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Improving Immune System Health with Dr. Robert Rountree: Rational Wellness Podcast 396

Dr. Robert Rountree discusses Improving Immune System Health with Dr. Ben Weitz.

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Podcast Highlights

Rational Wellness: Boosting Immune Health with Dr. Bob Rountree
In this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast, Dr. Ben Weitz hosts Dr. Bob Rountree, an integrative medical doctor practicing at Boulder Well Care and a teacher at the Institute of Functional Medicine. They discuss how to improve immune system health to protect against viruses, bacteria, cancer, and more. The conversation touches on the history of functional medicine, the role of nutrition and lifestyle in bolstering immune function, and the benefits of supplements like vitamins, probiotics, and medicinal mushrooms. Additionally, they address common misconceptions about supplements and the impact of diet on chronic diseases. The episode also includes a discussion on the importance of maintaining a healthy gut microbiome and explores how proper nutrition and lifestyle changes can potentially reverse conditions like early-stage Alzheimer’s.
00:29 Guest Introduction: Dr. Bob Rountree
01:27 The Evolution of Functional Medicine
04:04 Controversies in Nutritional Science
09:48 Understanding the Immune System
17:30 The Role of Gut Health in Immunity
22:34 The State of Health in the U.S.
23:16 The Impact of Nutrition on Immunity
24:52 The Role of Vitamins and Public Health
26:29 Case Studies and Research on Nutrition
31:53 The Flexibility of the Immune System
38:05 Practical Tips for Boosting Immunity
42:34 Conclusion and Resources

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Dr. Robert Rountree, MD is a diplomate of the American Board of Holistic Medicine and certified by the American Board of Family Practice. He lectures around the world for the Institute of Functional Medicine.  He combines traditional family medicine, nutrition, herbology, and mind body therapy in his practice in Boulder Wellcare in Boulder, Colorado.  His office number is (303) 443-9590.

Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.  Dr. Weitz has also successfully helped many patients with managing their weight and improving their athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111.

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Podcast Transcript

Immune Health with Dr. Robert Rountree

Dr. Weitz: [00:00:00] Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates. And to learn more, check out my website, drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me and let’s jump into the podcast. Hello, Rational Wellness Podcasters. Today, we’ll be speaking with Dr. Bob Rountree about immune system health. Our topic today is the immune system and how we can improve our immune system so we can protect us against viruses, bacteria, parasites, toxins, cancer, and not attack our own cells or organs.

Dr. Bob Rountree is an integrative medical doctor who practices at Boulder Well Care in Boulder, Colorado. He teaches for the Institute of Functional Medicine. He consults with various nutritional companies. He’s been in practice since 1980, and I consider him one of the founders of our functional medicine movement, along with Dr. Bland and et cetera, et cetera.

Dr. Rountree: Well, thank you.

Dr. Weitz: So what else you

Dr. Rountree: were abounding anything, we just we were just trying to put the information out and then it became a thing Everybody says they’re doing functional medicine,

Dr. Weitz: right?

Dr. Rountree: I mean, that’s a term that jeffrey bland came up with like, I don’t know 40 years 35 40 years ago, right?

All the functional medicine just people said oh, that’s kind of a weird name but we’ll go along with it and it kind of makes sense and now like You see ads for people doing functional medicine practices everywhere.

Dr. Weitz: Oh, yeah, absolutely training programs all [00:02:00] kinds of stuff. I remember I used to get his Audio tape series and it started out with these little cassette tapes.

Dr. Rountree: Yeah, I still got those cassette tapes

Dr. Weitz: I ended up throwing them out. But it was originally I think it was called preventative medicine update And then it was something else and finally it was medicine

Dr. Rountree: update

Dr. Weitz: exactly

Dr. Rountree: Yeah, I really got to hand it to Jeff. I mean, he, he started a movement. I don’t think he was trying to start a movement.  I think he was just saying, Hey, guys, there is research out there to support the use of nutrition for treating health problems. That was a profound concept. Right.

