Dr. David Bilstrom
MD
This episode discusses alternative approaches to treating autoimmune diseases, including methylation and Tudca. Speakers discuss the limitations of traditional medical approaches and the need for a more holistic approach to address the root causes of these conditions. Additionally, the conversation touches on the interconnectedness of vitamin D, microbiome, and gene expression, and treatment with supplements in treating various health conditions caused by excess inflammation.
Dr. David Bilstrom 0:00
I’ve been on a multi decade mission to figure out what I didn’t get taught in my more traditional training. On average, the day in, day out, stuff that we do as physicians about 17 years behind the data. We now know that autoimmune and the immune system disruption is part of so many chronic health issues that we didn’t think were autoimmune. We’re finding out that the immune system is the central mechanism in driving all chronic disease. The pancreas can stop making insulin completely in a child, it takes one to three years for them to be diagnosed with type one diabetes. When they have this life threatening ketoacidosis, they gotta go…
Natalie 0:36
One to three years? That’s crazy!
Dr. David Bilstrom 0:39
If they gave mice Tudca within 100 days of giving them this type one diabetes, killing the cells completely, they regrew healthy pancreas cells to make insulin, totally reversed type one diabetes.
Natalie 0:48
Stop it.
Dr. David Bilstrom 0:49
There’s almost not a healthy person nowadays. You have to methylate B vitamins in order to do this wonderful stuff. This is not one person’s opinion. This is the science.
Natalie 1:00
Dr. Bilstrom, welcome to the Invigor Medical Podcast. We’re so excited to have you today.
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:06
Oh, thank you for having me.
Natalie 1:08
This is going to be a really interesting topic, I think, because autoimmune disease is kind of one of those pie in the sky, like, What even is it like?
Derek 1:16
It’s so uh, nebulus.
Natalie 1:17
Yeah, you hear, you hear things about or people might say, you know, they have, you know, lupus or something you’re like, I think that’s autoimmune, but what is really autoimmune? And so I’m really excited for us to dive in with all of the knowledge and expertise that you have on these topics. But as always, we love to start with a little bit about you and how you got here, and a little bit about your learning and your schooling. You know, what makes you an authority on these topics, so share with us a little bit about your history and how you got here today.
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:17
Well, I’m a former division one men’s tennis player at TCU.
Natalie 1:45
Oh no kidding!
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:46
I’ll give them a shout out. They’re ranked three in the country now.
Derek 1:53
There you go.
Natalie 1:54
Love it.
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:54
And because I did my residency at University of Colorado, I’m a multi decade extreme snowboarder.
Natalie 2:00
Oh, wow!
Dr. David Bilstrom 2:01
And I’m also a physician.
Natalie 2:05
And, do you sleep, sometimes?
Dr. David Bilstrom 2:08
Well, when I’m not going down the hill really fast on my snowboard. I’m usually a physician. And my original area, especially as a rehabilitation doctor, was spinal cord injury, so everybody that I would see would be paralyzed from the waist down, the neck down, in an incredibly complicated patient population, incredibly sensitive to side effects and medications. Like you and I might take something for stuffy nose, not even think twice about it, and it could kill them. Wow. So with that population, though, it really taught me these huge gaps in treating most chronic health issues simply with the traditional methods of, well, here’s a medication or here’s a surgery. That just doesn’t work for so many chronic health issues. And I’ve been on a multi decade mission to figure out what I didn’t get taught in my more traditional trainings that could help people with chronic health issues. And then about the last 10 to 15 years, I’ve really been focusing on really changing the way that autoimmune disease is dealt with worldwide. You know, I saw it. I mean I was reversing it, and I read this incredibly sad story in The New York Times about a famous journalist who was losing her career and her life to lupus, one of the autoimmune diseases that you mentioned. And her story was absolutely classic, where she felt really crummy, got worse and worse, went to doc, to doc, to doc. Three to five years on the average, this happens, five to seven doctors, and nobody could figure out what’s going on. Eventually she gets the diagnosis. Oh, I know what you have, you have lupus. And then the only thing that people typically are offered are medicines. They just put a bandage on a couple symptoms they don’t get at the root cause. The person continues to get worse and worse. And in her case, she was losing her life and her career to that. And that is so sad, especially when I read that for years I already been turning this stuff around and that’s when both my wife and myself, we said, Okay, we gotta change the way that autoimmune disease is dealt with worldwide.
Natalie 4:08
Yeah, I think it’s incredible and very notable what you said about learning outside of what had been taught to you. Yeah? Because I think, I think that’s, that’s really what makes incredible doctors, right? Is, is you’re given this foundation and all these things that you’re taught, and then over the years, more science comes out, or you grow an awareness that there’s not enough science in an area, and you have to do more digging. And I think it’s incredibly noble, because it’s easy to kind of like rest on your laurels. Not that, you know, getting a medical degree and going through residency or whatever it may be, is resting on your laurels, because that’s a lot of work, right? I don’t want to diminish that, but at the same time, to rest in a you know, I’ve got this. I know how to do this, you know, I’ve there’s nothing more for me to learn. And specifically for healthcare providers. It’s probably one of the more dangerous professions that you can have that attitude in, right? If there’s nothing more for me to learn and grow into, because it is actually-you can do harm, right? If I do that in my job as a sales rep, like, I’m not gonna learn anymore. Really. I’m just not gonna get higher revenue sales by having that attitude, I’m not really going to harm anyone, right? I’m just going to keep going at the pace I’m going. So I did really just want to take a moment to highlight that and ask you what, what was, what’s that been like for you to, you know, to realize kind of a failing and a hole in this, and how much work has it been to to put in the effort to do the research and find the spaces and the the holes that needed to be filled?
Dr. David Bilstrom 5:46
Well, my my wife, Jody, sweetest person in the entire world, all the piles of articles that are sitting on our dining room table month after month, year after year, that I always get grief about, like, you know, that’s kind of how it is day in, day out. But after my original area, especially, you know, board certified in physical medicine and rehab, I’m now board certified in three additional areas.
Natalie 6:08
Wow.
Dr. David Bilstrom 6:08
And that’s just part of this, you know, more and more information-on average, the day in, day out, stuff that we do as physicians about 17 years behind the data and oftentimes it’s data that’s even older in that that everybody’s forgotten about. And, you know, people try to reinvent the wheel, but it’s been around a long time, and so I find it absolutely fascinating. I love deep diving in all these different topics, and it’s just amazing all the connections to the point where you get this immune system stuff, this autoimmune stuff, this, these, like classic autoimmune diseases, and you go, Oh, okay, there’s a lot of this stuff. There’s an explosion and epidemic, but we now know that autoimmune and the immune system disruption is part of so many chronic health issues that we didn’t think were autoimmune and immune related, such as heart attacks and strokes and autism and Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia, cancers, the flip side of the same coin that saw immune disease. And so really, we’re finding out that the immune system is the central mechanism in driving all chronic disease.
Natalie 7:11
Well and I can imagine just thinking about like you’re talking about years and years and years of knowledge and research that’s old, but then taking into consideration how much our environment has changed, and how much that may affect autoimmune disorders and diseases and what’s applying, and how you may, you know, have this idea. And, like, Yep, this is how it works. And now something within the environment, or the way our food is produced, or medications that people are taking, it changes whatever’s happening in the body to some degree, or there’s some kind of reaction to it. I mean, like, how much is that kind of thing coming into play? Where you’re like, Whoa, this is, like, a completely different point of origin than we’ve ever even seen before. But I’m assuming, you know, trying to figure out how it’s interacting with the immune system. I don’t even, I’m not even smart enough to know how I want to phrase this question, but hopefully you’re kind of getting where I’m coming from. Or you want to add?
Derek 7:57
Yeah, it was, I think that a good place to start is just like, let’s talk about autoimmunity as a whole, right? Because, I guess my understanding of it because, like, I don’t have a deep level of autoimmunity, which is why we have you on the show. But my basic understanding is that, essentially, the immune system is fine tuned to identify anything within the body that doesn’t belong and attack it and remove it, right? And autoimmunity is when it takes its job too seriously, starts working too many hours, pulling all nighters, and it starts malfunctioning and and taking out things that really arecrucial to the function of the body. I don’t know. Can you iterate further on that?
