The Dr. Hyman Show
Toxic Food & Hidden Chemicals Are Everywhere: Here's What You Can Do
Mon, 10 Mar 2025
Our immune system operates like a finely tuned symphony, yet many of us find ourselves out of harmony, vulnerable to persistent infections, autoimmune conditions, and chronic disease. Rather than merely suppressing symptoms, a Functional Medicine approach seeks to identify and address the underlying disruptions driving immune imbalance. Central to this dysfunction is compromised gut health, which undermines immune regulation, while mitochondrial impairment and chronic inflammation further erode the body's capacity for resilience and repair. By restoring balance at the root level, we can cultivate a more robust and adaptive immune system. In this episode, I discuss, along with Dr. Elroy Vojdani and Dr. Leonard Calabrese, how cleaning up our diets, improving gut health, removing toxins, and decreasing stress can do wonders for our immune systems. Dr. Elroy Vojdani is a pioneer in the field of functional medicine and research and is the founder of Regenera Medical, a concierge functional medicine practice in Los Angeles, California. He graduated from USC Keck School of Medicine, is a certified Institute for Functional Medicine Practitioner. Dr. Vojdani has conducted medical scientific research for decades with more than 25 publications in multiple peer-reviewed journals. He is also world-renowned for his research and development of state-of-the-art lab testing in the field of immunology. He recently authored a book entitled “When Food Bites Back” which discusses the role of food immune reactions in the development of autoimmune disease. Dr. Leonard Calabrese, is an expert in immunology and rheumatology. In fact, he is a Professor of Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University and Vice Chair of the Department of Rheumatic and Immunologic Diseases. Dr. Calabrese is the director of the RJ Fasenmyer Center for Clinical Immunology at the Cleveland Clinic and holds joint appointments in the Department of Infectious Diseases and the Wellness Institute. Dr. Calabrese has made significant contributions to science in the fields of chronic viral infections and autoimmunity and vascular inflammatory diseases of the brain. He has received numerous awards and honors for his contributions to the advancements of immunology and wellness. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Full-length episodes can be found here: Boost Your Immunity with These Simple Steps How To Reset Your Immune System At A Cellular Level The Secrets to Creating a Healthy Immune System
Chapter 1: What is the importance of gut health for the immune system?
Coming up on this episode of The Dr. Hyman Show. 60% of your immune system is right underneath the lining of your gut. So it's there because you're exposed to foreign molecules from food and bugs, and your immune system is the first line of defense. And so when that system gets disrupted, If you get what we call a leaky gut, it creates a lot of inflammation.
And so changing your diet has a huge impact on there, working on your inner guard and your gut microbiome. Did you know that over 75% of people are deficient in magnesium? That's a problem because magnesium is essential for over 600 functions in your body, including energy production, stress regulation, and deep sleep. Here's the catch. Not all magnesium is created equal.
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Right now, Bioptimizers is offering my listeners a special discount. Just go to bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use code HYMEN10 at checkout. Don't wait. Your body will thank you. It plays a big role. Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale.
And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, Dr. Hyman Plus.
And if you're looking for curated, trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website, drhyman.com, for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. What are the things that help us have immune resilience?
And what are the things that have changed in our environment, our life, our lifestyle that have actually made our immune systems be dysregulated?
Yeah, the most important cell in the immune system is something called a T regulatory cell. And the dominant population of T regulatory cells in an adult lives in the lining of the gut. So the gut is the center of immune resilience. Those regulatory cells are responsible for
you know, kind of balancing all the different sides, making sure that, you know, in an inflammatory attack against something that we should be attacking, we don't end up in that mistake of attacking ourselves. So the gut is absolutely the center of the immune system and immune resilience.
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Chapter 2: How does diet affect immune resilience?
80% of Americans have glyphosate in their urine, which is a natural antibiotic that kills, well, not natural, it's a synthetic antibiotic that kills your microbiome. And on top of that, our diets change dramatically. We've reduced our fiber. We've increased ultra-processed food. We take emulsifiers that damage our gut lining, cause leaky gut.
So we have a whole cascade of things that have happened in our environment, we call the exposome, that have really caused massive damage to our gut, which is where 60% of the immune system is. And then that's led to...