Dr. Weitz: Despite thousands and thousands of studies and success with, thousands and hundreds of thousands of patients and all these practitioners out there, it’s still sometimes Going upstream it there’s still a lot of antagonism and [00:03:00] people calling it quackery and and a lot of It’s difficult for the medical profession to accept the benefits of nutrition or nutritional supplements And

Dr. Rountree: you know the irony of it is that?  The, some of the original supplements were made by a drug company, Hoffman Laroche. Is that right? Yeah. When I first went into practice, there was no objection in mainstream medicine to vitamins. Hoffman Laroche made a product called B Rocha, which was vitamin B, E I don’t know what the R was, but you know, vitamin C, vitamin A.  So it was a standard thing. Doctors didn’t think anything of it. And then I guess somewhere along the lines. Supplements started getting this reputation, you know, of being a little sleazy and oversold. And it never made sense to me because one day they’re popular, the next day everybody’s bad mouthing them.  You know, I’m just going [00:04:00] either there’s science or there isn’t science. Right.

Dr. Weitz: Right. Well, you know, unfortunately the science that gets published in the journals that most medical doctors read is, you know, there could be 99 studies on the benefits of omega 3 fats. And then the one study that looks like there might be some harmful effect or no benefit.  That’s the one that’s published in JAMA, and a lot of our conventional medical doctors, that’s all they say.

Dr. Rountree: There’s a really good example of that. It’s a study that was done, I think, at the University of Washington about maybe 10 years ago, where they took a bunch of guys and did blood tests on them, and then they followed them for 10 or 15 years, and then at the end they concluded that men that had higher levels of omega 3 fatty acids, the stuff in fish oil, had a higher incidence of [00:05:00] prostate cancer.

Absolutely. You go, wait a minute, you did one blood test. At the beginning. So if they’d had a fish taco the night before That’s going to make their blood levels go up of the fish oil And then you’re going to say based on that increases your risk for a decade

Dr. Weitz: I just had a conversation with a patient of mine who has prostate cancer and his doctors told him Absolutely.  Don’t take fish oil. And it’s still because of that one stupid study. And by the way, nobody in that study was given fish oil at all. But the conclusion was you can’t take fish oil as a supplement, but maybe it’s okay to eat fish.

Dr. Rountree: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Weitz: Which made, makes no sense at all.

Dr. Rountree: Yeah. And you know, this, that’s a study done in Seattle, right?  And they’re telling people, well, I don’t know, maybe salmon will cause prostate cancer. It does go, the media doesn’t understand how to [00:06:00] interpret these nutritional studies. Right. So when they hear something negative, that will actually serve as clickbait, right? Because people will see a headline, fish oil causes breast cancer, fish oil causes prostate cancer.

You know, fish oil is terrible. Fish oil will make you get atrial fibrillation, fish oil will make you bleed to death. Don’t ever take fish oil before surgery or you will bleed to death, right? Then you go, well, you know, I’d really like to see the research itself, read the studies. And when you actually read the studies, you don’t see those findings at all.  It’s crazy what’s going on out there. And, you know, vitamin D is a really good example of that. I know you’ve talked to Dr. Michael Holick, who’s one of my all time heroes, you know, and he presents a very compelling case for all the benefits of vitamin D beyond bone health. And still we see in the news.  Well, don’t worry about vitamin D. You don’t need it. You don’t need to measure your [00:07:00] blood levels. It’s pointless to measure your blood levels because it doesn’t matter if you’re deficient. You know, if you get rickets, we’ll know you have rickets.

Dr. Weitz: I just had a patient whose cardiologist told him don’t take any vitamin D because it will lead to more calcium in your arteries.

Dr. Rountree: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The craziest thing in the world. So don’t eat yogurt, don’t eat cheese, because that’ll give you a heart attack. Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, I you and I have talked about this in the past, but if you skin your knee and you get a scab over the skinned area, then you’re going to get crusting.  And that crusting could accumulate calcium as part of the crusting process. Well, the same thing could go on your arteries. Right? So if you get thrusting of the atherosclerotic plaque, that could get calcium deposits in it. So did the [00:08:00] calcium cause the person to get a scab on their skin? It’s the same kind of logic.  It just doesn’t make any sense.

Dr. Weitz: Right. Absolutely. Try to get your heart to contract properly without adequate levels of calcium. It won’t happen.

Dr. Rountree: It won’t happen. The other thing we know is that if you do a calcium score on people, and I do that all the time in my patients with a risk of heart disease.  Right. I do a coronary calcium score, and their calcium level may be high, the calcium in the plaque that shows up on the scan. So that level, the volume of calcium can be high. If you put that person on a statin, then often that calcium volume level will go up. And all that means is that the plaque is getting firmer and more consolidated and less likely to break off and less likely to give you a heart attack.

