Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Roger Seheult discuss the 8 pillars for building your immune system, offer practical strategies to strengthen the immune system, reduce inflammation, and minimize the risk of common illnesses like colds and flu.
Dr. Roger Seheult is a board-certified physician in internal medicine, pulmonary diseases, critical care, and sleep medicine at Loma Linda University. Dr. Andrew Huberman is a tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine and host of the Huberman Lab podcast.
Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/N5DAW8mkJ6Y?si=Wzs2vtXgyZT7pJgM
Show notes: https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/how-to-enhance-your-immune-system-dr-roger-seheult
*Timestamps*
00:00 How to Boost Immune Health
00:24 Fundamental Layers of a Healthy Immune System
00:57 Tool: NEWSTART
01:16 1: Nutrition
01:28 2: Exercise
02:21 3: Water
02:49 4: Sunlight
03:08 5: Temperance
03:22 6: Air
03:55 7: Rest
04:24 8: Trust
#HubermanLab #RogerSeheult #Immunity
Disclaimer & Disclosures: https://www.hubermanlab.com/disclaimer
if you were to think about the the major pillars of remaining healthy especially when one is exposed to cold and flu from kids for in your case also in the Intensive Care Unit where people are coming in specifically because their sick often with infections like colds and flu or worse you need to take specific precautions to avoid getting sick what do you think of as the fundamental layer of keeping a healthy immune Sy system to avoid getting sick and then we’ll talk about how to get over and move through being sick more quickly yes well the question is how do you avoid getting sick in terms of uh infectious diseases and as it turns out the answer to that is is actually the same in terms of avoiding getting sick for anything and it it sort of goes to the pillars as you call it in my mind there’s a there’s actually a physician that I I know very well just outside of uh Stanford actually and place called wear wear University Dr Neil nedley and he’s actually coined this this pneumonic called New Start um and and each of those letters to me in my mind is something that I go to when I want to improve health uh in in people in general so the and starts for nutrition and we can talk about nutrition and what that does to the human body obviously you know as natural as possible staying away from processed foods that’s something there um exercise is e and and uh when I’m talking about exercise I’m talking about the understanding that we have regarding exercise not to build muscle necessarily be stronger I’m talking about exercise in terms of health and that has more of a a j hook type of of picture what I mean by j- Hook is if you’re not doing any exercise you’re going to have higher levels of inflammation as soon as you start to do some exercise even mild to moderate exercise the amount of inflammation your body starts to come down but as you start to do more and more exercise you do have to be careful in terms of your General Health this is exactly what happens with athletes um they have to be very careful that when they’re doing that type of elite athletic exercise that they’re not sick on the day of performance and so that that’s an issue so I’m referring to just you know mild to moderate exercise is good um the next one would be W water so this is something that’s really interesting obviously it seems pretty you know obvious but not only the use of internal water but external water so in that area we can talk about sauna cold plunge things of that nature that can actually help with our immune system that’s a whole interesting area of discussion it involves the innate immune system it involves interferon there’s a lot of history and data that goes back over 100 years on how that’s been used start stt so s is sunlight I’ve been a real proponent of getting people outside into the Sun and we can talk a lot about that there’s a lot of interesting research not only in terms of sunlight in terms of influenza but also covid and just about any natural disease lot of interesting information there t t uh stands for the old term called Temperance which you may recall is a is a term that we use to prevent us from taking in toxins into our body that’s a whole another discussion so staying away from things that would make you sick a is air and when I talk about air it’s not just what we focus on which is keeping bad things out of the air so having fresh air but there’s a whole discussion to be had in terms of air that has good qualities in it so there’s a whole area of research that looks at for instance fdes which are chemicals that come off of trees you may have heard of forest bathing they’ve done a lot of research in Japan on this and getting out into nature there are actual chemicals that are in the air that you can breathe that actually have an impact on your inate immune system finally R we’re getting to R and T at the end R is rest now this is a goes without saying but people who have good sleep habits are going to have much better immune systems whether you’re talking about the the antibody response after a vaccine uh versus just um the number of times per year you’re sick there’s very good data very good research that shows that getting seven eight hours of sleep at night is going to be very beneficial for your immune system has to do with cortisol and beta receptors and all sorts of things and the last te which is trust and uh for some it is is trust in in a higher power trus in God these are the sorts of things that can help us uh relieve stress if someone else is as helping you as someone else is there tea would also include Community people that are around you these are some of the less um tangible ways of measuring but when someone asked me a question what can I do to avoid getting sick and as you just asked me in terms of influenza there’s a lot of specific things we can talk about but that’s where I start out with the pillars of Health [Music]
