune system to overcome chronic infections.

You’ll learn:

• Why infections are a common trigger of fatigue
• What are the typical infections people with fatigue can have
• Why vitamin D supplements are often NOT a smart idea
• The difference between supplements and phytochemicals (and how it can be the difference between doing something helpful vs. counterproductive)
• How to boost your immune system and prevent infection
• A set of phytochemicals you can use to boost your immune system and help you beat chronic infections so you can overcome fatigue and get your energy back

 

Download or listen on iTunes here

Listen to the podcast outside of iTunes here

Watch the podcast here

How to boost your immune system to increase energy Show Notes

How missionaries killed children in Africa by supplementing with iron(1:10)
How anemia can be connected to a chronic disease  (4:24)
How supplementing iron when you have anemia can make you sick (5:40)
Why you need to keep track of your anemia (6:56)
What Anemia of Chronic Disease is (8:36)
Why you should question your anemia diagnosis if you are feeling fatigued (8:44)
What the red flags in patients with fatigue are (9:58)
What infections can be triggering fatigue (10:33)
How Borrelia and Lyme disease changes the codes of your cells to no longer accept Vitamin D (11:22)
Why Vitamin D supplementation will not work as proclaimed and why Vitamin K is important to boost your immune system to  optimal health (12:58)
How our bodies are acquiring Vitamin D (15:33)
Why you need to find out what your level of methylation is before starting to supplement (17:48)
How gene analyzers can give you wrong recommendations (20:45)
Why some doctors are wrongly prescribing different supplements (22:05)
How articles on supplements can paint a wrongful picture of their effects (23:48)
Why eating a nutrient dense diet can help boost your immune system (24:44)
The difference between supplements and phytochemicals (25:36)
Why magnesium is important to boost your immune system (27:36)
Why Cordyceps is a great supplement to boost your immune system (27:54)
What you need to investigate when you want to boost your immune system (28:44)
What to do to boost your immune system when you suspect your fatigue is caused by infections (32:00)
How to select your practitioner (33:27)
Investigate what is going on. You can boost your immune system by looking at your environment (35:33)
Make sure you boost your immune system by using the right treatment (36:32)
Find an advocate to help you boost your immune system (37:15)
Health starts in your kitchen (38:48)
How to boost your immune system when your doctor cannot find out what is wrong (38:15)
How fasting can boost your immune system (39:28)
How sauna and cold therapy can boost your immune system (40:06)
How they used botanicals to treat Zika (40:55)
How you can use echinacea to fight infections (43:14)
How Tylenol can reduce efficacy of vaccines (43:57)
The correlations between vaccines and autism (45:21)
How the intracellular infections are hard to get rid off (46:13)
Why you should reconsider using Cipro (47:43)
How to boost your immune system to mitigate the effects of Cipro (49:43)
How some botanicals acts like Cipro (50:42)
How different mushrooms can help you boost your immune system and fight off infections (51:15)
How echinacea can boost your immune system though the act of hormesis (53:56)
How Astragalus will upregulate and boost your immune system (55:55)
How different parts of the Echinacea plant works differently in the body (58:32)
How calcium deficiency might impact the Vitamin D status (1:02:18)
What you can do to prevent infection (1:03:39)
How detoxification of the liver can help recovering from cancer (1:04:24)
Why sleep is important to prevent infections (1:06:20)
How cleaning out biofilms can reduce chronic sinus infections (1:07:25)
How xylitol can prevent cavities (1:10:07)
Where you can learn more about the work Guillermo Ruiz does (1:10:48)
How hormesis can extend longevity (1:12:38)

Links

For Guillermo’s Podcast click here
To visit Guillermo’s website click here

Transcript

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How to boost your immune system with Guillermo Ruiz – Transcript

Ari Whitten: Hey there everyone, this is Ari Whitten back with The Energy Blueprint podcast, and with me today is Guillermo Ruiz, who I had the pleasure of meeting on a recent backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon where we were with Dr. Alan Christanson. He’s a friend of Dr. Alan Christanson as am I and we kind of were introduced there and hit it off, and had some awesome discussions.

Guillermo is doing some really fascinating research in the area of different botanical extracts, specifically in relationship to infections. He is currently a naturopathic medical student, but he’s not really just kind of any typical naturopathic student. He’s really involved, deeply involved with a lot of cutting-edge research in this field. He knows a ton, he’s already an expert and I’m happy to share his wisdom with you today. Welcome, Guillermo.

Guillermo Ruiz: Hi, how’s it going?

Ari Whitten: Good man, how are you doing?

Guillermo Ruiz: Oh you know, it’s 72 degrees in Arizona so it’s just perfect.

How missionaries killed children in Africa by supplementing with iron

Ari Whitten:    Nice, cool. Obviously, we’re talking about fatigue, we’re talking about energy enhancement, how you boost your immune system, and chronic infections is something that we hear a lot about. There’s research implicating it as a trigger for chronic fatigue syndrome, and there’s a lot of discussion around this idea of chronic infections or hidden infections in relationship to fatigue. Can you talk just a little about what that connection is all about?

Guillermo Ruiz: Well you know this chronic infection, these pathogens, the intracellular pathogens are just so pesky because we talk a lot about evolutionary medicine, and we always talk about the things that we have evolved to live in this environment. For example, we have amalyase, we can eat carbohydrates but seldomly do. We turn around that microscope and start talking about the evolutionary things that these infections do to you.

I want to start this with a little story about American people that were going to Africa to help kids get better. They were missionaries and they went to Africa, and they were testing for iron. They found that a lot of kids had low levels of iron, so they started supplementing with iron.

Malaria actually does something really funny. It goes intracellularly and it starts affecting, your body adapts itself to sequester iron from your blood. It takes iron and hides it because of bacteria, viruses they use this iron in order to reproduce. The body has evolved mechanisms to help fight infections, just like fever but differently so trying to get away the precursors for this bacteria and viruses to reproduce.

What happened when this missionary started injecting iron? The kids started dying.

Ari Whitten: Whoa.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, so it ramped up those infections and these kids began to get worse, and eventually the infection proliferated and these kids died. If you go on Pubmed and you start looking at the recommendations for missionaries, or people trying to set up a free clinic you can only supplement people with deficiencies in iron if you have a solid anti-malaria protocol or solid anti-malaria clinic in those regions.

How anemia can be connected to a chronic disease

Ari Whitten: Wow, interesting. It sounds to me like anemia could almost be a response to an infection or connected to that infection in some way?

Guillermo Ruiz: It actually has a medical name. It’s called Anemia of Chronic Disease.

