72: Why Your IBD Keeps Getting Worse No Matter What You Try

If it feels like you've tried every intervention (pharmaceuticals, natural remedies, herbs, etc.) and keep getting worse, there's a very explainable reason for that. You'll learn why this is happening and what you can do to fix it and finally start healing.

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• Immune reactivity and hyper-vigilance
• Leaky gut and gut barrier breakdown
• Microbial instability
• Detox and drainage overload bogging down your system
• Threat signals and the "cell danger response"
• The order of steps needed to intervene
• What is involved in these steps

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Transcript

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) There is nothing more frustrating than trying to heal your gut by yourself with better food, better supplements, even better doctors and specialists, only to feel worse every time that you try. But by the end of this lesson, you're going to understand why this keeps happening and the cycle keeps repeating. And of course, I'm going to show you how you can stop triggering your symptoms without guessing and actually get yourself on the road to finally healing with these interventions. Now, if we haven't met yet, my name is Josh Dech. I'm an IBD specialist, physician's consultant and researcher. And I'm here to help you understand how your gut works so you can heal it naturally. Now, two things to keep in mind here. I got a puppy running around who is inevitably going to pee on something. And I'm also dressed like I'm going to a rat battle because Wednesdays are my days off and I don't do my hair or dress like a human being. So that's why I look like this instead. So love you. And that's what's happening. So here we are today. Now, there are five main reasons why your symptoms seem to get worse whenever you try to intervene with natural supplements or even pharmaceuticals, even diets. And these aren't random. They're actually all related. Everything that's going on inside your immune system works together. And we're going to connect the dots for you here. So the first reason why you seem to keep getting sick no matter what you do is actually what we're going to call hypervigilance and even more directly immune hypervigilance. What is immune hypervigilance? Well, we talk about bowel disease. It's not an autoimmune condition. The literature is extremely clear. We're working on publishing more of this now. It's extremely clear that your immune system isn't attacking yourself. In fact, when you look at all the antibodies in IBD, the top 10 most common ones from two to three percent of the time up to 80 plus percent of the time we see these antibodies in humans, none of them are self-attacking, which means the disease is not by definition autoimmune at all. And when your doctors are saying that they are grossly misspeaking. But here's what's happening instead. You have four paths or four layers of immune responses. The layer number one, this one is going to be acute. It's kind of like getting the flu or food poisoning is kind of get past it. Your body flames up and it comes back down. You're good. That's acute. The problem is after a long enough period of time, it turns into chronic. Chronic is where it's ongoing for a year or more in spite of intervention and it's still not fixing or getting better. That's considered chronic. Stage three, this is where you are. This is what we're calling immune mediated. So picture this. You have one stressful day. You're fine. You shake it off a stressful year or two or five years. Eventually, you're just going to snap and go postal. You lose it. It's an overreaction. That's immune mediated. That immune response becomes so hypervigilant, so elevated. What's happening instead is that the immune responses push, push, push, push, push to the point where tissue begins breaking down. Instead of getting rid of the threat and healing, they actually become toxic to your system. You're not self-attacking. It's just working overtime to try to heal with no off switch. So the end result is things break down. I mean, picture you're trying to do a renovation on your house and instead of just going coop and scooping out a couple things off the wall, you tear the whole house down. That off switch on the wrecking ball just never got turned off. That's what's happening to your immune system. The fourth stage of your immune system, this is what we're going to be calling either immune deficiency or collapse. This is where we could see true autoimmune disease if it even exists and that's another conversation. We might see chronic inflammatory response syndrome known as SERS. We might see MCAS or mouse cell activation syndrome. But most of you, the 98 plus percent, are you're right here. It's immune mediated. Your immune system is overreacting. So the reason every time you try to intervene and take something, take an herb, whatever it is, you have a hyperactive, hypervigilant immune response. So every time you add something into it, it's a threat-based response. So it's like you having severe anxiety, it overreacts to whatever you do. It's not autoimmune. But what's more interesting about this, it's a hypervigilant response or hyperreactive response. But we take a lot of things to try to calm the immune system. I see so many supplements out there, medicinal mushrooms, they actually activate the immune system. They're boosting it. Well imagine you boosted your