Dr. Weitz: Absolutely. Yeah. We started using that CT angiogram with artificial intelligence [00:09:00] now because that scan will show you the soft plaque as well.

Dr. Rountree: Yeah. Yeah. That clearly test. I love. Yeah.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Cause that soft plaque is the more vulnerable, like you just explained.

Dr. Rountree: Yeah. The soft plaque that doesn’t have calcium in it.

Dr. Weitz: Right. So again, people, everybody who’s listening out there, consume your calcium, consume your vitamin D. There is no increased risk of heart disease with taking a modest amount of calcium supplements. And vitamin D is crucial for immune system health for every part of the body, almost every set of cells and organs in the body has vitamin D receptors in it.

Dr. Rountree: Yep. Absolutely. So let’s start talking about the receptors.

Dr. Weitz: So let’s start talking about the immune system. Tell us a little more about the immune system. How does it work? How does it [00:10:00] function?

Dr. Rountree: Okay. So you’ve got two basic parts of the immune system, the innate and acquired. The innate immune system is pre programmed, right?

It recognizes certain molecular structures. The structure of a bacteria, the structure of a fungus like Candida albicans, that’s built into the DNA of the innate immune cells. So the DNA will make a protein that acts as a receptor. So that’s basically the lock on the door that appears on the surface of those cells.

So that lock that’s on the surface of those cells, when it sees the molecular structure of a yeast, for example, it says something’s up, there’s a problem here. Or if it sees a Staphylococcus aureus, it says there’s something going on. Then those cells go from being in a dormant, inactive state to being activated.

And [00:11:00] if those signals keep coming in more and more candida, you know, more and more yeast or more and more bacteria, then the immune cells get more and more activated and eventually they create what’s called inflammation. We all know that term inflammation. It’s the most described medical response pattern in the medical literature.

It’s been in the literature for thousands of years, right? The Egyptians wrote about inflammation, right? And the Ebers Papyrus. And so it’s been out there for a long time that we know that even very crude creatures like jellyfish have an innate immune system. And if the innate immune system is activated for a period of time after, say, being exposed to a virus, then it starts activating the acquired immune cells.

The acquired immune cells start out being inactive. T cells are an example of that, T lymphocytes. They start in a neutral place. [00:12:00] But if that person is exposed to the yeast over and over again, eventually the innate cells will signal to the acquired cells. It’s time to wake up guys and start making copies of yourself.

We call that the clone wars. Right? Bring in the clones. Right. So those T cells start dividing and getting more and more activated, and then they activate B lymphocytes, and B lymphocytes make antibodies. A lot of people think antibodies is what the immune response is all about, but that’s way down the line.

Right. So you’ve got this innate immune system that has got pre programmed DNA response patterns to molecular structures. Those cells get activated, and if they persistently get activated, then they turn on the T lymphocytes and the B lymphocytes in the acquired immune system. So that’s kind of an overview of how the immune system works, right?

It’s a, it’s a lovely, beautiful, and [00:13:00] very complex system. And it’s a living, System, which is important to understand. It’s constantly interacting with our environment, which is really key point is you’re not stuck with the immune system you have because it’s constantly learning and growing and evolving.

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Dr. Rountree: I’m glad you asked that question You know, our immune system is designed to recognize what’s foreign, right?

And in an immune system that works really well We’ll be able to say oh that’s a part of the joint don’t go after it, right? instead Go after these foreign bacteria or Our invoices in the gut. Now, immune system needs to be very discriminatory, right? It’s if we’ve got 40 trillion bacteria in our gut.

Absolutely. And all over our body, on our skin, everywhere. Skin and our, and actually we used to think parts of our body were sterile, like the brain. Right. Check it out. There’s no sterile part of the body. There’s bacteria and viruses all over us. Yeah. They’re on us. They’re in us. And if our [00:16:00] immune cells were to react to every single thing they saw, you’d have havoc.

Right. Right. You’d have chronic inflammation in your gut, your eyes, your nose, and maybe that’s what’s going on with something like eczema. Right, or autoimmune disease. Absolutely. You know, Dr. Mark Huston, a good friend of mine, he says that heart disease is actually an auto inflammatory disorder. It’s a situation where the immune system is overreacting.