Ari Whitten: Wow.

Guillermo Ruiz: What I’m getting to is that as practitioners we like to do tests. We like to see a number and then if we have that number, then we can do things to change that number but we can get into a lot of trouble when we’re bypassing evolutionary mechanisms in order just to see a number change. That’s where we need to be a little bit more careful and actually, it sounds like a meme now. Everyone is saying oh, you’ve got to remove obstacles to cure, you’ve got remove obstacles to help. You hear it from any practitioner, that’s the goal but having low levels of iron in your blood might not mean that you just have an iron deficiency. It could mean that you have a chronic infection and your body’s responding adequately to that infection.

How supplementing iron when you have anemia can make you sick

Ari Whitten: Hmm, very interesting. I have so many questions but the first one is, is this something unique to malaria or does this apply to a lot of different potential infectious microorganisms?

Guillermo Ruiz: Again, this is a problem with things that grow with the use of iron, like cancer. You can get an Anemia of Chronic Disease from cancerous processes. You can get Anemia of Chronic Disease from different viruses, even like those intracellular parasitic like Lyme Disease and anything that is intracellular, like that, will cause you to have Anemia of Chronic Disease.

Ari Whitten: Wow, so if somebody has anemia, I know a common recommendation would be to supplement with iron. It seems like that might be a tricky idea. Anemia is kind of this weird scenario where anemia is this thing that’s often connected to fatigue. The typical sort of thinking around it would be just oh, supplement with iron.

Why you need to keep track of the reason of your anemia

Guillermo Ruiz: It could be, especially for example if you were female and you have heavy periods, if you have a lot of intestinal damage where you might be bleeding from an ulcer, yeah maybe that could be the cause of the anemia. Maybe getting a stool sample and checking for occult blood. If you are a female with heavy periods and maybe you have PCOS, or maybe you have an underlying condition.

It always goes back to, ”Okay, what is the reason for the anemia?” If you’re a 30-year-old male who is not bleeding, because we don’t do leeches or we don’t have ceremonial cuts or we’re not hiking and losing a little bit of blood here and there because you scrape yourself and you have low iron, that’s tricky.

Now, will you feel better? For your listeners, anemia, if you want to break it down to the simplest terms, anemia is the inability for your blood to carry oxygen to tissues. You’re using the iron as a co-factor for hemoglobin. Having anemia is any of the reasons why your blood cannot carry oxygen. For example, you could be bleeding out and you don’t have the volume.

What Anemia of Chronic Disease is

You can have Anemia of Chronic Disease where your body’s hiding that iron.

Why you should question your anemia diagnosis if you are feeling fatigued

Diagnosing someone with anemia just because of their CBC, their complete blood panel says that they are low in iron is very lazy. If you give them iron they might feel better for the short-term, but if you don’t correct that ulcer if you don’t correct that PCOS if you don’t correct the chronic infection you’re going to be supplementing for a very long time. If you have Anemia of Chronic Disease where your body is doing what the body has evolved to do, which is sequester iron, you might be feeding the fire.

Ari Whitten: It sounds like if somebody has fatigue and they have been diagnosed with anemia, it sounds to me like a differential diagnosis is really, really critical at that point. You don’t just go and start supplementing with iron when you, in fact, have a chronic infection and your body’s sequestering that iron for a reason. To help you fend off this microorganism that’s infected you.

People should be very wary of just rushing to start supplementing with iron if they have anemia.

What the red flags in patients with fatigue are

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, and you will see more anemia in female patients. It’s more common, but a red flag would be to have a healthy looking, 30-year-old male that maybe has been hiking in the Northeast. Now they start getting this pain in their muscles all over their body, and now they’re getting fatigued now you wouldn’t be too crazy if you were thinking Lyme Disease if they have anemia.

What infections can be triggering fatigue

Ari Whitten: Gotcha, okay. Tell me what kinds of other infections might be common triggers for fatigue.

Guillermo Ruiz: Back on the Borrelia or Lyme Disease wagon. Not only does your body do this sequestering of iron, this organism that’s turning the evolutionary mechanisms on the microorganism, this intracellular parasite or this intracellular organism actually go into the nucleus of the cell and they change the coding, and then your cells stop expressing VDR, Vitamin D Receptor.

How Borrelia and Lyme disease changes the codes of your cells to no longer accept Vitamin D

Once you stop creating that VDR, now your cells are not accepting the vitamin D.

Ari Whitten: Why do they do that?

Guillermo Ruiz: Vitamin D activates the immune system.

Ari Whitten: Aha.

Guillermo Ruiz: It’s trying to protect itself from the immune system.

Ari Whitten: Sneaky little bastards, huh?

Guillermo Ruiz: You know it’s so fascinating, it so fascinating because when I started listening to this evolutionary health stuff and started really getting into outside of the box with health, vitamin D was like the golden child. People would say everyone should benefit from supplementing 5,000 IU’s of vitamin D every day.

Ari Whitten: Of course.

Guillermo Ruiz: The more we learn, maybe that’s not the correct answer. One of the biggest problems is that if you have fatigue and then you go in there, and you again, draw some labs and then you see low levels of vitamin D, and you supplement with vitamin D. The VDR receptor’s no longer active on those cells, so now you’re not utilizing the vitamin D that’s going through your system so that lab is going to improve. Your doctor’s going to be okay, I fixed it but you haven’t fixed anything because that is not active.

Why Vitamin D supplementation will not work as proclaimed and why Vitamin K is important for optimal health

Ari Whitten: Gotcha, so is vitamin D supplementation, I mean what you’re just saying is that it won’t work or would it actually be harmful? Is there a risk of it actually being counter productive?

Guillermo Ruiz: It’s not going to activate the immune system, so your body’s going to want to do something with that vitamin D. Worst case scenario, maybe you have a deficiency of vitamin K. Vitamin K can only be acquired from very specific food sources. For example, you can get vitamin K from natto, which is fermented, slimy soybeans or you can get vitamin K from dairy of animals that have been pastured on green pastures.

For example, here in Arizona I can go to my local store and get some grass fed dairy, but they feed those cows mostly hay, which is grass that has been dried. That is not a good source of vitamin K, so what ends up happening if you don’t have the vitamin K, which the vitamin K tells where to calcify and you have vitamin D, which says calcify you’re not having the formula to say you need to put the calcium into the bone. If you excess vitamin D you might start calcifying your vessels, which is how you end up getting heart disease.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, atherosclerosis or you get kidney stones.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, so again what do we do about this? Any person that has increased levels of inflammation is going to probably have lower levels of vitamin D than necessary. Again, if you have a vitamin D deficiency, there is a reason why you have that vitamin D deficiency. In the case of inflammation, you’re overusing your vitamin D to activate the immune system to do all these different things. Just supplementing with vitamin D might not be the way of modulating that inflammation.