Dr. David Bilstrom 8:37
Yeah, absolutely. So there’s two different parts of the immune system. And the kind of classic way of looking at autoimmune disease is with what they call the adaptive immune system. So the adaptive immune system will make antibodies specifically designed to go after certain things that have gotten into our body that are going to hurt us, drag us down, like infections. And so you make an antibody, you attack this infection, such as, like the cold virus gets in us, we have a cold. Well, we don’t need this cold for 20 years. The immune system makes antibodies specific for that exact virus, kills it, gets it out of the system. Within a few days, we’re fine, but then the immune system gets confused, and then we start attacking our own body parts, and basically we’re self destructing. Kind of rule of thumb is it’s always a bit counterproductive to stay healthy if you’re self destructing, right? And so this is where you see, like rheumatoid arthritis, where you’re attacking the joints, or Hashimotos, you’re attacking the thyroid, psoriasis, you’re attacking the skin. But then we also have this other part called the innate immune system, and this is the part of the immune system, and inherently is trying to prevent excessive inflammation from being produced that will damage tissue. And so inflammation is used by the body for healing. It sends information like, you sprain your ankle, it gets inflamed, it swells, it gets red. Well, that’s information that the body uses to go, Okay, we gotta go in there and fix that. We gotta get rid of that excess inflammation. But if you can’t get rid of that excess inflammation, it stays, but also the chemicals that get released through the central inflammation process start damaging healthy tissue nearby. And so we gotta be able to turn off inflammation, even though it gets turned on to heal and fix stuff, we got to be able to turn it off. And that’s the innate immune systems job. And one thing we see a ton of because of kind of the world around us, is we are just not very good at turning off excess inflammation anymore. It’s just wherever you have excess inflammation, you got a health issue.
Derek 10:37
Why is that like? What do you think are some of the key factors behind that?
Dr. David Bilstrom 10:41
Well, kind of like Natalie referenced, is the human body is designed to adapt to the world around us, but the world around us is changing so rapidly, and it’s so challenging to be healthy and that the body just can’t keep up. And we’re just getting all these things, including, you see this stuff called like the civilization diseases. All these things that are happening so much more now than they used to, such as autoimmune disease, but also, you know, obesity and diabetes and cancer and high blood pressure, cholesterol, cataracts, retinal issues, Autism, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Dementia, Lou Gehrig’s disease, heart attacks and strokes.
Natalie 11:20
Sleeping disorders that can lead to these things, right? Like, we had a sleep expert on not long ago, and it was just crazy thinking and learning about, like, it’s sleep, no big deal. But like how he was even saying how many more sleeping disorders there are, and how there’s more awareness, but also, like the way that our palate is formed because of what we eat. And then you start thinking about that and how sleeping, not getting enough sleep, can lead to more of these things. You know? There’s just so much at play in the environment, in our food, that’s impacting these massive parts of our overall health.
Dr. David Bilstrom 11:49
Yep, super challenging to be healthy. You can see this like in children, and it’s like, oh my gosh, just the diseases that young people get compared to what they used to get. You know, if it’s not Autism Spectrum Disorder, developmental delay, it’s ADD/ADHD, depression, anxiety. Every other kid’s got asthma and peanut allergies and gluten intolerance. It’s just like crazy how much this stuff’s going around, even in people that should be at the very healthiest, which are the young people, right?
Natalie 12:15
And when you’re talking about inflammation, there’s a term, I don’t even know if it’s like a technically, a diagnosis, but I’ve heard the term multiple times, chronic inflammation, and I just kind of tied it together to what you were saying about with the the what did you call that part of the immune system, the second one, the innate immune system, and that inflammation, and so this inflammation where there shouldn’t be, right? And I was like, oh, chronic inflammation. I’ve heard about that, and that makes sense. I just never heard it broken down in those terms. I mean, it sounds like it’s just an incredibly complex process, that there’s a lot of different things that could go on and what’s causing it to not function the way that it should, and then how you even begin to address those things. And so kind of going back to what you were talking about earlier, about the frustration of people going to doctor after doctor and diagnosis after diagnosis, and nothing working, right? And it seems like it’s a very complicated process. So like, is there hope? Because, you know, you talk about, I even know people who’ve experienced this firsthand, and then, you know, get prescribed a medication to deal with it, but they just, they just really never get better. So, like, I’m hoping that you’re here to tell us that there is hope and there are ways to get better.
Dr. David Bilstrom 13:29
Well, you’re so right. The body is super, super complicated, but it’s also super, super logical. There is this inherent logic that the body uses, and if you really know that logic you’re basically looking at everything, yeah, and you’re seeing how everything’s connected. And so kind of to your point, you kind of go like, okay, so is this person really not feeling well? And it’s one thing after another after another, and they go to Doctor, Doctor, Doctor. Well, you look and you go, Well, how can everything be off at the same time? And one of the saddest things is women hear this all the time. The more stuff you got going on. It’s all this kind of stuff. Eventually somebody’s going to say, I just think you’re depressed.
Natalie 14:10
I’m so glad you said that specifically about women.
Dr. David Bilstrom 14:12
If they said that to a guy, they probably get punched, right? But women hear this stuff all the time. Whatever the health issue is.
Natalie 14:18
Well and also, so often reduced to emotions or hormones, right?
Dr. David Bilstrom 14:21
Yep. No, right. Where it truly-what I tell patients is, when you have everything wrong, you go like, how can everything be wrong? Here I am on 35, I feel like 135 I should feel better than this when I’m 135 I say, well, actually, it makes it very easy. The only way that everything can be off at the same time is some really important central mechanisms are off. And we know this. This is where this, you know, this logic, comes in, and we pinpoint what’s going on here. We’re in a position to fix everything at the same time, because everything is so connected. And what we tend to find is people are looking for answers. They’re doing their homework. They come in, they’re like, 40 different supplements, yeah. And I go, everyone I look at I’m like, Oh my gosh, you are so smart. I know what you read. Everything makes sense, but they’re missing the big central mechanism to the point where we’ll say, Well, we’re going to address this stuff, and then ideally, everything can get better at the same time. Well, if something over here is not getting better, even though this, this and this are getting better, well then we can give that special attention, and we’ll go after that, but if it gets better all by itself, I’m so glad we didn’t waste your time, effort and money going after that, because you just fixed it by yourself, because we got at the central mechanism.
Natalie 15:38
Yeah. I mean, that’s heartening, at least, to know that, like, you know, and of course, we I’m like, yeah, the body’s really intuitive. It’s really smart. But when you start thinking about these super complicated diagnoses and how like, interconnected it is within the body and all of these different systems, I just, I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be going through that process as a patient with doctor after doctor, and just like feeling like you just can’t get answers, and then the toll it begins to take on your mental health. I mean, I would imagine, by the time patients, some patients come to see you, there’s like-and then your mental health starts affecting physical health, and it’s just like this big circle, and you, you know, by the time they get to an expert like you, maybe, I mean, how often are you seeing that where patients are coming to you and they’re just, like, completely depleted and just like, almost ready to just give up hope?
Speaker 1 16:28
Pretty much every single one and we see people from every state, and adults and children. There’s children, like, five years old with like, four autoimmune diseases already.
Derek 16:39
That’s terrible.
Natalie 16:40
Ugh. So sad.
Dr. David Bilstrom 16:40
And it’s a worldwide problem. We see people from 21 time zones around the world. This is a worldwide problem.
Derek 16:45
Well and that’s what the question I was going to ask is, like, how, actually, how common is this? And like, how increasingly common is this becoming? Like, do you have any hard numbers around that?
Dr. David Bilstrom 16:58
Yeah. You know, and the numbers are way underestimate the true amount there, because when people look at the incidence and the frequency of these autoimmune diseases, they’re only talking about like the top 20 or the top 40. They’re not looking at how this immune system stuff is part of every chronic health issue. So there was one-so if you’re making antibodies attacking the body part, you’re self destructing. So here’s this one antibiotic. This one antibody called the anti nuclear antibody. It’s abbreviated the ANA, and it goes positive on a simple blood test. And you’re attacking your nuclear material, your own DNA, as the nuclear material, your DNA, your genes that tell the cells what to do. So you really don’t want to piss off your DNA.
Yeah! That’s a bad idea.
Natalie 17:41
[laughing] Shoots self in foot.
Dr. David Bilstrom 17:44
Historically, when a person would get that diagnosis, if they see that in the blood test, there wasn’t a name for it, and what people would say, would hear would be, well, your ANA is positive so on average, in five to seven years, you’re going to start attacking other parts of your DNA, other parts of your body, and then will tell you, is it rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, sjogren’s, mixed connective tissue disease, those kind of things. Well, you got to wait. And basically you’re like, Well, what’s my mental attitude going to be if I know I’m going someplace bad, and I got to wait, and I got to feel worse as time goes on, before I even find out the name?
Natalie 18:22
Wow.
Dr. David Bilstrom 18:24
But then all they’re offered is a medicine that puts, you know, kind of a bandage on a few symptoms. You keep getting worse and worse. And I said this is ridiculous. You know, you have this autoimmune process. 30 million women of childbearing age in the US alone have a positive ANA.
Natalie 18:41
Wow.