And we know that people that have bacteria in their gums, right, they have gum disease are more likely to have heart disease.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, we’ve had Dr. Houston on the podcast five or six times.

Dr. Rountree: I love Mark. We’ve been on stage many times together. We’ve traveled to China together. So he’s really a brilliant thinker, insightful guy.  But what is this telling us about how responsive our immune system is? It says that those innate immune cells, which are the, they’re the [00:17:00] sentinels, right? They’re the part of our immune system that is sniffing around. It’s sniffing around and it’s going, Well, is that bacteria in the gut? Is that something I should react to?  Or, just leave it be. It’s not really a problem. Now, if the person eats something that’s contaminated with salmonella, they eat bad chicken, right? Right. A lot of salmonella out there, the immune system is immediately going to go, that’s bad stuff,

Dr. Weitz: right? And that, of course, is why so much of the immune system is centered around the gut.

Dr. Rountree: It’s centered around the gut. So that brings us to the issue of, well, what can we do to keep that immune response? Healthier. Well, we know that having healthier bacteria in the gut keeps the immune system calmer because it’s basically sending a signal to the 80 percent of your immune system that lines your gut.

If the balance of bacteria in your gut is healthy, the signal goes to those [00:18:00] immune cells to say, all is well, all as well. So if the person eats a high fiber diet, simplest thing in the world. If they eat a high fiber diet, then there’s a lot of things that go on with that. But the high fiber diet, especially what we call prebiotic fibers, which you know all about, those prebiotic fibers feed healthy bacteria.

The healthy bacteria then send a signal to the immune cells lining the gut all as well. And that calms down the whole immune system. What’s my example of this? Well, a study just got presented at one of the hematology conferences I think about a week ago that took people who were at risk of getting multiple myeloma, which is a cancer that develops in the bone marrow.

The person overproduces antibodies that don’t work well, they’re just these dysfunctional proteins [00:19:00] and those proteins kind of build up all over the body and it can be deadly. Yes. They did a very interesting study and they started out doing this in animals, in laboratory rats, and then they extended that to humans.

They put them on a high fiber diet. Again, these are people that were at risk of getting myeloma. They put them on a high fiber diet. And lo and behold, what do you think happened? Is it greatly decreased the progression of the myeloma? So it, the high fiber diet. You hear what I’m saying? A high fiber diet prevented this bone marrow cancer from progressing.

Dr. Weitz: That’s amazing. But that’s heresy, Bob. It’s wacko claims that eating healthy is going to have any effect on cancer.

Dr. Rountree: And you know where they did this? Memorial Sloan Kettering. One of the most conventional cancer centers in the country. Right. So, you know, you pull back and you [00:20:00] go, they are saying that you change your diet and it impacts the progression of this potentially deadly cancer.

That is amazing. So that’s a big starting point to go what’s happening in your gut. The mix of bacteria in your gut is affecting the entire immune system in the body. So prebiotics are a good way to start. I’m a fan of probiotics as well. You know, there’s a lot of them out there and not all of them are that great, right?

But even something as simple as eating good quality yogurt. Or fermented food like kombucha or fermented cabbage. Yeah. All that stuff, that’s a really good start for modifying your immune system. So the big picture here is it says our immune system is capable of being altered and modified. That’s great.

That’s a take home because if you read the immunology textbooks, [00:21:00] how much space do you think is devoted in those textbooks to outlining the impact of diet and lifestyle, your mood, your stress. There is nothing and I, I, I guarantee you pick up any traditional textbook on immunology and you will not find anything in there about the impact of the environment, your, your lifestyle, how you eat, how you sleep.

None of that is in the immunology textbooks. Sad. It’s very sad because it’s ignoring the science, right? Right. And it, it kind of gives the impression that any science that says, or any research that says your diet impacts your immune function, oh, that’s a little suspect. It’s a little fringy, but it’s not fringy at all.

I mean, we literally have thousands of articles showing this, and it makes sense because immune cells. [00:22:00] are like any other cell in the body, right? They’re living cells. Right. If they’re living cells, it means they need, they need nutrients. Oh, what a concept. Your immune cells need nutrients to function. How many people are deficient in those nutrients?

Dr. Weitz: It’s very common.