Ari Whitten: Okay.

How our bodies are acquiring Vitamin D

Guillermo Ruiz: Most importantly, the way we acquire vitamin D is through the sun. Walking outside for around 10 to 15 minutes in full spectrum sunlight, that sunlight hits your skin and then there are around 16 or 18 different things that happen. Out of those things, we don’t even know what half of those things do. We haven’t spent the time to see what the repercussion of the conversion of sunlight into vitamin D what happens. When you supplement vitamin D, you’re basically skipping all that cascade of reactions and we don’t know what the repercussions of not having that cascade do to you.

Ari Whitten: Right, and yeah like you said, there’s so many things that happen during sun exposure. To me it’s always absurd when I hear people make recommendations to stay out of the sun, so many people are sun phobic and then give recommendations to supplement with vitamin D as a pill, and they equate the two as being the same. Like you said, there are so many things that happen with sun exposure.

I mean, we’re being exposed to infrared light, we’re being exposed to lots of different kinds of UV light, red and near-infrared light, which have all these different kinds of physiological effects. I should also mention Stephanie Seneff has theorized that cholesterol sulfate, which is also synthesized from the sun is like just as important, or maybe even more important than vitamin D.

And then we also have, I’ve even heard people talk about the ultraviolet light kind of irradiating the blood in the capillaries of the skin, and that may be potentially having some antimicrobial effects. All kinds of different mechanisms going on there.

It’s kind of absurd to say ”hey, just pop this vitamin D pill and that’s the equivalent of being out in the sun regularly.”

Why you need to find out what your level of methylation is before starting to supplement

Guillermo Ruiz: Then on the flip side, there’s been in the past couple of years, this is pretty recent you know, three or four years there’s been a lot of talk about MPHFR. That being having a mutation in your glutathione pathways where you are maybe not methylating enough in order to detoxify.

That’s been a hot topic, but it’s such a new frontier. Usually, we get really excited about things, new discoveries and we just jump to fit in and then we just go all out on that type of stuff.

The problem is that there are people that over methylate, so you have under methylators and then you have over methylation. When we supplement, you can go to any health food stores and ask the guy standing there by the supplements what is the best form of vitamin D, they’ll tell you D3 co-cosypheral. Do not take the syadale form, that’s bad, that doesn’t work of the B-12 vitamin because you’ve got to get methylated form because those methyl factors are going to help you.

The problem is that with over methylators, you start accumulating those methyl factors and then you end up having the same symptoms as someone that under methylates, so mental fog, you have the mental fatigue, you have this chronic fatigue syndrome picture presents if you’re an over-methylator that is just getting a bunch of vitamin B’s that are methylated or vitamin B-12 that has that methyl group as if you were an under methylator that was not getting enough vitamin B’s and B-12’s.

This whole supplementation thing is really sexy, it’s an actual thing for a lot of people, but we need to be careful that we are only using this supplementation, the methylated B vitamins only if you’ve discovered and you have a practitioner with you that has analyzed your genome or whatever they want to do, and they are like okay, this is the reason why you need it.

How gene analyzers can give you wrong recommendations

Ari Whitten: Actually, on that note, I recently did a 23 and me genetic analysis, and ran it through a couple of these after market gene analyzers. There’s one particular woman who specializes in Nutrigenomics and her name is Amy Yasko. I ran it through her free gene analyzer and I swear, I was given the recommendation to go on I want to say like 75 different supplements that are supposed to help me with methylation. I’m not even trying to exaggerate there, I honestly think it might have been in the neighborhood of 75 different things that were being recommended to me.

Then I ran it through another gene analysis tool that told me that I methylate extremely well. I ranked as an A-plus in terms of methylation. On the one hand, I’m getting this one gene that’s saying ”hey, you’re great at methylation!” And then the other one’s saying, ”hey, you’re terrible. You need 75 different supplements so that you can methylate properly.” To me, that’s scary because what if I go and spend whatever, a thousand or two thousand dollars to get all these supplements, and then they actually end up making me worse if anything.

Why some doctors are wrongly prescribing different supplements

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, and that’s such a big concern because in this functional medicine world, you have the people that have done the research and they’re solid, and they have clinical experience and they have had thousands of patients that they get and better, but then they go on a podcast or they write a blog on methylated vitamin B-12, and how it’s better than taking the [inaudible] form of vitamin.

The problem is that the people that are on the outside looking in, maybe the MD’s that are not totally convinced about this functional medicine, they’re still in the old world and they have to see patients for five minutes. They read this blog and now they’re recommending vitamin B-12 methylated vitamin to everyone.

Even worse, a person at your local food market is now, ”Oh, I just read this on Dr. Google and he says that vitamin B-12 is the greatest thing.” Now everyone’s taking vitamin B-12. Either two things happen, they don’t feel better or worse, they end up having more symptoms of methylation problems.

This supplementation route of things is just such a rabbit hole.

How articles on supplements can paint a wrongful picture of their effects

Ari Whitten: Yeah, for sure, yeah I agree. Just the other day someone posted an article, someone was asking me what I thought of this article.

It was on lithium, it was like the five benefits of lithium. She was asking me what I think of the idea of supplementing and I said, ”Be cautious because this article is making it sound like this miracle substance where the more you take of it, the better. Be aware that for example, lithium is actually used to treat hyperthyroidism to suppress thyroid function. Getting too much of this stuff is also bad for you.”

I think all of this is really, to me it’s an argument in favor of eating a nutrient dense, whole food diet and not getting too carried away with supplementation of isolated nutrients.

Why eating a nutrient dense diet can help boost your immune system

Guillermo Ruiz: That’s where I was taking this, that’s the point that I wanted to make. I don’t want to sound doom and gloom. I don’t want you to go into your cabinet and just throw away all your supplements right now but cover your bases.

Start with a nutritionally dense, varied diet. Once you have that nutritionally dense diet, I assure you 90% of the population will get better. It’s that 10% that might need some supplementation. The supplementation is going to be so surgical and so pointed if your practitioner is thinking about your health from an evolutionary perspective. For example, I don’t know if this is a cool question for you but how many supplements do you take?

The difference between supplements and phytochemicals

Ari Whitten: You know, that’s a good question. I would say that I rotate through a number of them. I take probably, I don’t know six to ten different things at any given time, but very few isolated vitamins and minerals. I take a lot of like phytochemicals for example.