anxiety during a panic attack. How much worse would you feel? The same thing is happening here. You're elevating your responses accidentally and pushing the wrong ones up instead of calming them down. So your immune boosters are harming you. And that overactive response, you're getting flares, mucus, blood, food sensitivities, medication, supplement intolerance, the works. So your first reason, you have a hypervigilant immune response. That's why you're so sensitive. The second big reason, and now again, when you're trying to take natural, herbal, anything, you have a hyperactive response simply because you have leaky gut. Now, the more appropriate term that some people prefer is increased intestinal barrier permeability. Leaky gut is a common term. If someone says leaky gut doesn't exist, they're arguing semantics on language. Head out of your ass. Let's talk really. Call it leaky gut. It is what it is, right? So we have leaky gut. When you have this integrity loss of your barrier, instead of it being nice and tight, it gets leaky. So things can pass through artificially when before they would have to go through checks and balances like border security at the airport, right? You have to screen and scan everything to say, okay, you're safe to go. Your immune system loses that integrity. And so things can just pass right through unchecked. The problem is these what could be harmless compounds cross into blood circulation, lymphatic system, where they should not be, or at the time they should not be. They're not small enough. They're not broken down enough. Your immune system overreacts and it stimulates amplifying the reaction. So what you've just done is you took a hyperactive immune response, like you in the middle of a bloody panic attack, and then you added more anxiety on top of it through your leaky gut. And now that immune response gets worse, that's why it keeps happening. Number three, this one we're calling microbial instability. What does that mean? Well, in the case of inflammation, irritation, in the case of a body that is highly inflamed, that breeds an environment for what's called dysbiosis. Dysbiosis just means imbalanced bacteria. Your gut microbiome, it's got a state we call homeostasis. That's normal, that's healthy, that's balanced. That's what it's always trying to get back to. If you get food poisoning, that microbiome imbalances, but then it works back to homeostasis. It's healthy, normal level. That's where it should be. The problem is you're hyperreactive, you've got inflammation, you've got irritation, there's something in your gut that's driving these immune responses, which creates an environment for bad guys to overgrow. They like inflammation. Now, your ecosystem, instead of being strong and healthy and resilient, is actually quite fragile. And when it's fragile, it reacts violently to sensitivity. Picture somebody, let's go back to the same analogy. You got somebody with anxiety, a severe anxiety disorder. When you put them through stressful events or you put them through change, you do something, they can go into a total panic attack or a meltdown. Same thing with your gut. You have a fragile ecosystem, like a fragile psyche or emotional state. Now you go to add antimicrobials, probiotics, fiber, different supports for your bile, whatever you do, and these can cause die-off, they can cause mobilization of toxins, and all these things are moving through an already fragile ecosystem, adding stress to a stressed out body. Now what you're doing is amplifying that anxiety response. It's against somebody who's really anxious and you shoot a gun off behind them, that bang, sends them into a panic attack. That's what you're doing to your body because of the antimicrobial instability. Reason number four, we have blocked pathways for what? Detox and drainage. If you haven't heard me talk about detox and drainage, simply put, detoxing is collecting your garbage, drainage is bringing it out to the curb. So when your body detoxes, there's different phases, it's actually taking in all this junk, it's neutralizing it, it's making it non-toxic or as little amount of toxin to your body as possible, and it breaks it all down and says, okay, you're packed up and ready to exit. Then it goes through your drainage and there are seven exit doors inside of your body that we're focusing on to get things out. The main ones that I see in bowel disease, this is a problem, picture this for a minute before I explain your drainage, picture you're trying to detox, you got a messy house and you're trying to clean up your house, what do you do? You take all the junk and you pile it up into one room. The other rooms might be clean, but that one just got way worse because you didn't send it out of the door. Same thing what you're dealing with now, you get all these detox processes going in and then your drainage pathways, which are primarily going to be your liver, your bile, that's going to be through gallbladder, your bile system, right? Bowels, bladder or kidneys, I shouldn't have put bladder, it's going to be kidneys, you got your limbs and you got your skin and even sinuses. Think about when you're sick, right? You pee, you poop, you sweat, you stink, your nose gets stuffy, these are things trying to exit your body or responses on the exit pathways. So when you are trying to detox and you're mobilizing toxins, but the exit doors are blocked, you just move toxins around, they go somewhere else, your body has to respond to that