Dr. David Bilstrom 18:41
But it hasn’t gotten to this other stage as of yet. So I said, this is ridiculous. Why wait for it to get worse? I’m going to put a name on it. So I named it Bilstrom’s Nuclearitis back in 2018, showed up in a textbook in 2020.
Derek 18:41
Wow.
Dr. David Bilstrom 18:42
And I said, Well, this is an autoimmune process. Now it has a name. In medicine, kind of traditional medicine, if we don’t have a name, we aren’t quite sure what to do. I don’t know what the diagnosis is. We’re not sure what to do. Now we have a name, now we’re going to go at it right away. We’re not going to wait for to get worse, but we’re not going to just put a bandage on it. We’re going to go back and look at these central mechanisms, and we’re going to make it go away. We’re going to turn off that ANA. It’s going to go negative. And now we did our due diligence, not only to prevent you from getting those things that we knew you were going towards, but now, because we know how the immune system works, we’re really putting you in a position not to get other chronic health issues as time goes on, and really maintain your health long term. Because we got rid of why you were attacking one body part when this was just first diagnosed.
Derek 19:40
Well, I was just gonna say, now, now you’re in a textbook. You’re gonna get down in history for perpetuity.
Natalie 19:46
That’s super cool. That’s pretty incredible. Kudos to you for that and for being a part of the solution. Oh man, I lost my train of thought. What was I gonna say? It was about…did you have another one?
Derek 19:58
I do have another one. I was going to say specifically, like you’ve talked about band aids, right? And Band Aid treatments versus getting to the heart of the issue, what would you say are some of the most common Band Aid treatments that you’re kind of like, you know, enough of this. And what are the true treatments for autoimmune disorders?
Dr. David Bilstrom 20:19
Beautiful. Let me say one thing about the last subject real quick, okay? Because I think, seems somebody’s going to go, oh, that ANA. That’s not a disease. So a lot of times that positive ANA before you attack other body parts, they called it a not fully formed autoimmune disease. But then nobody did anything. But when I look at that, I’m like, Well, how about diabetes? Do you look at, you know, pre diabetes, and go, Oh, it’s not-you don’t have fully formed diabetes yet. So we’re not gonna do anything. We’re just gonna wait, and then when you get fully formed diabetes, then we’ll do something. Well, how silly is that? Right? If you see something that’s not fully formed, let’s get out of the system before it’s gotten worse and all this. And so this is where I said, Yeah, we can’t just let it get worse. We got to get rid of it when it’s in the early stages there.
Derek 21:03
You know, Peter Attia talks a lot about this, actually, in his book Outlive, one of the things he talked about is, you know, like, I think it was something about smoking, how, like, you could smoke however much, and like, you it technically wouldn’t put you in the at-risk range. And, like, yada yada yada. And that’s essentially how current medicine works that it’s like, if you’re not past this threshold, we’re not going to treat you. And it’s such a big problem with health 2.0 and that hopefully we can come around that curve into health 3.0 and actually start addressing these problems at the root, just like you’re saying, and address them before they become a problem.
Natalie 21:37
And I was…
Dr. David Bilstrom 21:37
Truly! Like with diabetes, you can see it comeing 10, 20 years ahead of time. You start seeing blood sugar and insulin changes, you know, decades before the actual, oh, by the way, you got diabetes, right?
Natalie 21:47
And going, when you touched back to that topic, it made me remember my question, or thinking about testing like these, ANA’s, like, right? If you’re saying that these are precursors to all of these autoimmune disorders, then, like, my question is, how difficult is it to test for this? Like, how expensive is it? Why isn’t it something that’s like, a part of, like, you know, if I want to go in and get a blood panel and check, you know, my thyroid and my estrogen and my progesterone and all these different things, you know, which I’m learning more and more is something I should be doing every other year, if not yearly. I’m wondering, like, is this something that’s just become a part of, like a, like, routine health check? But I guess the second part of that question is, is this something that you’re born with or that you can develop, or both?
Speaker 1 22:32
No, you develop it. Okay, you develop it. Now, there are things that happen during a pregnancy, during gestation that can either set the system in a good place or set it in a bad place. There’s things with how a child is delivered and what happens right after birth that kind of sets the system in a good place, bad place. But truly, we have so much knowledge about what drives chronic health issues that if you know something’s going on that would push you someplace you don’t want to go, there’s, there’s a simple blood test that any lab can run, probably that will see it coming a mile away. So like type one diabetes, the diabetes where the pancreas that’s making insulin and people end up on insulin pumps. So originally, this was called childhood diabetes, right? The pancreas stops making insulin, you need an insulin pump. Well, this is how crazy difficult to stay healthy our world is. They had to change the name because adults started getting childhood diabetes. Their pancreas stopped making insulin. Now we got adults on insulin pumps. So rather than go, wow, something weird is going on here? We gotta do something. They go, Well, we’re just gonna change the name from childhood onset to Type 1 and then adult onset diabetes was the insulin resistance. Well, we can’t call it that, because now kids are getting it.
Derek 22:34
Okay.
Dr. David Bilstrom 22:34
So now we gotta change it from adult onset to Type 2 diabetes, right? And so, for example, a premature infant delivered premature before 37 weeks, their liver doesn’t make as much of something really important called tudka, T, U, D, C, A. A bile acid, but they now call it a chaperone molecule, because it’s basically tied in to every one of these civilization diseases that we went over, including this epidemic of Type 1 Diabetes. So a premature infant’s liver doesn’t make as much tudca as a term baby’s liver, but because of that, tudca is so important for the pancreas cells that make insulin, premature infants are more likely to get Type 1 diabetes, but because it sets the system in a difficult position, they’re more likely to get Type 2 diabetes as an adult and all these other health issues. So what you could do if you see like a baby born premature or complications during pregnancy, mother has preeclampsia, this kind of stuff, you go, I know they’re going to Type 1 diabetes. So what you do is, on the simple blood test, you check the insulin production by the infants pancreas, if it is starting to go low, you know, they’re heading to type one diabetes. The body is so cool with how it can deal with stuff that the pancreas can stop making insulin completely in a child, and it’s not-it takes one to three years for them to be diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. When they have this life threatening ketoacidosis, they got to go to the hospital, they gotta get pumped with fluids to save their life.
Natalie 22:34
What? 1 to 3 years?
Dr. David Bilstrom 22:56
That takes one to three years, even after you stop making insulin completely. So every child that we see who already has an autoimmune disease from every place that we see them, Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis, Autism, Uveitis, all this kind of stuff, we check their insulin, they ain’t making it. Their blood tests? They’re not making insulin. And then you go, you’re going to Type 1 Diabetes, but we can turn it back on again, right? We can fix it, including, we give them this tudca, you know? It comes in a capsule, liver’s not making it. We give it to them. Pancreas wakes up, starts making insulin again.
Natalie 25:58
That’s crazy!
Dr. David Bilstrom 26:00
Including, and this is kind of the funky thing about inflammation-so we reverse autoimmune disease. We can get you to stop attacking your body parts with these antibodies, and then the body part wakes up, right? The body part gets healthy. Joints get better, and Rheumatoid, Hashimoto’s will stop attacking the thyroid. Now the thyroid makes a thyroid hormone. But we could not, I couldn’t quite figure out, how can we get Type 1 Diabetes reversed? Because we seem to be able to stop people from attacking their body parts, but we cannot get these people to make insulin again. It turns out that’s not how Type 1 works. Type one works by this excess inflammation of those cells and the cells that make insulin go dormant. They just go to sleep. They’re still there. So you can have type one diabetes on an insulin pump for 10, 20 years. Those cells in your pancreas are still there. They’re just dormant. All you got to do is wake them up. That’s what tudca does. Okay?
Natalie 26:58
Wow.
Dr. David Bilstrom 26:58
Now I saw that and I’m like, holy crud, no wonder we couldn’t wake them up. We got rid of the inflammation, but we didn’t have what we needed to wake them up. But then Harvard did a study. They published it 13 years ago, super interesting, where they have mice models for every one of the human diseases. So they have a mice model that reproduces Type 1 Diabetes in humans, Autism, heart disease, all this. So they have this mice model. They gave them a chemical that totally killed the cells in their pancreas to make insulin. Totally killed them. And I look at that, and I go, that’s gonna make it more challenging, because the typical thing for most humans is not that those cells are killed and gone, they’re just dormant. But what they did is they gave these mice, if they gave mice tudca within 100 days of giving them this Type 1 Diabetes, killing the cells completely, they regrew healthy pancreas cells to make insulin. Totally reversed Type 1 Diabetes.
Natalie 27:50
Stop it.
Dr. David Bilstrom 27:52
Now, what their conclusion was was, this might be a real game changer, but they also concluded, Well, geez, if this tudca ever became a prescription medicine, we might really have something here.
Natalie 28:03
Right.