Guillermo Ruiz: It’s like the difference between taking, for example, purified fish oil. Purified it’s a polyunsaturated fatty acid that once it gets to your stomach, some of it is going to be converted into reactive oxygen species, which is the opposite of the reason why we take fish oil, versus taking something like cod liver oil, which is closer to a food. It doesn’t have as high levels of DHA and EPA but it does have things that protect the DHA and EPA to actually making it into the places where you go.

Ari Whitten: Right.

Guillermo Ruiz: Curcumin versus turmeric, over and over again we’re trying to find ways of making curcumin more absorbable. If you were living in a place that uses turmeric on a daily basis, and they did an autopsy on your brain, your brain would be yellow. That’s not with this fancy form of curcumin lipolyzed, it doesn’t matter. It’s because a constant exposure to it, to a food source of curcumin, actually makes it to where you want it. You start with a nutritionally dense diet, and there are things that you’re going to have to supplement.

Why magnesium is important to boost your immune system

For example, magnesium. I take magnesium because it’s so hard to get magnesium from the soil. The soil, we’ve destroyed our soils with mono-crops so I do take a magnesium supplement, and that’s about the only supplement that I take on a regular basis.

Why Cordyceps is a great supplement to boost your immune system

I do rotate with different like I’m going to try Cordyceps, which is a mushroom coming up. I want to see, I want to try to take some measures and see what happens when I take this cordyceps.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, there’s been some good studies that have come out on cordyceps, both militarius and synesis in the last year or two proving endurance and exercise performance, and things like that. It’s a good one.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, so it’s going to be really exciting to do that. Other than that, if you or your listeners have this fatigue, if they think they have a nutritional deficiency somewhere, investigate why.

What you need to investigate when you want to boost your immune system

Ari Whitten: Okay, so on that note real quick and then I want to get deeper back into infections. What do you recommend as far as investigating why? What is the process that you think someone should undertake to investigate?

Guillermo Ruiz: The first step could be, let’s say you have a B-12 deficiency and you don’t happen to eat animal products, maybe that’s a reason. A couple of super foods that have some B-12, they might have the Cyanocobalamin type of B-12 and people consume them and they say ”Oh, I’m getting my B-12 from the Cyanocobalamin.”

The problem with that is that it attaches to the receptor of vitamin B-12 and it actually blocks it and prevents it from working.

Ari Whitten: I just want to be clear, the foods you’re talking about are what like algae, like spirulina, chlorella, things like that?

Guillermo Ruiz: Specifically spirulina so you have the B-12 molecule circulating so they take your blood, and it looks like your fine, but it actually is not working.

Ari Whitten: Right.

How you can find out your micronutrient profile and start implementing them to your diet to boost your immune system

Guillermo Ruiz: I’m not trying to convince anyone to start eating meat, you do you. But if you go online and there are so many different tracking websites, and you have fatigue and you think you’re eating clean, or you’re eating clean go ahead and input into one of these websites and look at the micronutrient profile.

Maybe you are just missing copper. That’s one of the hard ones to get. Maybe you’re not taking enough lithium, and if it’s not coming from your diet and you’re not hitting that RDA, the first step would be, ”What are the foods that have this type of nutrient?” And then go at it, try to include them in your food and then check back in a couple of weeks or a month, and see if you still have those nutritional deficiencies.

Ari Whitten: Gotcha.

Guillermo Ruiz: The big red flags are going to be when you have aches and pains when you have this mental fatigue when you don’t have the precursors to make serotonin and dopamine. And then, do not jump directly into the supplementation.

There’s a reason why you need, maybe your body is utilizing this because of the disease process. Maybe you have an intracellular organism that is preventing you from absorbing it, maybe your blood glucose is through the roof and your body’s trying to figure out what to do with this inflammation, and it’s utilizing your vitamin D faster than it should be.

That’s when you have to zoom in and make sure if you have an underlying infection, you take steps to correct that.

What to do to boost your immune system when you suspect your fatigue is caused by infections

Ari Whitten: Yeah, and so on that note, that’s a perfect lead-in since we all want to get back into more of infections.

Tell me about what are the steps you’d recommend. Let’s say someone has fatigue and they suspect that it might be related to some kind of infection.

What are the steps that you’d recommend? And I guess, first of all maybe we should get into diagnosis a bit because I’ve heard mixed opinions on this subject. Some physicians I’ve spoken to have said yeah, we can diagnose active infections versus previous ones and other physicians I’ve spoken to have said that the diagnostic tools for looking at antibodies to viruses, for example, are not very good at detecting whether something is a current infection versus a past infection. What’s your take on that?

Guillermo Ruiz: First of all, I’m not a doctor. I’ll be a doctor …

Ari Whitten: You’ll be a doctor in 12 weeks.

Guillermo Ruiz: In 12 weeks I will be a doctor. Well, I still have to pass my boards, but yeah 12 weeks I’ll be a doctor.

Ari Whitten: He’s being modest everyone, he’s like top of his class. He’s acing all of his classes so there are no worries about him passing his boards.

How to select your practitioner

Guillermo Ruiz: The first thing of my blog, I have a huge blog post. It’s three sections long on how to select a practitioner, plus I’m from Florida and when I moved to Arizona the first thing that people would ask me is like when are you going to be done. It was four years away. I remember when I was back in Orlando, I went to my doctor and I wanted to know what my testosterone level was.

It’s my body, I want to know how much testosterone I have circulating. The doctor fired me on the spot. He said, “I’m not what you need. I don’t want to run these labs because I think you’re going to go to the streets and get testosterone, so I’m just terminating our relationship. You need to go find another doctor.”

Ari Whitten: Wow.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, so if you have chronic fatigue, if you felt better before and for some reason you think that you’re no longer feeling optimal, you’re not crazy. You need to follow… you are your only advocate, go find a doctor that is willing to work with you. That’s whether you do Paleo, vegan, if you want to become a photosynthesis organism, go find a doctor that agrees with you and that is going to see things and is going to help you. It’s a team effort. You have to take care of yourself and that doctor might be the quarterback that’s going to pass the ball to the right people, but they’re not going to be a dictator that says ”you are way more than what I need. I just want to prescribe your statin and go away.” Find a doctor that is willing to work with you, that’s the number one thing.

Investigate what is going on. You can boost your immune system by looking at your environment

Secondly, let’s investigate what’s going on. Some things are going to be very easy to tease out. For example, if you are from Arizona and you feel crappy, and you have a cough that it doesn’t go away, there is an infection called coccidiomycosis here in the Southwest. It’s an organism, it’s a type of yeast that goes into your lung and creates lesions, very similar to what tuberculosis does. That could be a reason, that could be an endemic thing that’s happening in your region. If you’re in the Northeast, be aware of Lyme Disease. Seriously consider if you like to hike and you are healthy and you want to go, and then all of a sudden you start getting aches and pains, be aware of that.