Dr. Rountree: It’s very, very common. You know, we, we have not a bad life expectancy in the United States, but we have some of the highest rates of chronic disease of any country in the world.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I, we’re not doing great when it comes to life expectancy. We’re something like 27th or 28 in the world, despite spending twice as much as any other country on healthcare.

Dr. Rountree: Yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t make sense. And part of it is, is the chronic disease that we have in this country. So we don’t see malnourishment in the classic sense that, you know, you might see [00:23:00] in you know, the, in the Sudan or someplace where there’s. Terrible wars going on and people aren’t getting enough to eat.

We don’t see that. What we see is over nutrition.

Dr. Weitz: Yes.

Dr. Rountree: Under nourishment.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Rountree: So people getting plenty of fast food, ultra processed food that’s lacking the basic nutrients. And so as a consequence you know, our immune cells, immune cells just don’t work as well. During the midst, the height of the COVID pandemic, do you know who had the highest risk factor for getting severe COVID?

People who are obese and diabetic.

Dr. Weitz: Of course, which is 75 percent of the population in the United States.

Dr. Rountree: You know, so why didn’t they, they go down that path of saying, well, why is this? What is, what’s happening with the immune system of people who are diabetic or obese? Right. Right. And we’ve known forever that people who are [00:24:00] diabetic, if they get an infection, they get a cough.

Right. Or they get an infection, like a respiratory infection, it’s gonna be more severe. So we know diabetics have a diminished immune response. To infections of all types to they don’t heal wounds as well You know, at least I was trained in that in medical school You got a diabetic with a foot sore you better be on top of that Right because it’ll get infected and all of a sudden you got an amputation So well that tells us that nutrition And the overall sugar level in the person’s bloodstream, that’s impacting their immune function.

Yes. So why don’t we just give these diabetics a simple multiple vitamin? A multivitamin, like, you kind of go, well, that’s kind of crazy.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, it’s it’s really a shame with millions of people in the country listening to public health officials [00:25:00] it would have been nice if even a small part of the message was about getting healthy and eating healthy and losing some weight and reducing your sugar intake and getting some exercise and Taking some vitamin d and getting some sunlight and it would be nice if that was part of the public health message

Dr. Rountree: Yeah, I mean instead we hear vitamins are worthless, you know, they just give you expensive urine, right?  But it ignores some really good data That’s out there. So I mean one example I can give you is they have an issue in bangladesh of exposure to arsenic to the The water that comes down from the Himalayan mountains it’s got all kinds of minerals, metals in the runoff. So the groundwater that people are drinking all over Bangladesh is very high in arsenic.  And we know that chronic consumption of low levels of arsenic [00:26:00] increases the risk of cancer and other chronic diseases. And one marker we have for that is a simple blood test for homocysteine, right? Because homocysteine requires what we call methyl groups, right? Which is just methane gas minus one of the hydrogens, right?

Hydrogens, right? Very simple thing, but you have to get it in your diet. You get it from folic acid, which is found in green leafy vegetables. So people that are exposed to these low levels of arsenic, Over long periods of time their homocysteine levels go up and their Predisposition to cancer and other kinds of immune diseases go up Well, they’ve done a simple study in Bangladesh where they gave people a B vitamin a B complex vitamin and a fairly low dose It wasn’t a massive amount.

And what do you think happened? Their homocysteine levels went down and the cancer rates went way down [00:27:00] Wow simple basic thing Good, solid science. I think the doctor that did it is at Columbia University in New York. Very respected doctor. You know, that kind of data is, is out there. And it totally contradicts this message that vitamins are worthless.

Dr. Weitz: Right. You don’t hear much about that particular message.

Dr. Rountree: No, no. And, you know, I guess they’re the powers that be don’t feel like they make enough money selling the vitamins, you know, something is all, it kind of baffles me what that resistance is, why is there resistance to saying you should measure your vitamin D level, right?

It’s not an expensive test. People can do it at home. They can, there’s several labs that will send you a kit. Where you prick your finger and you say, yep. So the institute of medicine says, well, you don’t need to do that. Why, why even bother? And the [00:28:00] thing that they’re missing is that vitamin D is not just for bones, right?

Vitamin D is an immune regulator. Yes. Vitamin D keeps the immune system, the innate immune system from overreacting when it shouldn’t, but it also boosts it up to be appropriately reactive. Right. Appropriately reactive, which is an amazing thing. In the old days when people had tuberculosis, where do they send them?