threat in another location. That's why if you go to detox, I got really bad acne now or I got really bad joint pain, my bowels got really bad or my intestines got more inflamed, I'm really anxious. Yes, because you move toxins around to another system and those symptoms you're experiencing are toxins that move from one place into that skin and now the skin's got acne or inflammation. It moved from the gut into the joints and now you have arthritis trying to detox. That's all it is. You're mobilizing toxins, creating a different immune response. And so as you're trying to intervene, you're taking detoxes, you're taking new pills, new supplements, new anything, new herbs, new vitamins, your body's been lacking. If you don't have these open pathways, instead of clearing, you're moving and just moving junk from one room to another. That's why you inflame. I'm going to give you one more reason why this keeps happening to the cycle of taking things and getting worse. I'm going to show you to do to fix it and the steps that are required to do it safely. Reason number five, this one we're going to call threat signaling. Threat signaling, in fact, I'm even going to put here CDR. This stands for cell danger response. Threat signaling actually has to do with your CNS, it's your central nervous system. You have your central nervous system, which is actually your brain and your spine. You have your peripheral, which is all the things that leave from your spine to your arms, legs, fingers, toes. That's everything on the outside. Central down the middle, peripheral on the outside, but you also have what's called your ENS or enteric nervous system, which are the hundreds of millions of neurons inside of your gut, which actually between the gut-brain connection, 80% of the signals between them are made in your gut. They go to your brain. So your gut does 80% of the talking between your gut-brain connection. So you have these nervous system responses. Think about when you're stressed, you're anxious, your nervous system is hypervigilant. In the same way, a hyperactive nervous system, it amplifies pain, it increases intestinal permeability, it compromises immune responses, it even lowers your tolerances to certain toxins, to viruses, to whatever it is. So an overactive nervous system, you're stressed, you're not sleeping well, you're chronically ill, you're depleted on nutrients, B vitamins and omegas and zinc and magnesium and all the stuff you need to have a healthy, balanced nervous system, it doesn't have the tools it needs to calm. It's like you having a broken leg, but having not eaten for three months, your body's not going to repair that leg very quickly because there's not enough excess to go around to fix the damage. In the same way, when your body is deficient, what's happening is your nervous system becomes overactive and inflamed. Those responses don't have enough nutrients to bring them back down to a healthy state. And now we're sick or sickish. And the other thing we have, this is your fight flight. You're stressed, you're not sleeping, your nervous system doesn't have what it needs, you're in this fight flight response. Your body doesn't know what calm feels like or even how to get there, it doesn't have the tools. Well, the cell danger response is an itty bitty cellular version of that fight flight response. What happens instead, your body, instead of being able to produce energy, instead of like a lot of toxins build up in your cells, we talk about cellular detoxification to keep you healthy. Well, in a cell danger response, part of the protective mechanism is actually holding toxins. So you're spending all this time trying to detoxify and get stuff out of your body, but your cells are so bound up, they're not releasing the toxins to begin with. And you're actually causing more agitation and irritation. You're wondering why you're not getting there. You're getting more stressed and you're getting more sick. So it's actually a threat signal from the nervous system or even the cells. And that response is preventing you from getting well and if not, contributing to the illness. So the five main reasons why you are currently taking something, you're intervening, taking herbs, vitamins, supplements, medication, whatever it is. And you're not only not getting better, but you're actually getting worse is because you have a hyperactive or hypervigilant immune system. So those responses can't calm down. You have a leaky gut, so things are getting through, causing more response from the immune system. Microbial instability, which leads to die off reactions and toxins and all kinds of junk building up in the system. You can't get rid of them or detox or get the toxins out of your body. So they mobilize, causing more reactions. And then of course, your nervous system or your cells are stuck in fight flight. This is why you stay sick and have trouble getting well again. I see this probably one in 10 times that I'm working with somebody with bowel disease. It has to do with a stuck response in some way right here. But there is step in a process actually required to get you better. And if you don't do these things, you may never get there. And I'm sure based on what the symptoms are, what the reasons are so far, probably have a good idea of what it's going to take to reverse it. But I'm going to walk you through that anyway. Number one, the first step to getting you better if you're stuck in this cycle is to calm. It means a lot of things. It