Make sure you boost your immune system by using the right treatment

Thirdly, is that sometimes we try to do things in a natural way, but in some cases, an antibiotic might be the best way to get rid of that. For example, with Lyme Disease if you catch it early a course of doxycycline or minocycline might nip it in the bud. If you try to treat it naturally you might miss that window where that infection might go deeper intracellular, going into its dormant state and then it’s so much harder to get rid of it.

Find an advocate to help you boost your immune system

Most importantly, find an advocate. It could be a doctor that is going to help you investigate and find, but maybe it’s an acupuncturist. Maybe you have a very smart personal trainer that you trust. Maybe you have someone and they might not be your practitioner, but they might help you find the right practitioner and find the right course of action.

Health starts in your kitchen

I like to say that health doesn’t start at a hospital, health doesn’t start at the doctor’s office. Health starts with food in your kitchen and anyone can be a healer. You don’t have to have an MD or DO or DC or MB behind your name to be a healer. In fact, if you want to heal someone, there are many more ways to do it than just prescribing or getting supplementation.

How to boost your immune system when your doctor cannot find out what is wrong

Ari Whitten: Okay, so let’s say someone has chronic fatigue, someone suspects there might be an infectious trigger involved in why that happened. They go get testing from a doctor and nothing significant really shows up on the tests, which seems to be a fairly common occurrence. I’ve seen a lot of people, I mean, first of all, testing for infections is kind of a not a super common thing. It seems like the patient almost has to talk the doctor into testing for infections in the first place. Like I mentioned before, it seems like there’s controversy around whether these tests can even detect active versus past infections in many cases, especially when it comes to viruses.

What do you recommend for a person in that scenario? Are there natural methods that we can look at? One, assuming they’re eating a healthy diet, what are some strategies that you might recommend to somebody who wants to help their body overcome an infection of some kind?

How fasting can boost your immune system

Guillermo Ruiz: There’s a lot of things you can do to boost your immune system. Again, I’m not a doctor, but there is a window of opportunity to maximize the effects of therapies. For example, fasting. Fasting up-regulates your immune system. You shunt some of the energy that you would use to digest food, and you actually activate different mechanisms within your immune system that could help you get over an infection faster.

How sauna and cold therapy can boost your immune system

There’s a lot really cool research coming out on sauna and cold therapies to stimulate profusion and you stimulate profusion, and then you’re going to stimulate the cleaning and clearing of different bad stuff within your blood.

Prevention would be very important, but no one cares about prevention because once it happens, it happens. You can start looking into different botanicals or things to optimize the response of the infection.

How they used botanicals to treat Zika

Ari Whitten: Now we’re in your area of expertise. This is where all your research is, and you waited this long to talk to us about it.

Guillermo Ruiz: That the problem, because like you said, you have to know what the infection is. A really short story, it’s really difficult to get funding for botanical research because you can’t patent a plant.

In order to try to rattle the cage a little bit, we decided to do some stuff to fight Zika. Zika is an emergent infection, super famous for the Rio Olympics but there are no traditional books that say oh, this is how we used to treat Zika but there is a lot of information on how to treat dengue and West Nile Virus, which are pathogens that are in the same family as the Zika virus. We used those traditional methods to fight Zika and guess what, it worked.

Ari Whitten: What are those methods?

Guillermo Ruiz: We used botanicals that have been traditionally used for dengue. For example parlarco, papaya leaf, neem, so we basically went through traditional records of things that you used to treat dengue and this type of virus, and because this virus is so similar to dengue, it works. They are the in the same family. What I’m trying to get is those would be if you have a mosquito driven infection, such as dengue or Zika that’s one thing that you can do.

Another thing you can do is you can be supplementing with adaptogens. I’m sure your listeners are familiar with adaptogens. It turns out that different adaptogens work in different specific locations.

How you can use echinacea to fight infections

We’re doing a huge project right now with echinacea and how echinacea is able to up-regulate or down-regulate IL-8. IL-8 is a cytokine that causes like the cold symptoms such as fever and the aches. When you up-regulate that IL-8, you’re up-regulating your body’s ability to fight infection.

Ari Whitten: Do you get more of those symptoms in that case?

Guillermo Ruiz: Yes, which is super interesting because those revolutionary ways that we fight infection like a fever, helps you fight an infection.

How Tylenol can reduce efficacy of vaccines

Maybe when you have a fever, supplementing with Tylenol and decreasing that fever is not a good idea.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because so many people think of a fever as something negative in and of itself, and something that we need to take medications to get rid of. It’s like, ”Oh, you have a fever, this is bad. Let’s do something to lower the fever.” Not realizing that a fever is actually part of our body’s way of making it harder for that microorganism to replicate.

Guillermo Ruiz: I’m going to tell you this, this is in the literature. It’s a little bit controversial. I don’t have kids, I don’t have to make any decisions about vaccinations. I was fully vaccinated, so I’m going to start with that but there is a study that says that giving kids Tylenol for their vaccination symptoms actually decreases the efficacy of the vaccine.

Ari Whitten: Oh wow, interesting.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, so now you get into this conundrum of you have new infections coming back and maybe the kids are not covered, and it’s maybe because we were giving them Tylenol. I think there was a little bit of paragraph within that paper, and I’ll send it to you so you can put it on your show notes.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, yeah definitely.

The correlations between vaccines and autism

Guillermo Ruiz: With a little bit of correlation to autism. Now, do I believe that vaccines cause autism? No, I think the literature as far as of today is pretty clear about that correlation and causation. Do I think that giving kids a vaccination and then suppressing their fever and not activating the immune system is a bad idea? Completely, but I don’t have any kids so I don’t have to go through that. Now you have kids and all of your listeners that are interested in having kids in the future, you guys really need to keep an ear to the floor and really see where this is going, because it’s getting more controversial and more controversial.

Ari Whitten: Yeah.

How the intracellular infections are hard to get rid off

Guillermo Ruiz: Okay, back to infections. You have other types of infections that are intracellular. Those are the hard ones to get rid of because those intracellular infections have different ways of hiding from your immune system. For example, we talked about how they might down-regulate the VDR receptor so now your vitamin D is not activating your immune system, and now you’re not able to kill it.