To a sanitarium. Right. What was the sanitarium? A place where they got exposure to sunlight. Ah. Right? So when they’ve gone back and researched that, what they found is that The exposure to sunlight increases the DNA activation and the immune cells so that they make more of the receptor for vitamin D.

Now, if you have more of the receptor to vitamin D, and then you get vitamin [00:29:00] D, you get it from the sun, the vitamin D binds to the receptor and it turns on the immune cells. And when the immune cells are turned on, they make something that a lot of people don’t know about. They’re called antimicrobial peptides.

Which are natural antibiotics, right? And those natural antibiotics bite off tuberculosis. So it turns out sending people to Kellogg’s of Battle Creek and tell them to sit on the porch and you know Get exposure to the sun. There actually is some pretty decent science behind why that would work, right?

Dr. Weitz: Amazing the systems built into our bodies To fight off disease if we can get our body to work at an optimal And not a minimal level

Dr. Rountree: Yeah, so you make a really good point. It’s optimal nutrition. We’re talking about. Yes. Yeah, it’s not barely functional So [00:30:00] we’re not talking about correcting scurvy, right?  Right, you know, we’re talking about how much vitamin C Would you need to really get your immune cells in tip top condition so that a they react? appropriately when they’re exposed to viruses and bacteria and Fungi or B, they don’t overreact because overreaction is as much of a problem in our society as underreaction and overreaction would be chronic inflammatory diseases, you know, neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the most common things that people are dying of these days are all these autoimmune diseases.

Dr. Rountree: Yep.

Dr. Weitz: Yep. And that’s where your immune system is attacking your own cells and tissues.

Dr. Rountree: So is it possible to get your immune system to calm down a little bit, you know, if a person’s got say rheumatoid arthritis?  [00:31:00] Multiple sclerosis I’m good friends with Dr. Terry Walls. You may have interviewed Terry. I have amazing story. You know, it’s incredible. He did everything she was told to do, right. By the mainstream doctors, she

Dr. Weitz: was going downhill. She was in a tilt up wheelchair. Couldn’t even stand up. Couldn’t even pick her head up.

Dr. Rountree: And then she said, well, wait a minute. This isn’t working. I’m doing all the drugs. I’m doing everything right, and I’m getting slowly.  You know, the fish oil basic vitamins, and I’ve danced with Dr. Terry walls, right? We’ve had

Dr. Weitz: parties together and how she’s, she’s, this is several decades now that she writes her bike. She teaches, she, she does research. It’s incredible.

Dr. Rountree: Yep. So that’s again, another example of how the immune system is flexible.  The term I actually use is that the [00:32:00] immune system is plastic. So, you know, I don’t mean plastic in the sense of something synthetic, but in the brain, we talk about neuroplasticity. Right idea that somebody can have a stroke and knock out a bunch of cells in their brain and then be told well You’ll never walk again or talk again and then lo and behold they do the right kind of rehab they do the right kind of therapy and And they’re back completely functioning.  So the brain has this neuroplasticity, which allows it to overcome severe damage. And the same thing is true with the immune system. It’s plastic. It can be reprogrammed.

Dr. Weitz: The ability to form new neural connections, to create new neurons is somehow it became a. Accepted knowledge that you had all the brain cells you were ever going to have by the time you hit age 20 and after that, it was just downhill from there and that, and that is not the case.[00:33:00]

Dr. Rountree: So I think that things that can be done to reverse early stages of Alzheimer’s dementia. Right now absolutely lost a certain number of cells then it’s very difficult to turn that around But you get somebody who’s in the early stages where they’re getting forgetful and a little confused You know changing their diet cutting out the sugar Going on a good multivitamin adding fish oil all that stuff can make a huge difference

Dr. Weitz: Dr. Dale Bredesen has published multiple books. He’s published a research study. He’s at work on his second research study. Another research study was published, all proving that you could reverse Alzheimer’s and not simply slow down its deterioration, which is the best you can get with the leading drugs for Alzheimer’s.

