70% of your immune system is in your gut, and when you affect these guys, everything changes.

Yeah.

And actually, one thing that is a hypothesis right now about just the driver of chronic disease is called the disappearing microbiota theory.

And it's not just what we are exposed to in our lifetime, so all of the things you mentioned, you know, also antibiotics, but how we are inheriting less diverse microbiomes from generation to generation because of all of the things that each subsequent generation is exposed to.

So this includes things like C-sections, less breastfeeding.

Um, and when people get less of a diverse microbiome, this is, like you said, where the immune system lives, and this microbiome is what's actually modulating all of the immune activity in the body, and it's really the root of chronic illness.

So over time, it's really important not to just think of the things that we personally have, uh, a choice in how we manage, but thinking that over time, over generations, we have actually been inheriting a less diverse microbial, um, ecosystem in our bodies just by default, just because of, you know, modern living, sanitation, um, you know, all of the pesticides that we use to grow our food.

Oh, wow

You knew something wasn't right.

So I was about 24, 25 years old.

I had at this point moved to Seattle.

I didn't have a car.

I was riding my bike everywhere.

I was very active.

I worked at a coffee shop.

the no more moment when you decided you better go to a doctor?

So, you know, share with us about some of the studies.

Yeah.

And thank you.

This is my favorite thing to talk about.

I think personal experience and anecdotal experience and even clinical experience for those of us who've been working with clients over many years, that's so valuable.

But then actually creating a science experiment where we take a bunch of humans with a population that is kind of cohesive and then see what happens.

So much has come out of that.

Yeah,

What is that?

Yeah, so nutrient density really talks about how each food has a bunch of different compounds that our body needs, raw materials.

And so a nutrient-dense food, ounce per ounce, has a high amount of these compounds.

And most people are familiar with vitamins and minerals, but I'm not just talking about vitamins and minerals.

There are other compounds.

So omega-3 fats, these are actually really important for our body resolving inflammation.

Inflammation is kind of what makes you feel puffy and not great when you have an autoimmune condition.

How do you know that?

Mickey, what is the transition phase?

Yeah, thanks, John.

So the transition phase is really when a person decides they're going to do this elimination diet.

So what we previously talked about is the elimination phase.

It's the amount of time that you are eliminating food strictly.

In order to get there, you do now what I call the transition phase.

So back in the day, 15 years ago, when I did this myself for my two at that time, autoimmune conditions, I just jumped right in.

What is that?

Go ahead, Mickey.

Absolutely.

And so this is because these foods, now, I always like to say, they don't affect everybody negatively, but they are among the top foods that could affect people with autoimmune conditions.

So what you do is you avoid these foods strictly for a minimum of 30 days.

Some people like to go up to 60 days because they're extra motivated or they have a condition that maybe, you know, they have a lot of support.

at home, they can do it.

We can talk about that later if you want to.

Did I read that correctly?

Go ahead.

Oh, great.

Great.

Well, autoimmune disease is simply when your body attacks itself.

Anybody who has one knows that.

But for anybody who doesn't, that's really the basic pitch for autoimmune disease.

And it can affect any organ or system in the body automatically.

Is that where it started with you, Mickey?

Here's Mickey.

Yeah, yeah, because this is a big life change.

It takes about three to six months to really engage with it.

And for anybody listening who's like, wow, that is really intense.

If you have autoimmune disease and you struggle with this illness that doctors don't have a lot of quality options for us, we're often given some medications for different symptoms, but it doesn't go all the way into helping us live a full and productive life again.

So this is very attractive.

to people who have autoimmune disease.

It's like a magic spell for my hair.

So what happened to you?

Yeah.

So this all really started for me 15 years ago when I was undergoing my own health crisis, which at the time was a couple years.

I know for a lot of people, you know, they suffer with autoimmune symptoms for even far longer than that.

I think the average is five or six years before a diagnosis.

So I ended up having...

