The Immune System Recovery Plan

A Doctor's 4-Step Program to Treat Autoimmune Disease

Susan Blum, Michele Bender

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781451695007
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Diseases & Allergies

The bestselling book with 100, 000 copies in print from one of the most sought-after experts in the field of functional medicine, Dr. Susan Blum, author of Healing Arthritis, shares the four-step program she used to treat her own serious autoimmune condition and help countless patients reverse their symptoms, heal their immune systems, and prevent future illness. DR. BLUM ASKS:
• Are you constantly exhausted?
• Do you frequently feel sick?
• Are you hot when others are cold, or cold when everyone else is warm?
• Do you have trouble thinking clearly, aka "brain fog"?
• Do you often feel irritable?
• Are you experiencing hair loss, dry skin, or unexplained weight fluctuation?
• Do your joints ache or swell but you don't know why?
• Do you have an overall sense of not feeling your best, but it has been going on so long it's actually normal to you?If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may have an autoimmune disease, and this book is the "medicine" you need. Among the most prevalent forms of chronic illness in this country, autoimmune disease affects nearly 23.5 million Americans. This epidemic—a result of the toxins in our diet; exposure to chemicals, heavy metals, and antibiotics; and unprecedented stress levels—has caused millions to suffer from autoimmune conditions such as Graves' disease, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, celiac disease, lupus, and more.DR. BLUM'S INNOVATIVE METHOD FOCUSES ON:
• Using food as medicine
• Understanding the stress connection
• Healing your gut and digestive system
• Optimizing liver functionEach of these sections includes an interactive workbook to help you determine and create your own personal treatment program. Also included are recipes for simple, easy-to-prepare dishes to jump-start the healing process. The Immune System Recovery Plan is a revolutionary way for people to balance their immune systems, transform their health, and live fuller, happier lives.

CHAPTER 1

Autoimmune Disease Basics

A HEALTHY IMMUNE SYSTEM

Your immune system includes a group of cells in your body that protect you against infections and illness. This is why the immune system is often referred to as an “army” of cells. Every day when you’re exposed to things that could cause infection and illness—such as viruses, bacteria, mold, parasites, and foreign proteins in food—your immune system takes action. To do so, it calls upon many different kinds of soldiers, but to understand autoimmune disease, we will focus on one battalion in particular, called lymphocytes. Lymphocytes are a type of white blood cell that is responsible for protecting you from harmful foreigners like infections. However, if they aren’t working right, lymphocytes are the cells that cause autoimmune diseases. There are two kinds of “soldiers” that make up the lymphocyte battalion. The first is killer T cells, which directly attack anything they don’t recognize and which they perceive as an invader. I think of this direct attack as cell-to-cell combat. The other kind of soldier is called a B cell. These cells produce antibodies, which are molecules that grab on to anything that your immune system thinks is foreign and dangerous. After these molecules get hold of the foreigner, your immune system initiates a bigger response that causes an inflammatory reaction. When this happens, new compounds are released that attack the foreigner in order to kill it and clear it out of your body. You can think of antibodies as bullets released from the B cells to kill the invader. Both kinds of soldiers of the immune system, antibody-producing B cells and killer T cells, start a process that results in inflammation throughout the body. Though the process may begin somewhat differently, the end result you feel is the same for the most part. The first definition of a competent and healthy immune system is one in which the killer T cells and the antibody-producing B cells are in balance so that the immune response is balanced, too.

Depending on the invader, sometimes you actually feel something is happening when your immune system takes action and sometimes you don’t. Examples of these foreign invaders include bacteria and viruses. If you get a sinus or ear infection, which is caused by bacteria, you may experience your immune system taking action by having a stuffed nose and pain in your ear or sinus area. If you get the flu, which is from a virus, you might have a high fever. These symptoms are the result of your immune system trying to fight the bacteria or virus. You might have a strong reaction and the inflammation might be felt in your muscles or in your joints, like arthritis. All of these are signs that the immune system is working to fend off the infection. If your immune system is strong, this war within you should stop after a week or two at the most. Once its job is done, the immune system will relax and go back to its normal state of watching and waiting for the next offender, and the inflammation goes away. In someone with a healthy immune system, this is a good, normal process, and we need these killer T cells and antibodies to keep us healthy.

There is more than one type of T cell. The killer T and B cells are told what to do by the T helpers and the T regulators, which either turn on or turn off the immune response. The different types of T cells need to be in balance for the immune system to turn off properly after it is activated and the job is done. This balance is the second definition of a healthy immune system.

While your immune system needs to be vigilant in order to guard against infections and toxins, it also has to be very careful not to hurt your own tissues by mistaking your own cells for the invader. During their earliest development, your immune cells have to learn the difference between something that is a natural part of your body, or “self,” and a foreign substance, or “not self.” Being able to make this distinction is called tolerance. The third definition of a healthy immune system is one that attacks only invaders and not itself.

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Three things that define a healthy immune system:

1. Balance between killer T cells and antibody-producing B cells

2. Balance between T helpers and T regulators to turn on and off the immune system

3. The immune system’s ability to differentiate foreign invaders (such as viruses or bacteria) from natural parts of your body (such as cells and tissues)

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AN IMMUNE SYSTEM GONE AWRY

An autoimmune problem develops when the immune system fails at all three of these definitions of health. The body begins to make too many killer T cells or too many antibodies (this varies depending on the autoimmune disease and will be discussed in depth later) and then fails to turn off, so the immune reaction doesn’t stop. (These first two problems can also be seen in people with asthma and allergies, because they have an overactive immune response to substances called allergens. Symptoms such as wheezing and sniffling, and even life-threatening tongue swelling and throat tightness, are caused by the immune response, not the allergen itself.) But most important for those of you with autoimmune diseases, the immune cells are attacking your body’s own tissues when they should only be attacking outside invaders. Put all three problems together and the result is inflammation and damage to your cells and organs.