I think a lot of the rise in chronic illness in general, because the gut's not linked to everything from psychiatric disease to cardiac disease to diabetes, metabolic health, cancer, and obviously autoimmune disease and allergic disorders and asthma, not to mention just the gut issues that people have like IBS and all that stuff. So this is a massive problem.
It's causing huge amounts of disability and, and, and disease. And it's not something that traditional medicine does a very good job of thinking about diagnosing or treating. And I, And I've been involved with academic centers with these long COVID clinics, and it's kind of embarrassing, honestly, to see how little they know and how little they're doing.
And yet there's so much that's known that we can actually do something about. We were just chatting a little earlier about these different lab tests, for example, in Germany that they're looking at that are
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Chapter 3: What role do toxins play in immune dysfunction?
common in post-COVID patients, which are autoantibodies against your autonomic nervous system that affects your ability to regulate your blood pressure and gives you dizziness when you stand up or POTS, postural orthostatic hypertension syndrome. And we're seeing other autoantibodies against different tissues. And it's kind of scary. And there's techniques to actually fix it, heal it.
We talked a little bit about plasmapheresis, which they're looking at in Europe, which basically filters out all the bad stuff in your blood and cleans your blood, and it's used for a lot of immune diseases. So talk about, if we have this problem with immune resilience, what are we seeing with that?
We're seeing the rise in autoimmune disease, and can you kind of help us connect the dots between the decline in our immune resilience, the rise in autoimmunity, and then what's happened with this long COVID phenomenon?
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, 25 years of research now kind of starting to look at what is really happening here from a physiologic perspective, right? You know, intestinal permeability, leaky gut, you know, you've covered that many times on the podcast and in your books.
But, you know, it's hard to understate how important that process is in chronic inflammatory disease, autoimmune disease, neurodegenerative disease. You know, the more and more and more we look at it, the more we're finding that it is centered to all of these. So, though we do keep talking about it, it's rightfully an incredibly important topic of conversation.
So you listed all of the things in the environment that we are consciously or unconsciously exposed to on a regular basis as a population. Think about it from the immune system's perspective. If its job is to defend us from threat, and we are constantly pouring threat into ourselves again knowingly or unknowingly, I think it was only a matter of time until we saw what we are seeing now.
Massive explosions, viruses that I think five or six years ago didn't pose such a tremendous threat to us as an adult population. We talked about RSV, this last cold and flu season was horrendous.
you know, adenoviruses and rhinoviruses, things that typically cause like three, four, five days of regular cold, causing two or three weeks of pro, you know, prolonged congestion, you know, lots of secondary infections, you know, just, you're just seeing the immune system just completely failing.
So it's because I think of what we're continuously exposing ourselves to, what that does to the center of the immune system. And then we see all the ramifications of it, you know, now, 15, 20, 25 years down the road, in a population that's dramatically suffering. And the current medical infrastructure has zero answer for this.
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Chapter 4: How has COVID-19 affected long-term immune health?
Epstein-Barr virus, the majority of adults are asymptomatic from the infection, same with CMV as well too. These viruses are genius in their long-term evolution against us. They have figured out how to evade complete immune eradication by hiding in tissue after the acute infection. But with a normal immune system, they stay in dormancy.
They wouldn't dare step out into the wild and get eradicated by the immune system. But what we're finding is that the best.
Yeah, like if you have a herpes cold sore. Exactly. It only comes out when you're under stress. Exactly. It's not there all the time. But the virus is there. Correct. It's just sleeping. Yeah. It wakes up when there's some kind of insult.
Correct. Right? It's not rolling around in the bloodstream active all day long. But a very, very large percentage of long COVID patients have viral reactivation as a core of their clinical symptoms and clinical disease. So again, that poses the question, what in the world is happening with the immune system in the short and long term following a COVID viral infection? It's not meeting
the demands in the short term and then not balancing itself in the long term as well, which provides a beautiful open window for these reactivated viruses.