That’s why it’s so difficult to identify what the problem is because when you run those genetic tests you look at ELISA testing or Western Blood testing to look for Lyme Disease. I think right now the way your diagnosis is that you have to have three different chains, so three different markers. Naturopathic naturopaths usually if there is one chain, they might even treat empirically with a short course of antibiotics, just to make sure that even if maybe the test failed. As a naturopath, I can do things for you to prevent the ill effects of an antibiotic.

Ari Whitten: Like what?

Why you should reconsider using Cipro

Guillermo Ruiz: For example, give some supplementation such as Saccharomyces boulardii, which is a probiotic that is yeast based. It’s not bacterial based so even if you’re taking an antibiotic, it’s not going to effect that because it’s a different type of animal.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Cipro?

Ari Whitten: Yeah.

Guillermo Ruiz: Okay Cipro, an awful antibiotic. It causes tendon tears.

Ari Whitten: Whoa.

Guillermo Ruiz: I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of anyone rupturing their achilles tendon after a course of Cipro.

Ari Whitten: I haven’t, no.

Guillermo Ruiz: There’s on Facebook right now there’s like a couple of threads where people are like do not ever let your doctor give you Cipro.

Ari Whitten: Oh yeah, you know I did see that recently.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yes, so Cipro is a gyrase inhibitor, it helps the DNA de-entangle when it’s replicating. What the Cipro does it blocks the gyrase and then the DNA gets stuck, and then it breaks. That’s how it works. It doesn’t really differentiate from like bacteria to human. One of the things that Cipro does is that it uses magnesium as one of its co-factors.

When you start using Cipro, and I can send you those papers too, if you are magnesium deficient you start chelating magnesium from different tissues and that’s how you end up attacking tendons, and then you start breaking tendons. Contraindication for Cipro is an achilles tendon tear. It’s so difficult to come back from an achilles tendon tear.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, absolutely.

How to boost your immune system to mitigate the effects of Cipro

Guillermo Ruiz: Things that you can do to mitigate that effect if you are required to take Cipro, is make sure your magnesium status is healthy. The problem is that you cannot recommend a person take magnesium at the same time as Cipro because Cipro makes this metal bond and it becomes ineffective. The magnesium has to be in your system already in good status, in order to prevent the tear. Taking magnesium at the same time as Cipro is going to basically waste your antibiotic. There are different ways where we can be more careful and prevent the bad effects of taking an antibiotic.

Ari Whitten: Gotcha, okay so what else? What are more practical strategies people can use to help boost their immune function? Tell me more about botanicals, that’s your wheelhouse man.

How some botanicals acts like Cipro

Guillermo Ruiz: I’m really careful with talking about botanicals because one of the reasons I started following the Cipro lead is because one of our botanicals acts like Cipro.

Ari Whitten: Oh, I see.

Guillermo Ruiz: The same mechanism of action as Cipro, so the last thing I want is for people to say ”Oh, I’m going to start taking this every day,” and now they have a tendon tear or worse. That’s why I’m like really careful.

How different mushrooms can help you boost your immune system and fight off infections

For example, I’ve been geeking out a little bit on mushrooms lately and those beta glucans, and how those beta glucans actually go into your intestines. We have different receptors in our gut that …

Ari Whitten: Just to specify so in case any listeners are thinking that you’re taking psilocybin mushrooms and getting high, you’re talking about medicinal mushrooms, right?

Guillermo Ruiz: You know what, psilocybin could be a medicinal mushroom.

Ari Whitten: Depends on the definition of medicine, right?

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, exactly.

Ari Whitten: Not necessarily for infections.

Guillermo Ruiz: Not infections, no. I’m talking more like about turkey tail and cordyceps, and all of those different … Even your button, your regular mushroom has some beta glucans that you can use. The problem with the industry is that we get some little bit of research on beta glucans and they can just make beta glucans, so they can just print them basically and that’s how you start getting all these different stories about like ”Oh, this supplement doesn’t work because it’s completely fake.”

An easy way of ensuring that you’re getting your beta glucans is, just eat some mushrooms. You can go and order online some of these mushrooms, Cordyceps being one of them. Beta-glucan is a type of sugar and its sugars are really polar so they can dissolve in water. You can make yourself like a tea, so you put your mushrooms into hot water and you can drink that tea.

Not only are you making sure that you’re getting the right thing because you know for sure that this is an organic type of mushroom. It’s tasty and you’re getting it as a food source rather than as a concentrated overpriced supplement. You can actually drink that stuff and it’s going to activate those receptors, those receptors in your gut.

Your body, those beta glucans are like foreigner to your body so by the process of hormesis, your body ramps up its immune system to try to fight these beta glucans, and by proxy it helps you clean out pathogens and it helps all those different things that we hear from mushrooms like recovery, that’s how that process works.

How echinacea can boost your immune system through the act of hormesis

Ari Whitten: Cool and by the way, thank you for mentioning hormesis, my favorite subject.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, but that’s the thing, let’s go back to echinacea. Echinacea is acting by a similar process of hormesis, but it’s a little bit more specific because in our experiments, they’re invitro and they’re very preliminary, so I’m going to say that. In our experiments, you only get the spike on IL-8 if you have the infection. If you don’t have the infection, that cell remains normal.

Ari Whitten:    Okay, and just for people to remember, echinacea spikes IL-8, which basically helps our body do its processes of fighting and getting rid of that pathogen.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, exactly. Why is it doing this, that’s why we’re so excited because sometimes scientists roll their eyes at the concept of a plant being able to up-regulate or down-regulate if you need something.

We are discovering that if that cell is not infected by the rhinovirus, that cell doesn’t go and produce high levels of IL-8, which is just fantastic. That is something that maybe we can do, as a litmus test where if you have an intracellular organism, and you take echinacea and you don’t get a fever, maybe you don’t have anything.

Ari Whitten: Yeah.

Guillermo Ruiz: If you do, and I’m just talking out of my head right now, but finding the different plants that do this type of stuff can be super, super beneficial.

How Astragalus will upregulate and boost your immune system

Are you familiar with astragalus?

Ari Whitten: Yeah.

Guillermo Ruiz: Astragalus is another type of adaptogen that is immune modulating. What we found about astragalus is that there are a bacteria in the rhizome, in the root and that bacteria is a gram negative bacteria. There’s two types of general bacteria, gram negative, gram positive. The gram-positive are easy to kill, the gram negative have a larger cell wall, you know gook and it’s more difficult for antibiotics to penetrate that.

When you take the astragalus, and you put it in a blender and you blend it, you actually are blending some of that bacteria too. That LPS, it’s called lipopolysaccharides, LPS gets blended when you make that tincture. When you take that tincture in your body, a very similar process of hormesis detects those fragments of the LPS, it up-regulates your immune system.