You know, I was in my 20s.

So tell me, um, a little bit about all the books and how this new one is different from your others.

Can you tell people your, your journey of autoimmunity?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's actually how I got into nutrition and health, as a lot of us doI was diagnosed with Hashimoto's and celiac when I was 26.

At the time, I had been searching for a couple years for answers to really unexplained, non-specific health problems.

So the things that, you know, a lot of people start experiencing, fatigue, kinda h- shedding my hair, starting to not tolerate my workouts.

I was super active, cycling, running, and all of a sudden, you know, I actually couldn't, um, make it up a hill that I normally was traversing to get to work in Seattle.

Yeah, I'm familiar, yeah

So can you tell us how has AIP, uh, evolved from what was that one sentence, and then through the years, what is it now?

Yeah.

So back then, there was this paleo diet caveat where if you have autoimmune conditions, you might consider removing grains, legumes, eggs, nuts, seeds, and nightshades.

And today we know that as core AIP.

That's kind of the original autoimmune protocol.

But that was literally the sentence, take out these foods in addition to, like, a paleo diet.

Or in functional medicine, they were using specific elimination diets for autoimmune disease that had the same list of foods.

What would you tell somebody in that spot?

But, you know, being one of the leading voices behind the Autoimmune Protocol for well over a decade, one, wh-I would love to know the evolution of AIP and how it has evolved since it first started, and where you're at right now with this new iteration based on the research.

Yeah.

So thanks for that.

I love telling this story because it is a really unique story.

So AIP kind of came together about 15 years ago in the chronic illness community of people, mostly women like myself, who were searching, like grasping, honestly, around the internet for little threads of things that could help us feel better with autoimmune disease.

So first, I was a patient.

I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's and celiac.

Can you talk a little bit about how y- how you came, how you were able to come up with this?

Yes, and can you talk about some of the medical research behind the autoimmune protocol and, like, what the science actually shows and which autoimmune conditions have been studied so far?

Yeah.

So starting in 2015, the autoimmune protocol has been used in different groups for an intervention for autoimmune disease.

So the first research group that started this all off was at Scripps, the gastroenterology department, and they did a study using patients with Crohn's and ulcerative colitis.

So IBD collectively is what we refer to those two conditions.

They are digestive autoimmune conditions in the colon that cause ulceration and bleeding, and people when they are in flares, they are extremely uncomfortable.

So in this pilot study that they did, they ran 17 people with an active flare that had failed on whatever medication, standard treatment, biologics, steroids, everything.

And so, uh, what prompted the changes, and, and how do the core AIP and the modified AIP, how does that make the protocol more accessible today?

How do you see AIP helping this community, like the thyroid community specifically? Like, what kinds of changes would you say are realistic to expect?

Yeah, so we actually have two medical studies using the autoimmune protocol, specifically in people with Hashimoto's.

So one of the pleasures of, like, just the 15 years that I have been doing this is just seeing the research community get really excited about AIP.

That started with some IBD studies.

We've had some Hashimoto's studies.

We've also now, even as of a couple weeks ago, had some rheumatoid arthritis results published.

And the collection of all that results in the conditions where clinical remission is an endpoint, which does not include Hashimoto's, we can talk about that more, but IBD and RA, it seems like three out of four people get meaningful improvements in about a t- one to two month of elimination, which is fantastic.

So I'd love to hear from you, like, why, why did AIP need to evolve?

This stuff actually works."

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, yeah, I'm so excited about the research.

It's literally all I wanna talk about.

[chuckles] So, um, in IBD, you know, the very first study, and I just wanna tell everyone kinda how this happened, a patient who was going to, uh, gastroenterology at Scripps, San Diego, had ulcerative colitis.

They needed a bowel resection, so for IBD speak, you know, this is where they take out the diseased portion of the intestine, kind of reattach everything.

It is very invasive and intense surgery.

I'd love to know your Hashimoto's and RA studies too.