does. It means calm the immune system. It means calm the nervous system, right? We have to actually calm those systems down. These hyperactive responses cause inflammation. Honestly, at this stage, I don't care if you have to use drugs. You want to use Ativan. You want to use some sort of antidepressant, which can have immune modulating effects. If you want to use something to control or calm, you can use supplements, amino acids like L-theanine. You can use valerian or lavender or hops. There's all kinds of supplements to calm you down. I've even been relying on a peptide called C-LANK. The C-LANK, it actually is called GABA-NERGIC. GABA is this calming... It's G-A-B-A. It stands for gamma-aminobutyric acid. A little science lesson for you. It's a very calming thing for your nervous system. And when you get this peptide in, it actually produces more calming. And I've had people on it who feel like they're stoned. If they take six sprays on their nose versus one spray, they're like... And they're just on the coast, don't want to move ever. They just feel lazy because your nervous system is so chill, but they're not anxious. Now, is it fixing the root problem? No. Is it managing the symptom so you don't contribute to the problem? Yes, and that's okay. At this stage, you need prednisone or biologics or something to get your body into a state where you're not so inflamed so you're able to experience calm, which gives you the tools of the room to start intervening to get you actually better. Do it. If you need surgery, do you want lavender oil or do you want anesthesia? Give me the good stuff. It's temporary evil, and I can get better naturally soon. That's the steps we're looking for. So that's number one. We have to calm before intervening. That can be breathwork. It can be acupuncture. It can be earthing, red light, go to a beach, take a vacation, work on sleep, and sleep hygiene is very important. Knocking off the blue lights and the bright lights before bed, wearing blue light blocking glasses like reds at nighttime. These things will give your body the tools it needs to be able to start the calming process. The next one you're going to look at is we're going to consider some restoration, and it's kind of a broad-reaching word in this context. What we're looking at here in terms of restoration, your gut lining. You have leaky gut and inflammation. Yes, we're going to calm that down, calm the nervous system, help you get at a cell danger response, but then we need to give your body some tools to start healing and sealing because it's trying to do that already. This might look like the glutamines, the aloes. Maybe it's something more delicate like a marshmallow tea or slippery elm something. These are just tools to give your body what it needs. Maybe we're looking at restrictive diets. Maybe it's carnivore. Maybe it's just chicken and eggs and boiled chicken and rice. Whatever you can tolerate to not further aggravate the issue while we're working on treatments. Maybe that's needed. Maybe what we're looking at is micronutrients. Maybe you're juicing. I've got a client who's so reactive to everything she takes. We worked on breathwork and meditation and juicing to get some basic nutrients. She was able to tolerate that, and she's already feeling better because her body was locked in the cell danger response, hyper-reactive to even vitamins. We gave her very natural forms of everything that she could just take in and absorb more easily. Maybe you are taking vitamins, minerals, amino acids, or what's called EAAs or essential amino acids. Maybe it's going to be an elemental diet. Whatever it is that you need to give your body some of the nutrients to start restoring or I should even say replenishing its storages of vital tools it needs to rebuild. Step one, we're going to calm. Step two, we're going to restore. Step three, this is where now we can go into the all-important drainage phase. Now, again, I often start drainage right away. Most people can handle it unless they're in a very severe nervous system state or a cell danger response. Then most people can do drainage right away. But if you're stuck in that nervous system, that cell danger, that fight-flight response, drainage can often be a problem for you because you're mobilizing in a way that still you're releasing. But when we go to drainage, this is where we're looking at your bile support, your liver support, lymphatic and sweating and different interventions to actually get toxins out of your body. Why? Because it's like carrying a cup that's full of water on a bumpy road. You're going to spill it. The more you spill, the worse your symptoms get. But if you can take that drainage and actually get rid of some of this junk and you can begin emptying your cup, even though it may not be fully empty, you're less likely to spill. That's all we're doing is getting toxins out of the body to reduce the load on your cells and on your system so you don't have to freak out so much. You're really anxious. You got a lot going on. Hey, you know what? I'm going to take half of the things off your to-do list today. You don't even have to think about it. Like, oh, I don't feel so anxious anymore. Same with your immune system. Take the toxins out. Start drainage support. Your body can calming down. And then we can go into the all-important final stage, which is actually the beginning of the 5R process. The 5Rs are simply stated as remove. Now, we're removing the junk, the microbes, whatever