1 TBSP … Destroy Cancer Cells & Build Immune System (Scientifically Proven) | Dr. William Li

So your immune system is constantly identifying threats, responding to them, and keeping the body safe and secure. And when your immune system is not strong, or it becomes dysregulated, or it becomes weakened, all of those protective measures actually are compromised. Here's what happens when you age. The immune system can actually start to get slightly weaker. This is a process called immunosenescence. Senescence really means kind of slowing down, becoming less effective. And what happens is there are two things. Number one, there's a loss of immune defense. So your shields are down. Your immune system, the cells, become less and less effective at responding to threats. And the second thing that can happen is that the immune system, which normally is able to mount a little bit of inflammation to clean up. Inflammation actually helps to clean up areas where your body might be compromised. Like you have a wound, it'll actually clean up all the bacteria and make sure everything is okay before it starts to heal. You lose regulation when you age. That means that even though your immune system is able to mount a little bit of inflammation, it can't stop it. And so immune control is actually compromised, and now you get chronic inflammation. In fact, they call this state of aging when your immune system's overactive. Regulation is like your defenses are weak, but your ability to control it are poor. They call that inflammation, kind of a cute word, but actually it means inflammation due to aging, and it's coming from your immune system. You have persistent low-grade inflammation. That's not good because you want inflammation to be there doing its job, then turned off right away, okay? You don't want it to be chronic and low-grade. That's like a smoldering fire inside the wall of a house, like an electrical fire. You don't want that. You want attention to be gone when you don't need inflammation anymore. And losing your immune regulation actually will lead to chronic inflammation, and inflammation also has more inflammation and less immune defense protection. I mentioned this before. Your immune system protects you from cancer. What most people don't realize is that your body, which is made of 40 trillion cells or so, have to continuously divide, reproduce the cells, right? That's why you're still here today compared to yesterday, why you're still gonna be here tomorrow compared to today. Your cells are replicating, duplicating, copying themselves over and over again throughout your lifetime. And whenever that copying makes even the tiniest mistake, that's a mutation, and enough mutations accumulating, that's what leads to cancer. On top of that, we're exposed to toxins in the environment, environmental exposures can cause mutations, and you can also have genetics where you're born, you've inherited some mutations from your parents, and when your cells are copying, they keep copying the mistake over and over again, all right? Now, all of these types of abnormal cells with mutations can become a microscopic cancer. This is a cancer you can't see, you can't feel, won't cause any symptoms, and most of these microscopic cancers, microscopic tumors will never become a problem for your health. You won't even know you're there. This is happening in children, it's happening in adults, it's happening in you right now. But the reason why you're safe and why most people never have a problem is because your healthy immune system is constantly conducting surveillance, like cops on a beat, flying through your whole body, looking for anything abnormal, like those abnormal cells. And when it spots those cells, it will send out signals to basically clear them out and destroy them before those microscopic tumors could ever stand a chance to grow. This is happening all the time, this kind of quiet patrol. I call your immune system an army of super soldiers, and they're protecting you from the inside out, wiping out all these microscopic cancers. But as you are getting older, your immune system, this is the, it's like the cops on the beat, now you've got a bunch of retired police officers, they're less nimble, they're showing up for work late, they're actually less motivated to actually get in the car to do the patrol. When surveillance becomes less effective, that's when cells that would have otherwise been eliminated and need to be eliminated, wind up escaping detection and they can start to grow. When they grow up, okay, when they multiply, that's when a tiny microscopic cancer can become a detectable cancer, and that detectable cancer can grow and grow and grow, get a blood supply and explode in growth, right? So, you know, we tell women to do a breast exam, smallest tumor you can feel is one centimeter in size, it's pretty small, okay? But a one centimeter tumor already is made up of a billion cancer cells. So this is silent but deadly, you really need that immune system to wipe it out before the tumor gets that big. And this weakening of your immune system, immunosenescence is one of the reasons why cancer is more common in older people, all right? And when your immune system's weakened, not just by age, you can really see how this problem is. And one of the medical situations that we see this in is after an organ transplant, right? So let's say a liver is transplanted or lungs are transplanted or heart's transplanted, all right, your body, your own immune system will reject that organ because it's not yours, it didn't