Dr. Rountree: And what is Dale’s show? I like Dale Bredesn a lot. We’ve been on stage [00:34:00] together. His, his stuff is really solid, but you know, he gets a lot of pushback from the neurology community is saying, well, there’s nothing that could be done. And absolutely. That’s a community that has the reputation for looking at somebody with say Alzheimer’s or neurodegenerative disease and saying diagnose and adios.  We’ll diagnose you and then we’ll say, I’m sorry, we can’t really do much and we’ll see you in a year, you know, or we can put you on these really expensive drugs like Lakembi you know, which is crazy expensive. Oh, and this drug may slow down your dementia by very, very tiny amount, and you’ll need to have brain scans done every few months to make sure you don’t hemorrhage into your brain.

Right. I’m going, wait a minute, compared to what? Dale Bredeson says, Hey, nutrition can be helpful.

Dr. Weitz: It takes so long for a [00:35:00] new idea to be accepted in medicine.

Dr. Rountree: Yeah, generally about 25 years, start to finish. So, yeah, and what a lot of what Dale Bredesen says is like, we need to calm down the inflammation. Yes.  What’s going on in the brain of people with Alzheimer’s is an overreactive immune system. And what does the immune system overreact to?  Well, You know bad players in the gut and it’s it’s different things for each patient.

Dr. Weitz:  For one patient It’s gut health for one patient. It’s a chronic infection for another patient It’s heavy metals or mold toxins for another patient.  They’re just severely lacking nutrition So you’ve got to look at all these different factors and address multiple things. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to study a functional medicine approach, because the way we do research studies is we change one thing and [00:36:00] one thing only, and try to see a profound change.

Dr. Rountree: Yep, exactly. And that’s typical for study. Okay, let’s take people that have had five heart attacks and then let’s give them a supplement with folic acid in it, in a low dose, the folic acid for three years, and then they go, wow, The low dose folic acid did nothing to prevent more heart attack.  Therefore, folic acid is worthless. I just don’t, you know, I, I know a lot of these people that are in academic centers. I’ve talked to them, and they, it’s the way they think. It’s the way they train, right? They’re trained to think in terms of single agents, and it all came out of the antibiotic era.

Dr. Weitz: The problem is the model for what a accurate scientific study is all based on testing drugs and you can’t test diet and [00:37:00] lifestyle changes with that same model.

We need a different paradigm for what the ultimate research study is. Then the It’s double blind, single agent placebo study that is being used to test drugs. And then they try to apply that to nutrition.

Dr. Rountree: Well, look at the popularity of the biologic drugs for treating rheumatoid arthritis, right?

The way, yeah,

Dr. Weitz: I know those, those are the biggest selling drugs. Huge selling of

Dr. Rountree: most you know, revenue generating drugs in history, right? Adalimumab, you know, Humira, like top of the list. And so here’s a person that gets some swelling in one of their knuckles and they’re told you need to be on this drug that’s going to cost thousands of dollars a month and may give you an increased risk of lymphoma or tuberculosis, right?

I mean, right, because,

Dr. Weitz: because it’s blocking a significant part [00:38:00] of your immune system. Yeah, yeah. Let’s conclude our discussion here. Let’s kind of summarize what is some of the most important things someone can do to bolster their immune system to help us fight off infectious diseases?

Dr. Rountree: Okay.  Well, it starts with the most basic lifestyle stuff, right? Eating a healthy diet You know, which it almost goes without saying, but it should be said, right? Still not out there that the more fresh fruits and vegetables You can eat the better you’re going to and the prebiotic fibers that you can get, you know, from certain foods like garlic and onions and asparagus and, you know, the inulin FOS, all those prebiotic fibers are really helpful for your immune system.  I think probiotics are a good idea, right? You never use the strain of probiotic that has been researched. The cheaper [00:39:00] ones that aren’t named as strains are going to be a little less. Effective, but there’s a lot of good ones out there. So I think a probiotic is good. I recommend people go through the alphabet.  So they say, what vitamins should I take? Well, there’s the alphabet, A, B, C, D, E and zinc, right? ABCDE and zinc, right? And then I also had a Q for quercetin. Those are things I take all the time. So vitamin D, most all of us should benefit. From vitamin D, unless you’re a lifeguard in Australia, even those guys sometimes are those gals.  And Australia uses a lot of sunscreen, which is going to block the D. Right. So, you know, you can get a low D level if you’re out in the sun all day.

Dr. Weitz: And you won’t get, you won’t store as much, you won’t create as much vitamin D during the winter months.

Dr. Rountree: Exactly. Exactly. You’re not going to get nearly the exposure.