WHAT ARE AUTOIMMUNE DISEASES?

“Autoimmune” represents a category of at least one hundred diseases, not one specific illness. This can be confusing and is probably why many people aren’t familiar with autoimmune diseases or are unsure which illnesses fall into this category. Furthermore, the names of these conditions, which include Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, Sjögren’s syndrome, celiac disease, and multiple sclerosis, among others, don’t have the word “autoimmune” in them. This is unlike diseases such as the various forms of cancer, where their names contain the word “cancer” and the area where the malignant tumor(s) are found. For example, breast cancer is a tumor in the breast, colon cancer a tumor in the colon, and skin cancer a tumor on the skin. Without the word “autoimmune” as part of their names, autoimmune conditions sound like they are distinctly different diseases. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

What can also be confusing is that the names of autoimmune conditions don’t tell you where the disease is located in the body. Some autoimmune conditions are systemic, meaning that the attack spreads throughout the body to all tissues, as in lupus. Others are organ specific, where the attack occurs in a specific area or organ, like Hashimoto’s, which occurs in the thyroid. In either case, the name isn’t a helpful indicator of where the problem actually exists. For example, Hashimoto’s and Graves’ disease are in the thyroid, multiple sclerosis is in the brain and spinal cord, vitiligo is in the skin, and pernicious anemia is in the blood cells. Although the affected areas are different, we now know that the underlying problems in all of these diseases are very similar. In fact, the focus of recent research has switched from looking at the specific organ affected by the disease to determining the underlying mechanisms for how these diseases begin. This idea—that all of these conditions have similar origins—is critical to our approach for treating and reversing them.

More than one hundred different autoimmune conditions have similar characteristics. They are all serious chronic diseases with an underlying problem in the immune system. Another thing they have in common is inflammation, which is irritation and swelling inside your body, in any part including your brain. Inflammation can cause a wide range of symptoms, including fatigue, puffiness, muscle or joint pain, abdominal discomfort including diarrhea, and difficulty concentrating or “brain fog.” Or you may just have a vague, nagging feeling that something isn’t right, even if your doctor can’t find anything wrong with you.

By using a functional medicine approach and focusing on the primary cause of the immune dysfunction, research has uncovered many potential triggers for these diseases. (A trigger is anything that starts an unhealthy immune response.) It turns out that many autoimmune diseases are set off by similar things, such as gluten, heavy metals, toxins, infections, and stress. The main difference between each disease is that the immune cells target and attack tissue in different parts of the body. Essentially, most autoimmune conditions are more alike than they are different. And it turns out that fixing the foundational systems—which are your diet, stress hormones, gut health, and body’s toxic load—will heal the immune system and help them all. This is the revolutionary approach I detail in The Immune System Recovery Plan and why the treatment program it contains can benefit and target all autoimmune diseases.

WHAT CAUSES AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE?

The National Institutes of Health estimates that up to 23.5 million Americans suffer from autoimmune disease and that the prevalence is rising. With the numbers increasing every year, many experts have questioned what causes autoimmune disease and have been studying this to find out. As a result, there are many thoughts and ideas about how you “get” an autoimmune disease. Here are the explanations with the most evidence behind them.

Potential Trigger: Our Modern-Day Diets

Gluten

Modern-day agricultural practices include something called genetic modification. This means that the genes in the seeds for crops like corn, soy, and wheat are altered in a laboratory so that these plants can grow larger or resist disease more effectively. The result of altering our crops this way is that they now contain proteins that are not natural to the plant. Animal studies have found that these proteins are extremely difficult for us to digest, which causes symptoms such as:

• Heartburn

• Reflux

• Gas

• Bloating after eating

We have also seen evidence that these proteins cause immune reactions in the gut that can promote the development of autoimmunity. Autoimmunity means that the cells of your immune system are damaged and then make a mistake and attack your own tissues. Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley, kamut, and spelt, and genetic modification has made it stronger and more concentrated in the grains we eat. This higher concentration of gluten in our food has been linked to the increase in food allergies over the last few decades. Why? Because gluten is a relatively new component of our diets.

Originally, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, so they ate animals, nuts, seeds, and berries, rather than grains. Then they settled down to farming (only ten generations ago) and ate seasonally, rotating their food to eat what was available during that time of year. The benefit of this is that you are constantly varying your diet, whereas eating the same thing all the time increases your risk of developing an allergic reaction. Processed foods, which are those that have been altered by manufacturers so they no longer look like you just grew them, often have all the fiber and many of the nutrients removed. This process was created to give these foods a longer shelf life and make more food available to more people, but we now know that this is not a nutritious way to eat. Today, people who eat the standard American diet eat white flour at most meals, often to the exclusion of healthier, whole foods. Instead, you should choose whole foods, which look like they did when you picked them.

The problem with gluten is that it’s hard to digest, and when a lot of large pieces get into the bloodstream, the immune system goes on high alert, seeing the gluten as a foreigner and producing antibodies to attack it. Unfortunately, when these antibodies attack the gluten, they mistakenly attack our tissues as well. This is called molecular mimicry and is one way gluten is believed to cause autoimmune disease. Molecular mimicry is not specific to gluten. It can occur when your immune system mistakes your own tissue for any foreigner.

The other way food can trigger inflammation and autoimmune reactions is called immune-complex disease. Using gluten as our example, the antibodies bind to the gluten and form a complex that travels a...