Dr. David Bilstrom 28:04
The problem is, why does it have to be prescription medicine? They they use the same product, company’s product, this tudca that we use today.
Derek 28:14
So, so it sounds like to me, tudca is really the key to a lot of these different things. And so you asked a good question, why wouldn’t we just want this to be-why does this need to be a prescription medicine? Right off the top of my head, I would guess, if someone doesn’t have diabetes, or is not pre diabetic or and you know, any of these things, granted, those are very, very prevalent conditions now. But like, if someone is a perfectly healthy individual, would they be okay going to the store, buying it over the counter, and taking it? And how does tudca work in, if you’re supplementing with it, how would that work in a healthy individual?
Dr. David Bilstrom 28:54
Oh, I love this. So, you know, there’s almost, there’s almost not a healthy person nowadays. The world around us is so crazy difficult to stay healthy in.
Derek 29:02
Hmmm.
Natalie 29:02
Fair point well made, sir.
Dr. David Bilstrom 29:04
Oh my gosh. I mean, you see, like, I grew up in Chicago, and every school I went to was big, so my grade school is like three stories high. There’s like one kid with asthma, the one kid with an inhaler. Now it’s like every other kid’s got asthma and all this stuff, right? So what happens is all these things that make the world around us so challenging, whether it’s environmental toxins, you know, toxic light, blue lights and screens and you know, all these things that make it complicated to be healthy. What happens is, if you take away a human’s water, what we’re left with is 80% protein, got some vitamins in us, got some minerals, got some fatty acids. Remember, protein so hair, nails, hormones, neurotransmitter, cell walls, the enzymes that turn this into this. We’re all protein. So what happens, though, is, there’s one particular spot in the cell called the endoplasmic reticulum, where new healthy proteins are made. The world around us, creates inflammation there. Okay. Called endoplasmic reticulum stress. What happens then is, as the proteins are being produced, they become misfolded.
Natalie 30:06
Misfolded?
Dr. David Bilstrom 30:07
Misfolded protein. So they call it the Misfolded Protein Response,
Natalie 30:11
Like trying to fold a fitted sheet. It’s just not good. [laughing]
Derek 30:13
Yeah exactly. Just tons of fitted sheets.
Dr. David Bilstrom 30:13
When it’s misfolded, it’s not that protein anymore.
Natalie 30:17
Okay.
Dr. David Bilstrom 30:18
So in the pancreas, when insulin becomes misfolded. It’s not insulin anymore, right? But this goes with every other protein. And so this is where Tudca, made in the liver, historically, has been called a bile acid. Secondary bile acid is involved in digestion and keeping the gallbladder healthy and the gut healthy. But it turns out, is the-I’m going to give you a couple of other ones that are super cool, central Megdel. But this is the chaperone molecule. So what it does is it chaperones these proteins through the production process so they do not become misfolded.
Natalie 30:18
Okay.
Dr. David Bilstrom 30:18
Now we can make healthy proteins. So this is where this is, well, a big, central mechanism in every one of those civilization diseases that are being caused by the world around us, but we know what, why that drives chronic disease, but the science is pretty clear also how we can chaperone those proteins so they don’t get misfolded.
Derek 31:12
So what that, the image that just came into my mind, is the person that it’s the endoplasmic reticulum, is that what you said? That’s the thing that’s in charge of folding the proteins.
Dr. David Bilstrom 31:22
Endoplasmic reticulum.
Derek 31:24
So the endoplasmic reticulum is a teenage Derek with his laundry basket sitting on his bed. And if there’s no one watching me, I just throw it into my closet. If my mom is there watching me, she’s the chaperone molecule saying, like, you better fold those and put them away. And, yeah, they’re getting folded and put away.
Natalie 31:44
Yeah. [laughing]
Dr. David Bilstrom 31:45
Oh my gosh. I use a teenage kind of story about that too. So I think about like a freshman in high school who’s trying to go to the prom or a dance. Okay, so they got to get from home to the prom and back safe. Right? And, and the world around them is very dangerous, and so they leave the house, and one of these things that happens to these proteins is inappropriate protein groupings.
Derek 32:09
Okay.
Natalie 32:11
It’s very teenage dream. I love it. Inappropriate groupings. [laughing]
Derek 32:14
All of our cells are just teenagers running around doing stuff and having to deal with the challenges of the world, you know?
Dr. David Bilstrom 32:20
And there’s a group of upperclassmen over there doing something that your parents told you not to do. And they’re like, Hey, kid, come on over here. And you’re like, Oh, I’m not supposed to do that. Oh, don’t worry, it won’t hurt you. And you go like, Oh my gosh, right? And then the other one is inappropriate protein, protein interactions. So then I’m thinking, the child’s trying to get there and back. And then here is a handsome upperclassman that goes, Hey, you look pretty cute there.
Natalie 32:45
How you doin? [said like Joey Trivbbiani from Friends]
Dr. David Bilstrom 32:47
And you’re like, Oh no! No inappropriate interactions, please. That’s what happens in the body. And you’re like, oh my gosh, we need a chaperone to get my child to the dance and back, because I don’t trust the world around us.
Natalie 32:59
Yeah. And this is just blowing my mind. And I love the terminology of chaperone, and I love that we just kind of went in further, because, I mean, ultimately, these are very complicated processes and systems that we’re talking about, and I’m going to make sure that, like, for you know, the listeners, I mean, Derek’s way smarter than I am, and so I’m usually like, okay, if I’m having trouble following, I’m guessing some other people listening are having trouble following, but you’re doing such an incredible job of describing this and explaining it, and like that analogy and the chaperones. I’m just loving it, but I’m I know that, like you asked a question earlier, and we kind of got back, and I completely forgot what it- yours, and I’m not even mad about it, because I’m so into this. The tudca thing is kind of killing me, right? Because I’m like hearing what you’re saying about what this is doing, and like, it’s not harmful, and it can help so many things. And I’m like, Why have I never, ever, ever heard of this before?
Dr. David Bilstrom 33:52
I know, I know the science is amazing, but is so hard. You know, it’s this absolute explosion in science. There’s so many things to look at. It’s easy to miss huge areas of it, like this, this bile acid chaperone molecule kind of thing.
Derek 34:08
Well, and you touched on it earlier that scientific advances, oftentimes it takes 17 years from the discovery of it to even make it into the mainstream. I think one big example of this is like, semaglutide, the GLP1 therapies, those have been around for ages, but like, they are now having this research, or this, you know, massive explosion because they finally got FDA approved. But like, the FDA approval process is so intense and so long, like, we don’t get to see anything until it’s been vetted like, 20 times.
Natalie 34:41
Right. Or even thinking about, like, overcomming to mental conditions the effect of psychedelics for treating things like PTSD and depression and anxiety and, you know, all of and it’s like…
Derek 34:52
Well and that one comes with a lot of baggage from the 70s, you know?
Natalie 34:56
That’s true, but even that history is kind of interesting, but that’s not that’s a time for another episode. But, yeah, I’m just, I’m just really blown away. I’m just, I’m really stuck on tudca right now, and I want to be like…
Derek 35:08
Well see? Yeah, so am I. I’d love to…
Natalie 35:09
Like, can you even like, can you even get access to it?
Dr. David Bilstrom 35:09
Yeah.
Natalie 35:09
Like, how do you-like, is it something that has to be prescribed? Or you could just like, Amazon search, tudca?
Hey, I hope you’re enjoying today’s podcast. I just wanted to take a quick break, because if you’re listening, you probably know what we do here at Invigor Medical Podcast, but maybe not what we do at invigormedical.com so let me introduce us. At Invigor, we provide prescription strength treatments and peptides for weight loss, sexual health and lifestyle optimization. Every treatment plan is carefully prescribed by licensed doctors and sourced from legitimate pharmacies. You don’t ever need to buy questionable research chemicals again. And bonus, as a podcast listener, you get a 10% discount on your first treatment plan with code PODCAST10 at invigormedical.com. Now let’s get back to today’s episode.
Dr. David Bilstrom 35:57
It’s a supplement.
Derek 35:58
Really.
Dr. David Bilstrom 35:59
You know, the supplement industry is not overseen like the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical Industry, before they can sell the consumer, they have to have the products tested by independent companies for purity and content. So it has in it, what’s opposed to content it doesn’t have in it, what’s going to hurt, you know, purity stuff, the pharma this supplement industry is not that way. Most of the stuff over the counter is really doesn’t have in it what it says it’s got fillers that are problematic. And so typically you’re going to get the higher quality ones online.
Derek 36:32
It can be contaminated as well.