And are there, are there good diagnostics immunologically to help map out what's going on with these patients? Because I, you know, long COVID is a bucket, but it's truly probably many, many, many different kinds of problems. And each individual responds to the insult with different manifestations and many different kinds of treatments. But let's go over the buckets, if you don't mind.
So currently, with what we understand right now, I break it into five buckets. So there's viral persistence, which is essentially somebody never fully clears the initial COVID infection. They've got this very low level infection that just keeps on going and going and going and going. There's something called super antigen activation, which is parts of COVID have an ability to just dramatically
I'll just say piss off the immune system. There's the mitochondrial dysfunction and loss of autophagy that happens there. There's the microbiome and gut permeability dysfunction, and then there's the autoimmunity component. So if you're going to talk about diagnostics to be able to accurately pick up,
what's happening with long COVID, you basically have to say, okay, which one of these five buckets is the person living in? Everyone is gonna have some unique spectrum of those five, though the majority will have, let's say three or four of them. So we don't have diagnostics for the mitochondrial part, maybe on the research side.
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Chapter 5: What are the five buckets of long COVID symptoms?
Yeah, but it's the most important part of you. Of course that's going to happen.
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How do we regulate our immune system to do what it's supposed to do and not do what it's not supposed to do, which is happening a lot in our culture because we have such an overactive immune system given our inflammatory diet, given our toxins, given the change in our microbiome, given our... levels of stress and so on, we all are experiencing immune system dysfunction at some level.
So we also want to understand how inflammation plays a role in aging and how do we regulate the process of getting older without dealing with the consequences of chronic inflammation, which is driving so much of the age-related diseases. I wrote about this a lot in my book, Young Forever. There's a whole concept of a chronic systemic sterile inflammation.
It's not inflammation that's coming from getting an infection, but it's this low-grade chronic inflammation that we now refer to as inflammaging. the inflammation that occurs as we age. And that actually accelerates every aspect of aging. So how do we regulate that?
How do we understand how to not neglect our immune systems as we get older and make them strong and fit and be able to be resilient and rejuvenate their effect which is basically diminished as we age. We're less likely to be able to fight infections and cancer. So our immune system is dysfunctional at that level.
And at the same time, it actually is causing more inflammation that leads to more autoimmunity and chronic sterile inflammation that leads to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia. So we have to really understand the way to rethink our immune system to both upregulate our ability to fight cancer and infection, but also
reduce the levels of inflammation and autoimmunity that happen as we get older. Immunorejuvenation is a relatively new concept. It was really sort of framed by my mentor, Jeffrey Bland, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, the father of functional medicine, who was a student of Linus Pauling, and has taken this concept of immunorejuvenation and actually created a whole company around it called Big Bold Health.
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Chapter 6: What is immunorejuvenation and why is it important?
In the frame of functional medicine, we often people fall on elimination diets, which is eliminating inflammatory foods and anti-inflammatory diet. Things like gluten and dairy can be an issue. Processed food, obviously. Eating more whole foods, plant-rich foods is really key. So that's sort of what you're saying.
Absolutely. Yeah.
All right.
So the next topic would be, you said exercise. Exercise. So I've been interested in exercise and immunity for decades. Decades, actually, probably one of the first areas of behavior and immunity that I became interested in. And it's a it's a it's a complex area to talk. So over the past many years, I try to invite world leaders in all of these areas to my center to visit.
And last year we had David Neiman, who is one of the leaders. undisputed leaders in this field. And, you know, I do believe in what we call the J curve of exercise, that people who are sedentary, people who are sedentary are immunocompromised.
And we know this both from the laboratory and the risks of, you know, the kind of the canary in the coal mine that we measure usually is respiratory illnesses. And how many is normal and how many do you get? Being a couch potato is bad for your immune system. It is definitely bad for your immune system as well as virtually every other system in your body.
But I'm looking from the lens of immunologic strength.
And we just talked about heart disease and things like that, but this is a whole new view.
This is it. The thing that you can do to demonstrate immunologic enhancement is moderate exercise. And, you know, moderate exercise is still a moving target. And, you know, if we look at the guidelines which have been recently revamped, only in the past couple of months, you know, walking is an incredible form of immunologic strength building.
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Chapter 7: How can we mitigate inflammation as we age?