Ari Whitten: Oh wow.

Guillermo Ruiz: We did an experiment where we used these microbeads to remove the LPS from the astragalus. We made the tincture in the same steps and it did not activate the immune system.

Ari Whitten:    Wow, so you said this is a gram-negative bacteria that actually grows on the roots of the astragalus plant?

Guillermo Ruiz: Yes.

Ari Whitten:    Wow, so it’s almost like this is natural vaccines basically.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yes, yes and it was so interesting because of we actually the three levels of this, for astragalus we actually did three levels. We did an invitro and then we did an immuno array, we could see where the actual genes that were being activated. Then because we’re hippies and we love tinctures, we actually did two human studies with astragalus where they drank 100 ml of astragalus tincture.

I don’t know if your listeners are familiar with how we make tinctures, but it’s basically Everclear and astragalus. It was a very happy experiment. After that was done, then we drew blood and we actually looked at the white blood cells of these individuals. If you take away the LPS, nothing gets activated. If you have that LPS in there, that immune system goes rampant and just trying to clean and fix things. It was pretty cool.

How different parts of the Echinacea plant works differently in the body

Ari Whitten: Very cool. I want to go back to echinacea for a second because I’d watched a video about you presenting on some of the research that you did with that. You were talking about that you actually found different mechanisms of action opposing viruses, depending on the part of the echinacea plant that you used. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Guillermo Ruiz: Totally, so in botanical medicine, there’s a lot of memes. For example, you’ll have people say oh, you know the fresh plant is better than the dried plants. It turns out that, that’s not 100% true, but sometimes this traditional empirical evidence that has been passed for generations actually is true when it comes to boost your immune system.

Again, the concept of adaptogens is hard to prove because in a lab people are used to that the more you use something, the more of an effect it’s going to have and that’s it. When you tell someone Okay, this plant if you use it your body is going to figure out do you need to boost your immune system or do you need less? It doesn’t fit in scientists’ heads.

Ari Whitten: Right.

Guillermo Ruiz: That concept is like ”No, you’re full of shit, that doesn’t exist.” Well, we separated the plant into three. We did the root, we did the plant and then we did the flower. We wanted to see what effect each one of these parts had in the same experiment.

Turns out that yes, the root up-regulates your immune system. We didn’t see the same effect on the flower, and we’re like what’s going on because we saw the resolution of infection with the flower.

That’s where we were like what’s going on here? Why are we getting basically the same results? You’re seeing less death of the cell but one of them you see an increase of IL-8, and the other one you don’t see an increase of anything.

Once we started looking at all the different things that could be going on with this experiment, we started crossing our T’s and dotting our I’s, we found that the viral load on the ones that were treated with the flower was lower.

Then we tested it and sure enough, some parts of the plant are antiviral and other parts of the plant are immunomodulating. That goes back to another thing that herbalists say. They say that eating the whole plant is better than eating a fraction of the plant, not just the root or just … and it’s going to be very funny because my next step on this project is I’m going to try to find the best ratio of root to flower.

It’s going to be very funny when the best ratio is the whole plant. We’re like nature already gave us the answer.

How calcium deficiency might impact the Vitamin D status

Ari Whitten: Yeah, very cool. Any final tips on how y ou can boost your immune system? You know I actually have to ask you, on one thing we were talking about vitamin D receptors earlier, and we talked about sun exposure as being superior to vitamin D supplementation. Do you know if there’s any way to actually affect the expression of the vitamin D receptor itself?

Guillermo Ruiz: No, that’s a very good question because I was just geeking out with my friend Billy. He’s another student, he’s a year below me. He was telling me that calcium deficiency actually might impact your vitamin D status.

Ari Whitten: Interesting.

Guillermo Ruiz: It could be one of those things that maybe your calcium is not up-to-date, and maybe that’s why your VDR is low. That doesn’t mean go take calcium, no everything is in context. You have to figure out why.

A very good way of increasing your VDR would be eliminating any underlying infections if you’re able to find that infection. There are very safe things that you can do, even if you don’t have the diagnosis and boost your immune system through that.

What you can do to prevent infection

For example, getting some sun exposure to try to push that pathway a little bit better. Anything that is hormesis that is not going to break the camels back. Contrast showers, anything that is going to up-regulate your immune system such as fasting.

Those are things that we can do to prevent an infection, to make our infection treatments better or if you suspect an infection and you feel better after doing these things, that could be a way of getting rid of that infection.

How detoxification of the liver can help recovering from cancer

A quick story, my mother-in-law passed away from cancer. When she was getting chemotherapy, she was just tired and she was just really, really tired and not being able to walk or talk. She was just nauseous and tired.

We went to visit one weekend and we had read somewhere that liver detoxification was so important for the symptoms of cancer. My girlfriend actually did some Epsom salt baths where she would do the Epsom salt, and then help her out and then they would go outside to the pool deck and they would suntan. For the next six to seven hours it was like we had her back.

Ari Whitten:    Wow.

Guillermo Ruiz: It was too late and she probably never got that connection, but everyone else noticed. Maybe what was happening was like we were activating the detox pathways and the immune system back to normal, but it was just short lived.

Ari Whitten: Right.

Guillermo Ruiz: Maybe the constant activation of those pathways …

Ari Whitten: Yeah, or what happens if you get sun every day.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah exactly, then you might get bitten by a tick and not get Borrelia.

Ari Whitten: Right, yeah and in that context, in an evolutionary context it’s not such a weird idea that you would get lots of sun every day and boost your immune system through that. Our ancestors didn’t live indoors working at a computer in a cubicle most of the day.

Guillermo Ruiz: At 72 degrees.

Ari Whitten: They were outdoors in the sun pretty much every day.

Guillermo Ruiz: Have you read Stephen Guyenet’s book?

Ari Whitten: Yeah.

Why sleep is important to prevent infections

Guillermo Ruiz: The last couple of chapters where he talks about sleep and stress. Those are two things that down regulates your immune system. Not sleeping enough and being stressed all the time, having that cortisol high. That’s going to predispose you to some of these infections.

Ari Whitten: Mm-hmm (affirmative) yeah, for sure. I think to recap, I think some of the stuff you mentioned, lack of sleep and stress are things you just mentioned will not boost your immune system. Then you mentioned the number of hormetic mechanisms, so intermittent fasting.

I know there’s research on that to show that it kind of almost rebuilds a lot of the immune cells. Then heat exposure, saunas, cold exposure or contrast showers and then sun exposure, and then a lot of these botanicals that you mentioned, the astragalus and echinacea, and mushrooms.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah and good nutrient status, that’s hard to tease out.