start with you, it'll try to protect you by rejecting the organ, no good. You wanna keep that organ, so your doctor will actually put you on an immunosuppressant drug, right? This suppresses your immune system so your body won't reject that organ. This is actually for transplant patients. But guess what? When you actually suppress the immune system, you're suppressing those super soldiers, those cops in a beat, they're not conducting surveillance as well and those microscopic cancers are more likely to take root, multiply and expand and grow, right? That's why cancer risk is much higher in people who have an organ transplant on immunosuppressants. We also know, and these are some of the amazing breakthroughs in medical science that if you actually boost your immune defenses, shields up, power them up, put more cops in the street to conduct surveillance, all right, give them better weapons and give them kind of night vision to be able to look for bad guys, guess what? When you boost your immune system, you can actually fight cancer. And that's the basis for modern immunotherapy as a treatment for cancer. This is one of the most important breakthroughs of cancer treatment in our lifetime because even in older individuals, all right, people in their 80s or even 90s, if you give immunotherapy to boost the immune system, that can lead to dramatic responses. That's not chemo, it's actually helping your body do its own thing, your own defenses to kill that cancer, to do what it normally is supposed to do when you're younger, but then it failed and now you can restore that kind of advantage to go tackle the cancer. Sometimes it can actually result in complete remissions, all right? That's about as close to cure as we can actually get so far and the breakthroughs are happening really literally every month, we're seeing some major advances, very, very promising, all right? We're getting results that we could never have even imagined we could get before because we figured out how to power up the immune system. So your immune system is not only preventing cancer every day, if you have cancer, having a strong immune system is very, very important to fight it. So remember now, we've talked about why the immune system can't afford to retire, your immune system's got to protect you from invaders from outside of the body, bacteria and viruses, and protect you from invaders inside the body. These are microscopic cancer cells. Your immune system can't take a break ever. Most people think about aging in terms of wrinkles or maybe a slower metabolism, but your immune system may be your most important defense against the ravages of aging. And if you want to understand how your body actually protects you as you get older, make sure you've subscribed to my YouTube channel by hitting the subscribe button. This is where I actually break down the science of health and give you practical tips on what you can actually do to improve your health. Okay, let's look at another immune connection, this time in the brain with Alzheimer's disease. Your immune system also plays an important role in brain health. And here's something that you might find surprising. Your brain has its own immune cells. In the brain, those immune cells are called microglia, G-L-I-A, microglia. And one of the things those microglia do, they monitor the brain environment. Okay, they're conducting surveillance or checking things out and they clear out damaged cells. They remove debris. Inside our body, our cells are always getting older or getting damaged and need to be cleared out. That's what microglia does. They clear out old damaged brain cells. And microglia help to maintain healthy nerve function, kind of like maintaining the electrical system in your house, right? You want the current to be flowing so that your light switch is connected to your fuse box and everything that's electricity dependent is actually working. So your microglia, your brain's immune cells help maintain brain function. So what happens with aging? With aging, your microglia immune cells in your brain can start to falter and fail. And one of the ways that they fail is they can basically become persistently activated, right? So think about these cells. They are there to actually help to balance your immune defenses. They get activated when they need to. They turn down when they are done with things. But when you are aging, that regulation, the control of turning on and turning off is broken. It's like a switch that doesn't work very well. And when your microglia are persistently activated, they're on all the time. You know what that produces? That produces brain inflammation, all right? And at the same time, not only do you have more inflammation, but the microglia, the brain immune cells become less effective at clearing out the debris or clearing out toxins, cellular debris. So you wind up having this double barrel problem, too much brain inflammation and not enough ability to be able to clear out the toxins. And that is something that we start seeing in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, as well as some other forms of dementia as well. This is actually an area that is undergoing intense investigation. But what we do know is that there is an immune link to Alzheimer's disease and it's a disruption in the immune regulation that is what we believe is partly at work to cause that brain damage. OK, this is just another example of an aging condition where your immune system isn't doing its job the right way. Speaking of another condition of aging, let's talk about a