Dr. David Bilstrom 36:34
Yeah, with bad things. And so there’s really specific companies, and this is where, ideally, a knowledgeable health practitioner can help guide people to what the supplements are that are going to actually be able to help you. A few years ago in the state of New York, when all this information was coming out, a researcher says, all I’m going to do is I’m going to pull things off of all these shelves from all these stores in the state of New York, and I’m going to have them tested. And the testing told them that most of the stuff didn’t have anything in it that is said in the label. And his, his was like, well, most of the stuff is nothing but ground up house plants. And the attorney general in the state of New York was so appalled he pulled all the supplements off all the shelves in the state of New York.
Natalie 37:13
Wow.
Dr. David Bilstrom 37:14
And then everybody kind of forgot about it and they came back. But yeah, it’s, you got to make sure you’re taking the right stuff if you’re going to get the benefit.
Derek 37:21
Yeah.
Dr. David Bilstrom 37:21
But it’s out there. Tudca is kind of hard to get. The manufacturer that I like best, man, they keep running out. Because this is something that so many people want, because it can impact so much stuff, including, I think it’s going to be this absolute game changer with the epidemic of the neurodegenerative diseases like the Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Dementia, Lou Gehrigs and these kind of things that are all, were already in epidemic proportions. And then the viral infection from covid 19 has really accelerated all that.
Derek 37:52
Yeah.
Natalie 37:52
Wow.
Derek 37:53
So, I kind of want to get into some of the specifics of tudcut that, like, just purely out of curiosity on my side. So you said that tudca, someone that has type one diabetes that is no longer making insulin, can and in mice, it took dead cells and revived them. But in type one diabetes human patients that had dormant cells, it got them up and running again. How does that happen? What is the actual mechanism by which tid cut can then say, Hey, wake up, slap, slap, slap, slap, or do CPR on dead cells. Like, how does, how does that work?
Dr. David Bilstrom 38:32
Yeah. So basically, we would address that the same way you address any autoimmune disease. We go after those central mechanisms.
Derek 38:38
Yeah.
Dr. David Bilstrom 38:39
Okay. So like, for example, infections, we now know that infections are part of every chronic health issue. They’re not the infections that tend to drive obvious acute infections. Well, I got a high fever, and this that kind of stuff. We know you got an infection of some kind, but we’re talking bugs that drive chronic disease, drive chronic inflammation. So there’s very specific ones that tend to be in the bloodstream that drive all these different health issues. Easy to test. Any lab can test them. In my book, I say these are exactly the ones that need to be tested for. But also there can be bad bugs in the gut. And the guts a real big, central mechanism for everything that goes on in the system. But also, there’s bad bugs in the intestine. You know, you don’t want those guys to go anyplace but the toilet, right? You poop them out. So when you get a disrupted gut, and a lot of medicines do this, stress does it where it creates this thing called the leaky gut. Now, technically, it’s called intestinal permeability disorder, where the tight junctions are compromised, and then things that are in the intestinal lumen get past the hole in the intestine and get in the bloodstream. So there’s some viruses in the gut called enteroviruses, and they’ll translocate from the intestinal or our intestines, into the bloodstream and then go to other body parts and create chronic disease. And so some of these enteroviruses, this is where you hear things like the intestinal microbiome breast axis, or the intestinal microbiome brain axis. Every body part has its own mix of good, bad bugs, the microbiome. Well, some of these enteroviruses will translocate from the gut to bloodstream, go to the breast tissue, alter the breast microbiome, increase risk of breast cancer.
Natalie 40:26
Whoa.
Derek 40:26
That’s crazy.
Dr. David Bilstrom 40:28
Enteroviruses will translocate. One particular one-there’s six Coxsackie viruses that we test for and Coxsackie virus B, as in boy B4 tends to be the classic one that translocates from the gut to the bloodstream, ghosts the cells in the pancreas that make insulin, start creating inflammation, excessive inflammation. Well, then the immune cells come in to investigate. And kind of the rule of thumb is immune cells are part of this innate immune system. They kind of hate to get their attention, and because they come in, and they’ll actually shift because of all this inflammation going on there, and the proteins are getting misfolded now, the insulin is getting misfolded. It’s creating more inflammation. Blood sugar control is kind of starting to lose its place. Blood sugar’s going up. Then the body starts making a couple different things that create more inflammation. A couple pro inflammatory cytokines, NF, Kappa Beta, another one, they go down there, start creating more inflammation. Well, the immune cells are the same innate immune system. They’re supposed to put out fires and get rid of inflammation. All that inflammation and activity actually kind of shifts them, and then they start creating more inflammation.
Natalie 41:41
Oh my gosh.
Dr. David Bilstrom 41:42
And then all this shuts it all down, and those cells go dormant. And so you got to get rid of infections. You know, infections are part of all chronic disease. We use a product out of Canada called pH structured silver solution. So it’s a nano silver, not Colloidal Silver. Nano silver that truly can get rid of any infection, no matter where it’s at, no matter what kind it is, whether you know what kind you’re dealing with or not. I just did a nice video not too long ago. To this point, I go and look at this scientific study. It kills Malaria too.
Natalie 42:13
Wow.
Dr. David Bilstrom 42:14
That’s how it kills everything, right? And so we would use that to get rid of these infections of drug chronic disease, including it will kill Coxsackie viruses and all these other kind of things. So we’re getting rid of the infection. Well, now we got to heal the gut and a big central mechanism in gut health-so everybody kind of knows vitamin D and how important vitamin D is. Well, just about everybody except the medical community really knows about vitamin D
Natalie 42:40
[laughing]
Dr. David Bilstrom 42:40
But vitamin D is important for every cell in the body. But every cell in the body has a receptor for vitamin D, of a vitamin D receptor, so receptors can become resistant to whatever is supposed to stimulate them. So the one you hear a lot about is insulin resistance, that kind of precursor to diabetes. Well, my pancreas is making insulin but my insulin receptors in my body parts and my cells become resistant to insulin, so I can’t attach with insulin, do the work. Blood Sugar creeps up, and then you end up with diabetes eventually. Well, these vitamin D receptors are more numerous in the gut than any other body part. And when researchers figured that out back around 2015 or so, they go, Wow, vitamin D must be really important for the gut. Well, it turns out, though, the vitamin D receptors become resistant to vitamin D. You can have all the vitamin D in the world, but it can’t attach and do the work. So you got to fix it. And there’s three things that you do to fix it. Studies came out like in 2015, daily vitamin D, daily probiotics and daily butyrate. So butyrate is one that people may not know about. Kind of like tudca. Butyrate is called the short chain fatty acid made by the good bacteria in the gut. So here’s tudca made in the liver. Good bacteria in the gut make butyrate. Butyrate, oh my gosh, individually is so cool. It actually prevents cancer five ways.
Natalie 44:01
What?
Dr. David Bilstrom 44:02
It actually helps brain recover after a stroke. It helps the kids with the cystic fibrosis who are dying from their own lung secretions.
Derek 44:09
Wow.
Dr. David Bilstrom 44:09
All this cool stuff. When you put the three together and they’re all in capsule form, but each one ideally should be made by the body itself, right? We’re talking totally natural stuff, but we get goofed up. You know? We can’t make vitamin D from sun exposure. We don’t eat high vitamin D fish. You take antibiotics, it kills a good bacteria. Then you can’t make this butyrate. You take the three together, it fixes the vitamin D receptor in the gut in a way that can fix just about anything. So the original data was, oh my gosh, this is how, what you want to do to turn around reverse ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, recurrent C-Diff and H-Pylori infections of the gut. But then they said, kind of looks like this is about what you might want to fix, to fix everything. Well, six months later, the exact same researchers, University of Illinois, Chicago. I got shout out to my med school, University of Illinois. They go, Oh my gosh. This is a nuclear weapon against metabolic syndrome, insulin and blood sugar, abnormal weight gain, cholesterol, stuff. And then couple years later, Harvard comes out and goes, Wow, if you shift the intestinal microbiome this way, and I go, that’s what happens when you fix the vitamin D receptors. Make them sensitive again. They go, Well, you can treat major depressive disorder with this? Another psychiatry journal comes out six months later. Well, if you shift the intestinal microbiome this way, it changes personalities. People become more outgoing and more social.
Natalie 45:30
Oh my gosh.
Dr. David Bilstrom 45:30
It has such a big impact on brain chemistry. So this vitamin D receptor stuff, you make it sensitive, it is huge for everything, including the vitamin D and the vitamin D receptors activate chaperone molecules. But also, when you look at genes, we kind of go back to genes here. So there are certain genes that will predispose some of the type one diabetes, predispose them to autism, this kind of stuff. Well, we used to think, what genes you have hardwired, whatever we got, we got with that otherwise, parents and grandparents. We know that’s not the case now.
Derek 45:30
We got the epigenome.