it is. Drainage can even be part of the remove process. We are replenishing vitamins, minerals, amino acids. If you're at the stage now, you can tolerate them if you haven't done that already. We can rebuild and repair the gut lining and gut microbiome and then rejuvenate, not boost, rejuvenate the immune system. Remember, boosting, if your immune system's imbalanced and you boost the imbalance by accident, taking the wrong step, you will get far worse. But if you can rejuvenate and bring balance back to your immune system, that's how we get better. So I'm going to wrap this in a summary for you and I'm going to get to questions right away. Five reasons why every time you intervene, you get worse. Hypervigilant immune response, leaky gut, microbial instability, detox and drainage is congested or blocked, and then you have a threat signal from your nervous system or your cells. The way back is going to be to calm that system, the nervous system, the immune system, through drugs or other intervention that's okay for temporary. Do what you have to do. Then we can go into restoration and start replenishing and filling up the tools and resources your body needs. Give it the curcumins for inflammation. Give it the aloe for soothing and cooling. Give it the L-glutamine or amino acids for the gut lining. We can go into drainage, emptying the toxins, getting them out of your body, and then we can go into the actual removal of the toxins and other junk. And so you can see how the five R's that we take of rejuvenate, replenish might be up top here. So the five R process, I often talk about it and someone will come in, come to my program, go, I didn't follow the five R's exactly. No, you didn't. Because sometimes you have to turn it on its head. It really just depends. Those five R's, it's like you could stick them in a hat, shake it around and pull one out at random. Everyone's going to be different how they respond to each R in the five R process, but the five R's exist nonetheless. And this is how you get better with a hyperactive system that's hyperreactive to everything that you try. So I'm going to turn over to the questions now. This is a great chance to ask them. If you have not asked your questions yet, do it. That's what they're here for. They're here to give you answers to the questions that you've been dying to ask that nobody else will answer for you. I'm going to drop into it right now. But before we do that, I want to give you some information. If you've already found this episode somewhere else on one of my social media channels, you may not know we have tools for you that are free everywhere. You can get my podcast called Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally. You can get access to all my resources, all the things. And we have that out there for you. You can also get help through one of our programs. And here's how you can do that. If you're here on the pod or you're watching on Instagram or Facebook right now, there's a two-step process to do. Otherwise, we will miss you. It takes two steps. Here's what you got to do. The first, you're going to comment the word solution. That's going to trigger us. We'll get a notification saying, oh, hey, someone's looking for help. Got it. Second to that, I need you to send me a DM. That's a direct message to my Instagram inbox, my Facebook Messenger, whatever it is. Here's why. Probably 30, 40% of the time, someone comments the word solution. But you don't know this, but your privacy settings do not allow me to message you. And I'll comment and say, hey, I'm here to help. What can I do? Then you never hear from me again. You go years and years getting sick and go, oh, I remember that time, Josh, and you could help. So when you send me a message, it bypasses the privacy settings. We can get you connected right away with some resources. If you're on YouTube or on the podcast, all you got to do is click the link down below under the video under this episode. You can email me directly, book a call if you want to do that, and jump right in. We can just talk what it looks like. But here's what happens on a call. All we do with you is we go through these calls. My job on that is to figure out what is your root cause, where did it come from, how did you get here, and what does the path back look like? How much time is it going to take you? What's it going to cost you in terms of money for labs and testing and supplements and stuff if you need those at all? I will go through a full budget with you. At the end of that, you can say, you know what? It's not for me. That's okay. No pressure. It's not a sales call. If you say, you know what? I'd love to try. Let's jump right in. We'll actually get you into our team, 16 sessions over 16 weeks to walk you through the process of what it looks like to get better. We do these every single week. So let's jump over to the questions. Let's see what we got. Questions, questions, questions. If you haven't dropped your questions in the chat yet, do that now. And I'm going to start with Karen here on Facebook. And if I don't read your question out, that means it just got shoved up in the comments. We don't see it yet. But the first question we got here from Karen, she says, I just did a parasite cleanse beginning of December and still have diarrhea. Is this normal? Karen, if you did a parasite cleanse, picture this. When you go to do any kind of antimicrobial, call it a killer phase because you're killing off parasites or fungus or bacteria. And