How cleaning out biofilms can reduce chronic sinus infections

One last thing that I want to mention is biofilms because I know a lot of people that have chronic sinus infections. That might not present as fatigue but man they’re going to have a chronic infection. Another mechanism that bacteria have is that if they start noticing they’re being killed, they start chelating like different minerals and they start creating this biofilm, and it’s like a protector.

You might kill 90% of the bacteria with an antibiotic, but once they go into biofilm that antibiotic is not penetrating the bacteria, so you might have like 10% of the bacteria that is not even touched.

Ari Whitten: Those are now the ones that are going to reproduce, and they’re the ones that probably have the most antibiotic resistance.

Guillermo Ruiz: They’re going to come back and then you’re going to take another course of antibiotics, and they’re going to go into the biofilm and the cycle repeats. That’s how people end up with chronic infections such as chronic UTI’s, chronic sinus infections, you can have an overgrowth of candida and all of these different things. There are natural ways of reducing biofilm, N-Acetyl Cysteine, tons of papers on N-Acetyl Cysteine. My favorite though is Xylitol as it can boost your immune system by killing biofilms.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, I was going to say.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, that’s my favorite because it actually tastes good. Most of the product, and can I say the name of the product?

Ari Whitten: Sure.

Guillermo Ruiz: I don’t get anything from this product.

Ari Whitten:  The nasal spray?

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, Xlear.

Ari Whitten:    Right.

Guillermo Ruiz: It’s actually pronounced …

Ari Whitten: I think it’s Zyclear, who knows how to pronounce it?

Guillermo Ruiz: I was at a conference two years ago, and I met the inventor.

Ari Whitten: Oh well, then, in that case, you’d know how to pronounce it better than I do.

Guillermo Ruiz: It’s pronounced Clear.

Ari Whitten:    It’s pronounced just Clear?

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, but it’s Xlear, whatever.

Ari Whitten:    It’s pronounced clear? Well, the guy needs to take some spelling classes. I like his product but he needs to work on spelling a little bit.

Guillermo Ruiz: It’s an amazing product and it’s basically xylitol spray that you put into your nostrils, and then you’re actually getting some xylitol into those bacteria. Then that destroys the biofilm and when you take your herbal or antibiotic, it’s going to work better.

Ari Whitten: Yeah.

How xylitol can prevent cavities

Guillermo Ruiz: There are different things that you can do for different bacteria. The reason we have xylitol in gum is to break the biofilm that could cause cavities.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, and I actually use it with my toothpaste every evening when I brush my teeth for that reason as well.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, and there’s different things that you can use to break biofilm-like N-Acetyl Cysteine for things in your intestines. You can pretreat with N-Acetyl Cysteine and then take a course of botanical or regular antibiotics, and that could help you finally, finally clear that infection.

Where you can learn more about the work Guillermo Ruiz does

Ari Whitten:    Beautiful, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Guillermo. It was a pleasure talking to you and I love hearing about all the research you’re doing in this area. It’s absolutely fascinating.

Guillermo Ruiz: Oh thank you for having me.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, it’s a pleasure. Where can people find more information about you? I know that you have a fairly new podcast, so tell us a little about that so our listeners can learn a bit moer on how to boost your immune system.

Guillermo Ruiz: You can reach my podcast at podcast@3030health on iTunes. You can go to 3030health.com, 3-0-3-0 health.com and that’s going to take you directly to the podcast. My website is 3030strong.com, 3-0-3-0 strong.com.

I am going to be presenting at a botanical conference here at the school this week, then I am scheduled to present at Paleo Effects, a fantastic conference if you guys are into the paleo thing. I am also scheduled to present at the Ancestral Health Symposium in September. I’m trying to bring more of this botanical stuff into these communities because it’s funny that we sort of miss that whole traditional aspect of medicine.

Ari Whitten: Yeah absolutely, and thank you for the work you’re doing to bring it to the forefront of our awareness. I’m a huge fan, you know we’ve talked a lot about phytochemicals, botanicals so it’s a common interest of both of ours.

I approach things more from kind of the hormesis and energy enhancement, mitochondrial enhancement angle and you take more of the infectious disease angle so it’s just awesome to have these conversations with you, and thank you so much again for sharing your wisdom with my audience. Oh and I should mention in 12 weeks when you graduate, and you are a doctor people can actually come see you.

How hormesis can extend longevity

Guillermo Ruiz: Actually yeah, but you know I want to say something. It pisses me off that you’re right, it’s all hormesis.

Ari Whitten: Yeah I know, actually I think when we talked about it before you were kind of resistant to that.

Guillermo Ruiz: It’s all hormesis, yeah. At the end, it’s going to be all hormesis.

Ari Whitten:    Yeah, you know this is a little digression but there’s a really nice lecture from one of my favorite scientists. His name is Vince Giuliano and he is like one of the leading thinkers in the aging sciences community. He runs like the top blog on aging research. He has a really nice, two part presentation. It’s free on YouTube, it’s called The Science of Longevity.

His fundamental thing that he says is pretty much the most research-backed set of mechanisms to actually extend longevity, basically pretty much everything he’s talking about is all hormesis. I’m pretty convinced that it’s like the crux of good health and prevention of disease and longevity. Now there’s even this immune angle that I’ve been exposed to that I didn’t even realize, thanks to your work.

Guillermo Ruiz: Yeah, and at the end, it’s going to be as long as you’re not breaking the camel’s back, which is a problem with like the hormesis of Cross Fit.

Ari Whitten: Absolutely yeah, especially with people who are fatigued you have to be real cautious with exercise, but the mechanisms that you mentioned with the botanicals, intermittent fasting, cold exposure, heat exposure, I think those are all beautiful ways to start to get some hormesis going on without breaking the camel’s back.

Guillermo Ruiz: Without breaking the camel’s back.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, so thank you again, Guillermo. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Guillermo Ruiz: Thanks for having me.

Ari Whitten: Yeah, take care.

Guillermo Ruiz: Bye, bye.

Ari Whitten:    Bye.

Hey there, this is Ari Whitten with The Energy Blueprint. Thank you for watching this video, I hope you enjoyed it. I assume you did, otherwise, you probably wouldn’t have stuck around this long. Now you have a lot of ideas n how to boost your immune system.

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I hope you loved this podcast and learned more about how to boost your immune system. If you want to know more about how you can heal your body of infections and boost your immune system up to normal, check out the interview with Dr. Evan Hirsch on how you can start treating fatigue by cleaning your environment.