Dr. David Bilstrom 45:33
It’s not so much switch ones are turned on and turned off, right? So epigenetics, the things that change gene expression without changing the genetic code. So anything meditation, Harvard did a great study 16 years ago. Meditation flips genes the right way. Fixing vitamin D receptors flips them the right way. Tudca also works through epigenetics. It flips off bad genes and turns on good genes. Butyrate works through epigenetics almost exclusively and so, but then you got vitamin D. You have vitamin D receptors that are sensitive. Vitamin D attaches, tells the vitamin D receptors what to do. Vitamin D receptors make a protein called vitamin D responsive elements that go to other genes and have been shown to completely turn off every gene that predisposes to type one diabetes, turn off every gene that predisposes to autism.
Derek 46:55
Wow.
Natalie 46:56
What?
Derek 46:56
That is incredible.
Dr. David Bilstrom 46:57
And it’s a chaperone molecule too, to help those proteins from not getting misfolded. So we’re talking like these central mechanisms, right? But everything I’m talking about should be made by the body itself, but just is not because of all the stuff going on. But you give the body what it would typically use, it’s in a position to fix all this stuff with using the central mechanisms.
Natalie 47:16
It’s intuitive. It’s smart. It’s designed to fix itself, right?
Dr. David Bilstrom 47:20
Absolutely. Self correct, self correct, self correct.
Derek 47:22
Can I-I’ve got a random thought, and I don’t want to lose it. I was just thinking about all the Blue Zones, right? That are around the world, where these people live for very, very long, long periods of time. And like we all know that that sun exposure is is correlated with higher levels of vitamin D. Do we know if the blue zones have more sun than other areas. Because, if that’s the case, you know, like, I think about the Mediterranean, you know, if, like, I just think, I’ve never been there myself, I’d love to go. But, like, the image that I have is like, sitting on a Mediterranean beach with the sun out. And it’s just like, if…
Natalie 47:55
Yorba Linda, California is one of the Blue Zones. I feel like there might have been something up further north, though, so I’d have to…
Derek 47:55
Okinawa?
Natalie 47:55
Maybe. No.
Okinawa is one. I think Sardinia was another.
I don’t know why I thought there might have been one, like Iceland or Greenland.
Dr. David Bilstrom 48:08
Unfortunately, some of them aren’t even Blue Zones anymore, though, because the world is so toxic nowadays. Some of them are like they used to be blue zones, but now the civilization’s gotten a hold of them, and they’re not quite as blue as they used to be.
Derek 48:22
They’re a slate gray.
Dr. David Bilstrom 48:26
It’s really hard to make vitamin D from sun exposure nowadays. Things happen underneath the skin that make it very hard to make vitamin D. Oily fish have a lot of vitamin D so like in Scandinavian countries, historically, they’ve eaten a lot of high vitamin D fish. But then if you farm raise the same fish, it’s only got 20% of the vitamin D that the wild caught would have too. And so there’s a variety of things that make it really hard to keep vitamin D anywhere near ideal nowadays.
Derek 48:55
It’s such a systemic problem.
Natalie 48:56
Can I ask? When you mentioned butyrate, which, I don’t know that it’s something I’ve ever heard of before, but you’re saying vitamin D, probiotics, butyrate, which, ideally, your body’s making itself, but it’s not, but those three things taken in combination are kind of like a linchpin for all of these other things. So it-butyrate use, what you said it was a short chain fatty acid, right? Is that something that you can take, like in a supplement, like pill forms?
Dr. David Bilstrom 49:19
It comes in capsule form. Yeah.
Derek 49:21
That’s incredible.
Natalie 49:22
That’s wild. I was just sitting here listening to you talk, I am so fascinated. Also, you’re so good at explaining things where it’s like, you’re clearly very knowledgeable, but I’m following. And I was just realizing I caught myself in the camera at one point-we’re gonna have to, like, do a little montage, because usually I’m just, like, smiling and listening. I’m engaged. But this is me, like, mouth open, eyes wide. I’m just like, absorbing. I’m like, mind blown over and over again. And it’s like, we’re already, like, at an hour. And I’m like, we’re halfway through the points on this, on, like, this outline. Yeah, you know, but that’s so cool. And I keep thinking, oh my god, I can’t wait for my mom to hear this, or I can’t wait for this person to hear. Like, there’s so much incredible information. And we often say to our guests, like, we’d love to have you back because we’re like, there’s so much more we could talk about. But I’m like, No, seriously, yeah, we have to have you back because we have not like, we’ve barely touched, like, we…
Derek 50:12
Yeah, well, I want to dive into to another, another point. So we’re talking about nutritional deficiencies kind of across the board, right? We’re talking about vitamin D deficiency, deficiency in all of the other things. I know that a pretty key nutrient for the epigenome, and, you know, methylation, and maybe you can describe methylation is, is vitamin B-12, right? Methylcobalamin, any of those kind of things, can you talk a little bit about, does vitamin B-12 play into autoimmune disease? And if so, how does it?
Dr. David Bilstrom 50:46
Yeah, you know, the B vitamins in general, just really important for tissue healing and keeping tissues healthy. So it does a ton of different stuff. And so if somebody is deficient in B vitamins. Now, the B vitamins we tend to get from our food are not methylated. They’re not in the usable form. So then we’re required to put a methyl group on and methylate them so they can do their work. Now, when you tend to be low in B vitamins, there’s an amino acid called homocysteine. Easy test to do, simple blood test. Again, every lab can do it of course, any lab I tell I’m talking about that can be run-it’s in every lab. So homocysteine that will go up typically get high when you don’t have enough B vitamins in the usable form. We know that high homocysteine increases your risk of heart attacks, stroke, mood issues, Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, autoimmune disease, all these kind of things can go wrong.
Natalie 51:41
He’s running out of fingers over here.
Derek 51:42
Yeah. He’s going to have to start counting on his toes. He takes a shoe off, it comes up on screen.
[laughing]
Dr. David Bilstrom 51:47
You ask a good question. Like, yeah, that B Vitamin stuff is super important, right?
Derek 51:51
Yeah.
Dr. David Bilstrom 51:51
So, so historically, we would get a lot of methyl groups from cruciferous vegetables, like the broccolis, the cauliflower, the kales, the sauerkraut, this kind of stuff.
Derek 52:00
Meat sources have a lot of B 12 in them as well, right? Which is why vegans, which would probably meat sources, like, like, you know, just meats in general, have are a good source of B 12.
Dr. David Bilstrom 52:11
They are, but not necessarily the methyl groups. You need to activate the B 12 that you got from your food. That makes sense. And so you have to methylate B vitamins. In order to do this wonderful stuff, you have to methylate toxins to get them out of the system. So most toxins that will try to kill us, the environmental or otherwise, are fat soluble. So they get stuck in our fat stores, and then they just leach out, creating all this inflammation of disease. So you got to do is, you got to convert it from fat soluble to water soluble. So we can poop them out and pee them out and sweat them out. You got to methylate. But then also, when you’re trying to flip bad genes off and good genes on, you got a big one is methylation reactions. You got to methylate your DNA, your genes. And this is where 80%, a big reason why 80% of people that get autoimmune disease are women? Because women have 2 X chromosomes. Men have 1X 1Y there are so many bad genes on the second X chromosome, the X chromosome in general, that for a woman to be optimally healthy, she has to shut down over 85% of the entire second X chromosome, and we’ll shut down an entire chromosome in every cell in your body to be healthy. And those methylation reactions are so important for that. This is why women get, one of the big reasons I get more autoimmune disease than men by far.
Natalie 53:37
Well and there’s not as much we I just, we just talked about this a couple weeks ago with the guests. There’s like, not nearly enough research for women, specifically in health conditions, comparatively to men, right?
Dr. David Bilstrom 53:46
Yes, absolutely. They even use male mice.
Derek 53:50
Oh my gosh. Get out of here.
They don’t even use female mice in the experiments.
Get out of here.
Natalie 53:53
That’s crazy! I didn’t even realize this until recently. I mean, I knew especially about women’s reproductive health, that we were behind, but I think in general.
Derek 54:00
I mean, I think there’s been a big push lately to try and get more women into studies, just because of all of the stuff that’s coming out. But yeah.
Natalie 54:07
Yeah, it’s mind blowing. I don’t want to get too heated here, but, like, just wild. But I am encouraged to have guests like you and the guest we had a couple of weeks ago who are, like, aware and saying, like, Yes, that’s true, and it’s crazy and it’s wrong that we don’t have more research for women in the medical fields.
Dr. David Bilstrom 54:28
Yep. It is. And this is why it’s kind of harder for women to stay healthy than men, because the complexity is greater, even to the you know, oh, I got chromosomes that are problematic that I gotta shut down, I gotta turn off all these terrible genes more than the guy would have to turn off.
Natalie 54:48
Wow. Where do you want to go?
Derek 54:49
I think, I think we-it’s been a while and we’ve talked about so many good things. I want to go back to this question that I asked earlier.