any parasitic herbs do all the above. Antibacterial, antifungal, all the above. So picture, you got a balloon and that balloon is full of confetti. Now, you have got this cup. Your cup is already very full. What happens when you pop this balloon? All that confetti empties directly into your cup, causing it to overflow, and now you've got a problem. When you kill a microbe, a parasite, a bacteria, they're full of toxins and other things inside of them. Picture it like popping a balloon full of confetti. All that junk spills out and goes everywhere. And it has to capture in your cup, overflowing your overflowed system. Therefore, you end up getting sick. And you did that a month ago in December and you're still sick because your system never recovered. It overreacted to the mess. It's like me coming into your house and taking a bag of garbage. Your house is already, let's say you're a hoarder. It's already full. You're anxious all the time because of the mess. And I go in and just empty a trash bag. And you freak out. It takes you a month to calm down because you don't have proper drainage and you missed some necessary steps in that process of getting yourself well. Next question we've got here. Yeah, from Karen. I didn't have the diarrhea before I started the parasite cleanse and now you do. That's right. Because your cup wasn't as full. It was right on the brink. It was almost full. When you did the killers and emptied all this junk into it, you overflowed your cup and it's not been able to empty since. And that's why it's not going away. Mark, good to see you here. Karen, really appreciate you. Always so willing to share your knowledge and understanding. Of course I am willing to share my knowledge and understanding. That's why I do these. Thanks for coming out. Mark says this call was so clutch. I think clutch means cool. Is that what it means? I look like I'm cool dressed this way, but I'm not at all. Mark, is it fetch? You're never going to make fetch happen, Gretchen. Very good. I'm so glad you enjoyed it. You have any questions over on the gram? All right. Nothing on the Instagram. Guys, that makes it easy. Thank you so much for coming out. I'm so glad you enjoyed it. This call, it's eye-opening. It teaches you things and tools you need. It's all about calming the system, calming the nervous system. I'll tell you one last little tidbit here. If you have any last minute questions, drop them down below, but here's a really important golden nugget. If you're going through a process and you're not sure if your nervous system is overburdened, I promise you it is. We live in a world where our environments are not compatible with our biology. We live in a world where we're always so hypervigilant. We're always anxious. There's news and social media and politics and junk in our systems, and we're all inflamed. Our gut bacteria is imbalanced, and we have a thousand and one things to do every day with clocks, and we're micromanaging everything. We are chronically stressed. We have adapted to it to not notice it, but our nervous systems do. Our little lizard brains that have been around since the dawn of time were never designed to have this kind of lifestyle. So we are chronically stressed. We're just numb to it. It's like having a cut on your foot that you walk on. The cut never heals, but eventually you callous around it. Sure, but it's still a weak spot, and your foot's still screwed up, right? Same concept with stress in our lives. We just never get, we just, we never truly get used to it. We have a question on Instagram? Yeah, go ahead. This person says, have you heard of ModuCare? Have you heard of ModuCare? I have not heard of ModuCare. Elaborate. Let me know what ModuCare is. Guys, have you heard of ModuCare? Is that M-O-D-U care? I'm going to look it up right now so I can help you with this one. If I don't know anything about it, often it takes two seconds, and I can get the gist and give you some information. ModuCare, super immune. It's a dietary supplement. Let's see what's in you, ModuCare. If you guys can't see this, we're looking at a dietary supplement, ModuCare. All right, daily immune balance. There's many different forms, many supplements. Interaction safety. Why, it's a chewable tablet for the immune system. Why can't I see your ingredients? ModuCare ingredients. I imagine it's going to be herbs and vitamins and stuff. Yeah, pine oil, non-medical ingredient. Okay, so yeah, beta-cytosterol. Plant sterols can be helpful. Again, think immune stimulation. That's really what we're looking at. So any kind of plant sterol. Think of them almost like a vitamin, but they're not in the vitamin class. They're considered a nutraceutical, where it's a supplement that stimulates a response in your body. Can these things be good? Sure. I imagine the word ModuCare came from modulating the immune system. And what we do, we modulate an immune system. You basically take an immune system that's hyperreactive, and you give your body signals through certain chemicals or nutraceuticals that tell it, it's okay, calm down. You're dependent on those things, because the second you stop taking them, the signal goes away, your immune system ramps back up. But any kind of plant sterol, again, I've never used it in my practice, but I could see how for some, it would be beneficial. But just like medicinal mushrooms or other immune modulators I talked about, if you have an imbalanced immune system and you take something you've never taken