So I think there’s a case [00:40:00] for most everybody taking a little bit of vitamin A. The B complexes, yes, they do help the immune system. There’s good published studies on that. Vitamin C, you really don’t need massive amounts of vitamin C, unless your immune system has just gone kerplooey. But, you know, most people, a gram a day of vitamin C, that’s what I take, is good as a preventative.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dr. Rountree: And then the D and the vitamin E and the zinc, most people benefit from 15 to 30 of zinc every day. Quercetin, I’ve mentioned really enhances the effect of vitamin C. So those are all really good things that most people can benefit from. What about medicinal mushrooms? Yeah,

Dr. Weitz: I love medicinal mushrooms.

Dr. Rountree: We didn’t really talk about it much in, in the first part of the show, but I will. Say that there’s a pretty good body of evidence out there that that mushrooms like shitake, [00:41:00] maitake, Agaricus All those mushrooms really do help keep the immune system on its toes. So I’m always taking one or more medicinal mushrooms.

I think it’s a really good idea. Yeah,

Dr. Weitz: I chop them up and put them in my eggs. I put some lion’s mane in my coffee.

Dr. Rountree: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you’re talking. Reishi in my coffee with reishi mushroom in it. Yeah. Which one is better? You know, that’s a debate I’ve been having for most of my career. I don’t know if any one mushroom is better, it’s more that you use them for specific things.  Yep. So we could probably do a whole show on which one does what, but what I generally tell my patients is to try to eat medicinal mushrooms, like you said, you know, eat the lion’s mane and shiitake, and if you can find it, maitake mushroom, oyster mushrooms.

Dr. Weitz: Yep.

Dr. Rountree: Eat those in your diet as much as you can, and then if [00:42:00] you’re going to take a supplement probably a mixture if you’re taking it for general purposes, you know, like a five mushroom formula.  Yeah. It’s a really good way to go. Yeah. So that’s a, that’s a pretty good summary, I think, of where to start, you know, you, you can certainly get a lot more specific than that. But I think. For, for general purposes to keep our immune systems healthy. It’s the alphabet. It’s the cleaner diet. It’s a good gut microbiome and then adding medicinal fungi.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great. Great advice, Dr. Bob. Cool. So, tell everybody how they can find out more about you. Yeah, you’ve written three books. I’m sure. Are, are your books still available?

Dr. Rountree: Yeah, the books are still available. You know, they, we haven’t updated them in a while, but the amazing thing is people buy my books and they go, well, that’s still really helpful.  So I wrote a book on peds called smart medicine for a [00:43:00] healthier child. It’s still selling well, decades later. That’s wow. to me. So the, you know, I’m not really taking new patients right now. I have more work than I can handle. So what I do is, is refer people to the Institute for Functional Medicine. So a lot of what I do now is train doctors to be the next generation doing what I’m doing.  Cause of, you know, if, as the saying goes, if you can teach a person to fish. I’m teaching people how to fish and teaching doctors in particular how to fish. So if you want to find a doctor that does this kind of medicine, contact the Institute for Functional Medicine in Federal Way, Washington, and they keep a list of doctors who have done our training that are all over the world now.  Right. All over the world. So, it’s not just confined to the U. S., I just got back from a training in Columbia, of all places. Okay. So, great doctors down there that really know functional medicine.

Dr. Weitz: That’s great.

Dr. Rountree: So, this is a, this is a [00:44:00] worldwide phenomenon, you know, and I think it’s the future of medicine.  Absolutely. I agree. Cool.

Dr. Weitz: Okay. Thank you so much, Bob.

Dr. Rountree: You bet. It’s been a great pleasure as always, and I look forward to seeing you again in the future.

Dr. Weitz: Absolutely. I really enjoyed it. I’ll send you links after it’s published.

Dr. Rountree:  Okay. Sounds great.

Dr. Weitz:  Okay. Thank you.

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Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast.  For those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, I would very much appreciate it. If you could go to apple podcast or Spotify and give us a five star ratings and review. As you may know, I continue to accept a limited number of new patients per month for Functional Medicine. If you would like help overcoming a gut or other chronic health condition, and want to prevent chronic problems, and want to promote longevity, please call my Santa Monica Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition office at 310-395-3111. And we can set you up for a consultation for functional medicine. And I will talk to everybody next week.

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