Natalie 54:58
[laughing] We got this, like 30 minutes ago!
Derek 55:03
[laughing] Right!
Natalie 55:03
And we got to my question that I forgot, so I’m glad you remembered that.
Derek 55:05
Yeah. Yeah, so my question that I forgot, yeah, so I’m gonna go back to that, because I think it’s a really important one, is you talk about these Band Aid treatments, and that people come to you with these Band Aid treatments, and like, to me, I just would imagine that it’d be infuriating to get the same story over and over and over again. So what are the band aid treatments? And then we’ve, I feel like we, we jump straight to the sauce, we jump straight to the good stuff of, like, these are the good things to take. So let’s talk about Band Aid treatments. Like, what are people taking that are just masking the symptoms and not actually making anything better?
So, I’ll start with telling you why they are bandages based on how the immune system works.
Natalie 55:48
Yeah.
Dr. David Bilstrom 55:49
So the human body loves balance. You know, no matter what it is, you don’t want too much. You want to be too low. It’s always a sweet spot right in the middle. So like blood pressure, blood sugar, don’t want to be high, they don’t be low either. So the immune system has this beautiful set point right in the middle, not too high, not too low. But when you lose the set point in the middle of the immune system, the immune system actually moves away, up and down at the same time. Then the overactive immune system issues are things like all the autoimmune diseases, allergies, asthma and eczema. The underactive immune system. Are things like colds, flus infections, getting the same infection over and over again. So like you can see this starting in kids when they get the recurrent ear infections, strep throat, sinus infections, all this, and then cancer and the infections that drive chronic disease. And so if you see somebody with up or down stuff, you go, Okay, you lost your set point. You moved away. We gotta get you back to the middle. Okay? We gotta rebalance that immune system. Okay? So, but oftentimes, most of the time, when somebody has an autoimmune disease, they’re offered immunosuppressants. Well, they go by several different names, but they basically all suppress the immune system. And so like when you are watching daytime TV and every commercial is about these type of meds, and they say, Oh, by the way, side effects include cancer, life threatening infections. And you’re like, Yuck. That’s it. And so you know that these are these immunosuppressants if they’re going to give you increased cancer and increased infections and all this. And so they take you from up high, and in the attempt to get rid of the up stuff, they push you down, but they push you all the way down to the bottom.
Derek 57:29
Does the floor go down as well?
What’s that? So you have the ceiling, which is like super high, super high immune system, then you have the floor, that’s kind of like a weakened immune system. And you said that it brings it down. But does the does the floor go down as well? Like, do people get even more sick? Or is it just…
Dr. David Bilstrom 57:47
Well, yeah. You can always move farther away from the center point, yeah. And so this is where they say, Oh, by the way, this immunosuppressant that we just decided to use for your multiple sclerosis, your rheumatoid arthritis, any autoimmune disease. Oh, by the way, it’s going to increase your risk of cancer and a life threatening infection that no amount of antibiotics is going to ever keep you from dying from.
Natalie 58:08
Oh, my Gosh.
Dr. David Bilstrom 58:08
And then you look at that, and you go, Wait a minute, I already have this huge increased risk of cancer compared to anybody else. I already have infections that are driving chronic disease, and I’m at risk of getting more and now I’m on a medicine that makes it more likely I get that stuff? What the body says is, well, that’s not what we want. What we want is immunomodulation. We want to rebalance the immune system. We don’t want to suppress it. And so this is where we go. Oh, okay, well, these are the central mechanisms that do this. We just address those. We like to test and not guess. Of some places you can test, some places you can’t, depending on what part of the world you’re at, but if you can test, you can pinpoint it, and you bring them back to the middle. And this is where we get rid of the up. We get rid of down, because, say, This is why they call say, cancer is the flip side of the same coin, this autoimmune disease. So as you’re getting rid of the autoimmune you’re getting rid of cancer risk. And then we lock you in place in the middle. Now, if you use immunosuppressant to get rid of some symptoms, the up stuff, you’re not doing anything to rebalance, and you just keep marching along, getting worse and worse. And now I got a second autoimmune disease, a third, a fourth, a fifth, and you’re more likely to get cancer, such as Christina Applegate, one of my favorite actors of all time, right? She got breast cancer. Well, they found some genes. They said probably double mastectomy would be good because you have a high risk of getting again. Well, they did nothing though, to actually get at why she had the breast cancer, right? They didn’t say, Oh, you lost your set point. Let’s get back to the middle. They just got rid of a body part that she was more likely to get cancer a second time. Well, here she is with multiple sclerosis.
Natalie 58:08
So sad.
Dr. David Bilstrom 59:47
And you’re like, oh my gosh, I see this 10 times a day also where I go, you had this up, this down, but nobody did anything to bring you back to the middle. Now you got something on the other end, or you got another autoimmune disease, or I got breast cancer, and I went through chemo, radiation, and I’m quote, unquote, cancer free, but nobody did anything to get why you got cancer. Well, it came back. Now I gotta do it again. Well, of course, because you didn’t do anything to get rid of why you had the first time. Yeah, well, now I’m cancer free for a second time. I’m like, Oh, come on, somebody get rid of why they got the cancer in the first place. Otherwise, just keep getting pushed. And to you guys’s point, the body is so smart, right? It knows how to do this. You just got to give it this opportunity so it can do what it was designed to do, which is prevent all this stuff.
Derek 1:00:36
So I have a concept that I want you to vet for me, and maybe we can give this to our audience. I feel like a big issue with a lot of these things is it’s almost like a resource issue, right? That there’s so many and there’s a lot of reasons why the resources in our body might be getting depleted, right? These nutrient deficiencies, part of that is, well, I’d say a large part of it is environmental, right? The toxins, the food that we’re eating is not nutrient dense, all these things. And so really, it’s like our body’s doing its best. It just doesn’t have enough tools to build with. And because it doesn’t have enough tools to build with, it just goes, it just goes, you know, to hell in a hand basket. And, you know, you get these, these huge gaps in the immune system. I don’t know, is that, like…
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:01:21
That’s absolutely correct. And but the entire time this is happening, your body is saying, Hey, I know how to fix this, yeah, and I’m trying to fix it, but I got, something’s gotten in the way.
Derek 1:01:31
Just give me the resources.
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:01:33
And if you just get this thing out of the way, whether it’s lack of vitamin, a chronic infection or whatever it is, the body is like all right. Now I got you covered. I can fix this. So in clinic, we see this all the time. We’ll see somebody 84 years old, and they’ve had something since they’re six years of age, and they come in and they have all these health issues going on. And we talk about this and that, hey, you know, how often you get this ? 1 to 10, how bad is it? 10 is the worst? One’s a smidge. We do other stuff, and then I’ll say this has kind of happened multiple times. So here’s somebody who’s had ringing in the ears tinnitus since they were six. Well, now they’re 84 Well, I’ve had that forever. You know? What are you going to do? You get used to it, right? You know, it’s an eight out of 10 all the time. But, but this other stuff that’s happened more than last 10-20, years. Please help me with this. Well, then we make a couple changes. You might change how they’re eating. You might start on the thing to start getting rid of the infections that we know are always there. We might have them start doing a little deep breathing meditation, because that creates calm, and the body can fix things better when it’s calm, a couple things, they come back in six weeks, we’re gonna go over the lab, go over the fine tooth comb, we’ll pinpoint exactly what’s going on with these central mechanisms. But I’ll say, hey, you know, we started pretty calm, kind of started changing how you’re eating, and we start getting these infections. Anything getting better? Well, they may say, Well, you know, my energy is a little better. I’m sleeping better, and I think my pain’s a little less. And I’ll say, so what about that ringing in the ears? Stop dead. Oh my gosh.
Derek 1:03:10
It’s gone.
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:03:11
Oh my gosh, oh my gosh! It’s gone. I’ve had this since I was six years of age, and it’s gone. And I’m looking at my paper going, Yeah, I see right here, I had it down six years of age, you know, and but I ask because I expect things to get better, even if they’ve been around forever. But also it’s a great teaching tool, because then I go, isn’t it amazing how the body works? Can you believe how your body works? Your body has been trying to fix that. Your body has known how to fix that since you were six. You just gave it the opportunity…
Derek 1:03:11
And it took it.
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:03:16
…and look at it, go, this is what’s going to happen with this other stuff you got going on. As you really figure out everything else your body is just beautiful at healing stuff no matter how long you’ve had something.
Natalie 1:03:50
I want to touch on, because you’ve talked about when patients come to you and the treatments they’ve been on and versus what you do in because I’m just curious for our listeners, because I’m asking these questions, I’m wondering if somebody else is thinking it too. What is your success rate? Like? What is it when? Like, how often do you have patients coming to you who have had no answers, no forward progress, they’re just worsening or on the same path, and then it’s like light bulb, you see changes, and also, how important is it to catch it earlier versus spend 10 years being misdiagnosed and mistreated?