condition called sarcopenia. This is another place that you often see in people who are older, very old, they lose muscle mass. They're kind of skinny and shrunken, shriveled. And there's also a role of an aging immune system when you lose muscle mass. All right. Loss of muscle mass is called sarcopenia. And it's not just about not exercising enough and not getting enough nutrition. It turns out that an aging immune system also plays a role in controlling your muscle mass. A healthy, strong immune system helps you build muscle, get rid of old muscle, build new muscle. All right. And that's really, really important because even if you have optimal nutrition, which a lot of older people don't, but even if you had optimal nutrition, you still need to be able to go out with the old, in with the new, remove all the debris and build new muscle. Now, this is happening all the time, whether you exercise or not, out with the old, in with the new is something that your immune system is involved with. Now, in muscle, you've got special immune cells called the macrophage, and they are in charge of cleanup and rebuilding your muscle. When cleanups needed, the macrophages are in one gear, special gear in cleanup mode. When a cleanup is done, they shift gears and they go into repair regeneration mode. So here's one immune cell that can do two things depending on what's needed. But with aging, immunoaging, immunosenescence, your macrophages and your muscle don't do their job as well. And so the cleanup doesn't happen as well. And the rebuild doesn't happen as well also. And that's what we see with immunosenescence, one of the hallmarks of aging. Muscle breakdown and buildup system is out of balance. So you have more muscle broken down and less sufficient muscle rebuilding. And over the course of weeks to months, month after month and year after year, you can start to see you start to lose muscle mass, even if you're physically active and even if you're getting enough protein and eating proper nutrition, you still need to be able to manage this. And that's the link of the immune system. Loss of muscle mass, loss of strength, and that begins to make you more vulnerable to falls. You might lose independence. And this is what we're actually seeing in people who are getting really frail as they get older. So sarcopenia, loss of muscle mass is actually pretty complicated. You've got aging, you've got poor diet, you've got not enough exercise, but you also have a problem with the immune system as well. OK, so let's get to the good part. What can you do about all this? How can you support your immune system during healthy aging? Well, the good news is that your immune system is highly influenced by your daily environment, your lifestyle, exercise, sleep, stress management, and also what you eat. So I want to tell you about three foods that can help support your immune system at any age. But especially as you get older, I want you to keep these in mind. The first food is blueberries. Blueberries contain natural substances. We call them bioactives. And then blueberries, they're called anthocyanins, A-N-T-H-O-C-Y-A-N-I-N-S. Anthocyanins support immune cell function that can help regulate inflammatory signaling. Remember I told you immune system turns on inflammation and turns it off. Anthocyanins can help that function better. They don't just activate the immune system. They help the immune system function properly with the right type of balance. How many blueberries do you need to eat? Just about a cup's worth regularly. You can eat them fresh. You can eat them frozen. It's an easy way to support your immune balance. So obviously you need to make sure there aren't any warnings about produce that might be out there. But blueberries are really good. Green tea, one of my favorite beverages. Green tea has a bioactive polyphenols called catechins, especially something called EGCG. That's epigallocatechin-3-gallate. And EGCG, these catechins support immune cells called T cells. T as in Thomas. And they actually are involved with immune signaling and immune regulation. And green tea also contributes to an antiviral defense. So drinking green tea regularly, how much? Two to three cups a day actually supports your immune system as you age in a healthy way. Next up, extra virgin olive oil, EVOO. One of my favorite oils. It's a healthy oil, contains bioactives, polyphenols like hydroxytyrosol and oleocanthal. These are anti-inflammatory compounds that are naturally found in olives. So when you press out the oil, extra virgin, they're actually present in the olive oil. Now, what do these anti-inflammatory compounds do? They help to resolve inflammation. Remember I told you persistent inflammation is no good. Chronic inflammation. These actually start to turn the volume back down on inflammation, back towards normal. So remember, a little bit of inflammation is good. You don't want a lot of it and you don't want it chronically. But olive oil has these anti-inflammatory polyphenols that can actually help you restore immune balance. So just use extra virgin olive oil as your primary fat whenever you're cooking. Or if you feel like it, you can actually have a few tablespoons a day, even as a shot of olive oil. If you found this video interesting and useful, share it with somebody who can benefit from understanding what happens to their immune system as they get older. And don't forget, hit subscribe to get weekly updates from my YouTube channel and for more ways to use food as medicine to support your health. See you in the next video.