And Betsy and I, my nurse practitioner, world's best nurse practitioner, we talk to our patients about instant recess. That's what we call it. We say, you know, if you're totally sedentary,
just get up and start moving and now i'm copying you so in my immunologic summits for the past two years i invite our head yoga teacher from the cleveland clinic judy who comes and we do yoga at all the sessions so the first time i did this at a scientific meeting these guys are like What?
What is going on here?
And now it's like so popular. So anyway, we start moving the needle down to moderate exercise. There still is some data and there's some controversy that's recently been added into this. You know, the middle path is very strong for health and wellness, right? And, you know, you can... too much of something is often as bad as not doing it.
And there have been a lot of epidemiologic evidence to show people who are ultra-exercisers can actually do harm. Like marathon runners. And beyond. Now we have people, ultra-marathon runners. I don't think it's coincidental, and I'm sure you've seen this in your practice. I've seen many people who have developed
you know, what we would recognize now as chronic fatigue syndrome, who had started out as very high endurance athletes, and then something has fallen apart. And you just wonder in your head of whether this was a predisposing factor, but we get people moving. So there was a very interesting study done at the University of Colorado in the last about 18 months, where they experimentally
took a group of people who work at a sedentary job, a cubicle, sit there all day long, and they randomized them to you get to go to a gym and come in a half hour late, and you do 30 minutes on the treadmill. versus you who all you have to do is for five hours during the day, get up and walk around five minutes out of each hour, five minutes out of each hour.
And then they measured a number of outputs. And while they didn't do immunologic function, they looked at vitality, well-being, mood, et cetera. The people who won were the people who were just getting up and moving. Walking around. Yeah. You need a step counter. The 10,000 steps. All of that stuff that Mike Roizen talks about and our whole enterprise engages in. I think it's good for your body.
It's good for your brain. And it's clearly good for your immune system. So it's just a small bit of data. And similar to what we talked about from the nurse's health study in...
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Chapter 8: What lifestyle changes can improve immune health?
So what happens to your immune system when you exercise? not like the ultra marathoners. And I know you've written about this where you see even clinical studies looking at ultra marathoners versus regular folks, their immune system is different, their oxidative stress is more. What is actually happening when you exercise your immune system?
It's actually still relatively poorly understood if you divide it into two types of studies. One are the studies where you can do it in a lab and come in and do an exhaustive stress test or cycle until you've hit the oxidation wall and you're hit your aerobic capacity. There, it's not surprising that all types of things happen to your immune system. You have trafficking of immunologic cells.
You have elevations of inflammatory cytokines. Those are the mediators that cause inflammation and redistribution of lymphocytes like T cells and B cells. I've always said, well, I would expect that. That's just stress and your immune system is moving to stress. The more
Important question is if you take a person who's sedentary and a person who has moderate activity and a person who is an ultramarathoner, do their immune systems differ by what we have traditionally measured, T cells and B cells and inflammatory cytokines and the like? And the answer is there's very little difference that we can detect. And my response to that is that we have very poor tools.
We're just now- We're looking with an eyeglass instead of a telescope, right? We're looking at the same techniques that we looked at 40 years ago, where in the next five years, we'll be looking with what we recognize as omic technologies, where we're looking at the entire cloud of data of how your genes are functioning and how your proteome and metabolome
So some of that work is starting to be done right now. And I look forward to seeing more of it.
That's pretty exciting. So eating right exercise. Let's talk about stress because. I think the data is pretty clear that stress is not good for your immune system, but that the act of managing stress or actually doing things that help reset your stress response actually can help your immune system. And it's really the conversation about molecules of emotion.
It really is. I think that this is the most exciting area going on in immune behavioral science right now. And the data that are being generated are pretty impressive. So let's just talk about, let me back up and give you just a magic minute on triggering the immune system. So we have this immune system here. It's designed to defend us from all types of dangerous signals.
We traditionally think of that as external signals such as infections, and it certainly does all that. There is another... set of danger signals that we are just now starting to understand. And you brought up the term psychoneuroimmunology. Mouthful. It is. It is. And it's your psyche, your nervous system, and your immune system.
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