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:04:29
Yeah, you know, the earlier you get at something, the easier. It’s just not stuck in the system. Children heal a lot better than adults, so they tend to go quicker. So sometimes it really is, like, fast, okay? Like, the person I’ve referenced, like, oh my gosh, you know, holy cow. Other times it’s really slow and steady, wins the race and everybody’s different. It’s really hard to predict. One thing I know for sure, though, is when people have been doing, like, lifestyle changes. So I talk about, you know, staying healthy with lifestyle changes. Well, that makes SENSE. And S E N S E, so the first S would be stress management. Do your deep breathing. Are you doing your meditation? You know, taking time off for yourself? E is eating. Are you trying to eat relatively healthy, avoiding some of the fast foods, the highly processed foods, I kind of talked about those being like food like substances, not food.
Natalie 1:05:22
Yeah.
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:05:22
N is getting out in nature. Nature, getting out in nature. We put together a compendium about 60 different articles that show how nature helps human health and wellbeing. The next S would be sleep hygiene. And the last one is E, exercise. Just keep moving. Do your steps, right? Doesn’t have to be, you know, Marathon, just do your steps. That all makes sense. Well, when people are doing those kind of things, and we run blood tests, we run other kinds of tests, I can see exactly how that’s benefited them, and I’ll point out to them. I go this right here, the super important thing that would never look that good unless you’ve been doing the stuff you’ve been doing.
Natalie 1:05:58
Right
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:05:59
Because people come in, they do this stuff, and they’re like, I don’t think it’s working. I’m just wasting my time doing this stuff. It’s not working. I’m so frustrated. I’m like, No, no, no, no, no, no. I know that when we do blood tests, we’re gonna see this amazing foundation that you put together. We’re gonna see it in your blood work. Okay, that’s never good unless you do this. But we’re gonna also see what you missed, and kind of the classic things, they always miss that infections are part of chronic health issues. Thus we use the thing out of Canada, that nano silver product, people always miss that the vitamin D receptor becomes resistant. They missed that part as a couple other things that tend to get missed that we address that, and then people go, those are the people that change a lot quicker, because that’s an amazing foundation that’s already there, versus the people that are still doing everything they possibly can to undermine their own health. And then you ask them to do the deep breathing. Well, I only do it, like once a week. Hey, get out nature. Yeah, no I haven’t really done that. And you know all this kind of stuff. Well, they’re the ones that you know, the more the slow and steady kind of things.
Natalie 1:07:04
Well, and for those because I know that you said that the autoimmune disease and disorders are something that you can develop, not necessarily, you know you’re born with it, although you did say you can be more predisposed to these conditions, right? So for somebody that’s listening, that you know doesn’t have autoimmune or doesn’t have symptoms of autoimmune where they’re concerned about it, but maybe they could be more predisposed to developing something like this later in life. How impactful is it to rely on the S E N S E sense things like, how much of a difference does it make for somebody that has the predisposition and is intentional about their sleep, their exercise, their eating, the being in nature, all of those things to to keep them or at least prolong getting into autoimmune disease.
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:07:52
You know, if you start early enough in your life before a lot of this stuff really starts getting going, really you can, you can stay healthy just doing that stuff. Now the world around us makes it more challenging now than it used to, right? And even, like a couple generations ago, you can do everything wrong and still stay healthy. So I would see, I would see, like, here’s like, an 80 year old person smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, drinking way too much alcohol, and they’re 80, never had surgery. They’re not even on any meds yet. And they go, you know, I’ve been reading about exercise. You know, I’ve never exercised my life. I want to stay healthy. I might need to start exercising. You know, I hear that you shouldn’t eat fried food every meal. You know, I’m 80. I want to stay healthy. Maybe I should stop eating fried foods as much as I do. You know, maybe I should stop smoking cigarettes. They’re 80, they’ve never had a surgery, they’re not on emeds, and they’re thinking, I gotta change how I’m doing stuff. Nowadays, people do all this stuff correctly, and they still feel like crud, right? And it’s like, this is crazy! This is really nuts.
Natalie 1:08:51
Yeah!
Derek 1:08:51
There’s a video of this lady who she was getting interviewed, and I think we’ll put a link up of this up above. But she’s like, she’s getting interviewed, and she’s like, my doc, I drink Dr Pepper every day, and my doctor told me to stop it, otherwise I’d die. And is like, he’s dead now, and I’m still here, and I still drink Dr Pepper every day. Sugar’s good for you. That’s not, that’s not being promoted here, but I think it’s exactly to your point.
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:09:14
That is so true.
Derek 1:09:15
She’s like, she she-one, she probably just got the genetic jackpot where, like, her body and systems are just like, so fine tuned that she can do whatever the heck she wants. But, yeah, I mean.
Natalie 1:09:24
I think it’s great that you brought that up, though, because you do hear that, especially, you know, you know, I would say, like, more for my parents generation, or theirs, and like, talking about health, and they’re like, Well, my dad or my grandparent, this and that, and you’re like, Okay, well, that’s crazy, but I’d never really thought about it in the way that you just said, which is, they lived in a different time with different environmental and food toxins and structures and the way that they’re impacted in the body, right? It was, like so much has changed with the industrialized food system, and, you know, all of the chemicals around us and and I just never really thought about that. Well, like Duh. No wonder they smoke two packs a day and ate you know, a pound of bacon every day. And like all this stuff, and why they got through it better than we’re getting through it now, it makes so much sense.
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:10:08
And in women, what I used to see about 20 years ago, I haven’t seen it for a while, but 20 years ago, I’d see a woman 80-85 and we’d go through their menstrual history. Started at the right age 13. Never had a bad flow, never had a bad cramp, never had PMS, regular as all get out all of a sudden one day, didn’t have a flow. That’s menopause. She’s done. You never hear that nowadays. You never hear that. They all start too early, bad flows, bad cramps, PMS, ovarian cysts, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome.
Natalie 1:10:39
We need to get on birth control in order to regulate it, like. And that brings up another thing about just fertility issues. Like, we’re gonna have to bring you back on. I know how many people we hear now that, like, you know, are struggling to get pregnant, that want to get pregnant, and how much intervention there needs to be around that. And I’m guessing that’s something that you never, like you know? Even 80 years ago wasn’t as much of an issue.
You’re struggling NOT to get pregnant every time you turn around.
Right! Exactly, exactly. But, yeah, you’re, I mean, we are, we are way over a normal hour time. But I there’s, there’s so much, so much. And, yeah, we’re definitely going to have to have you back on so I will, I will just say thank you. But before we kind of wrap up, where can people find you? Where can people learn more about your work? And you know, because I’m sure other people like me and Derek are feeling like, Give me more. I want to learn more. This is amazing. So where can people find you?
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:11:33
So they can find, find everything on drdavidbilstrom.com, and we have two levels of courses for non medical people. We have two levels of courses for medical people. We post on all social media, do all these, these, sign, these videos and all this kind of stuff. One thing I think is really important is that people know that this is not one person’s opinion. This is the science. Yeah. So typically, what I will do in most my videos, including most of them out in nature, cause I want to promote that, I’ll be on a mountain my snowboard, or I’ll be hiking or something like, and I’ll say this scientific article from this journal from this year, entitled-it says this because people need to know this is the science.
Natalie 1:12:13
Big reference.
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:12:13
This is just the science, but the science is so great.
Derek 1:12:17
That’s amazing. You know? I just want to echo a sentiment that Natalie led with, and I want to end with this is like, I just want to give to you my gratitude of the amazing work that you are clearly doing. And, you know, just like, how you’re saying that this just is this needs to become common knowledge. And, you know, it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of time and so on, effort that I can tell that you’ve clearly poured into this, but the fact that you’re doing this truly makes you a leader in this field. And I just want to tell you how much we appreciate it, and that I sure our listeners appreciate it. So thank you so much for coming on, joining us and being willing to deal with our shenanigans.
Natalie 1:12:54
Right. And I will say-Yeah, our shenanigans, yeah, because we get going. I will say, truly, from the bottom of my heart, it’s been an honor to interview you and have you on our podcast like I feel really lucky that we had the opportunity to have you. So thank you so much.
Dr. David Bilstrom 1:13:09
Oh, you guys are so sweet. Thank you. Thank you for giving me opportunity to come on, and I would look forward to doing it again.
Natalie 1:13:14
Yay! Okay, we’ll make it happen. Thanks so much, Dr bilstrom.
Derek 1:13:18
Thanks for tuning in to the Invigor Medical Podcast.
Natalie 1:13:21
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Derek 1:13:24
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Natalie 1:13:29
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