Episode 125: Stress Management Tips
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Managing stress is so important for improving your health.
In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Jacqueline Junco, a board-certified physician, specializing in chronic illness management and environmental medicine.
Dr. Junco talks about the role of inflammation in various health conditions, including chronic fatigue, neuroinflammatory disorders, and cardiovascular disease. She shares practical tips on how to manage inflammation through diet, stress reduction, and other lifestyle interventions.
This is your chance to gain valuable insights on reducing inflammation and enhancing your overall health.
Tune into the Fast Metabolism Matters Podcast – Stress Management Tips with Dr. Jacqueline Junco.
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Jacqueline Junco, M.D. M.P.H, A.P., IMD a physician at the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine is a renowned expert in providing traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) services. Dr. Junco is a medically trained doctor who is certified in acupuncture, Chinese herbology, and oriental medicine from the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. Her knowledge of Western medicine and natural alternatives creates a powerful combination of modern technology and ancient therapies that are used to treat a vast majority of health conditions.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.jackiejunco_/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-junco-775507162/
Transcript Below:
Haylie Pomroy:. I am Haylie Pomroy, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fast Metabolism Diet, and the former Assistant Director of the Integrative Medicine Program at the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine. I say former because you guys, I am a lifelong learner, just like you all, and I have actually decided to go back and get my PhD in neuroimmunology. I stayed in the institute for it because there is no other place in the world that has a grouping of the most brilliant researchers, scientists, and practitioners. Of course, today we're talking about a very hot topic, and that is inflammation. What did I do? I grabbed one of our leading doctors in our clinic, Dr. Jackie Junco, and she's going to join me today and we are going to talk about, what is inflammation? What do you do with that bad inflammation, how does it impact the body, and how can you get your body back on track toward health? Dr. Junco, thank you so much for coming again today. You are a huge fan favorite and we get tons of questions after every podcast that you do. And so you tackling inflammation was a big one for our community.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Great. Thank you, Haylie. It's great to be here once again and congratulations on your new endeavor.
Haylie Pomroy: Thank you. I heard that after a little bit of a lot of education and clinical practice, that you just knocked something off as another title, you're also now the Department Chair of Integrative Medicine, but something else just happened.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes. I just got board certified from integrative medicine.
Haylie Pomroy: Which is funny because you've been practicing integrative medicine for?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: 26 years.
Haylie Pomroy: What is this with us successful women just collecting titles? I love going through our clinicians' offices and seeing all the...
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: All the alphabet behind our last names.
Haylie Pomroy: We are a lifelong learning institute. And it seems like we are attracting a lot of listeners that are really fired up and very excited about learning more about, not only their health personally but what they can do about it. We're going to try to tackle inflammation. I was just interviewed, someone from the American Heart Association the other day, and we were talking about that, they say if you want something done, have a woman do it. But we are now, women, are beating in, from a gender perspective, for heart disease, for stroke. And they're talking a lot about that being inflammatory-based. Is inflammation more than just breaking a bone in healing?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes. Haylie. I think inflammation is so important because, like you mentioned, it's not just having pain in your foot or you strike something and you get hurt. Inflammation goes far beyond that. We have inflammation, we have changes that occur in the brain, where we have the cognitive fog that you can’t think very well, you can’t focus. We have inflammation in the heart, which yes, us women, as we get older we have to be careful of that. The #1 leading cause of death in women is heart disease, then there's a lot of cardiac inflammation. There's inflammation in the gut which we know affects a lot of the whole gastric biome. There's inflammation all over the body.
Haylie Pomroy: Does the problem come in, I mean, we're supposed to have inflammation, it's part of our adaptive immune response. It's triggered to heal us when we have a toxic exposure or a viral exposure, insult, or injury. We don't want to be a noninflammatory being, we want to have that response, correct?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes, it's a normal response, but when it becomes chronic is when these things get affected.
Haylie Pomroy: Why does it become chronic? Is it that the body can't fix the insult? Or is it that the body gets where it doesn't shut off the initial response?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I think it's both and there's a lot of factors that could contribute to that, versus, what you're eating, things that you're exposed to, our stress level. There are so many factors that could make or break that response.
Haylie Pomroy: We're supposed to have an inflammatory response to an insult or injury or virus or bacteria or whatever it is, we call it in our community a hormetic event, something that we're supposed to adapt to, a change. Our body's supposed to self-soothe, supposed to re-regulate, at some point.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It's supposed to, but the majority of cases it really doesn't. We live in such a fight-or-flight environment, and our bodies are so induced to so many different toxins out there. Your cell phone emits EMF that causes inflammation. There are so many things, the pollutants in the air, mold exposure, so many things that are out there that hinder your body to do what it needs to do.
Haylie Pomroy: I think it's interesting that you brought up environmental medicine pretty darn fast. You brought up two things so far, and I'll get to the other one, which is I know impacting everybody, but so is environmental medicine. I think sometimes we think we're living in a little bubble or something, we forget that we engage with our environment. In the institute, we call it environmental medicine. Looking at what type of approaches can we help heal the body when it has had an insult from the outside environment?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And I think that's why it's important that we do take, when we first see a patient, part of our history, which takes a while, is doing a very thorough environmental history. What they were exposed to as children, what they were exposed to as adults. What kind of diet do they eat? Where they source their water from? How old their house is, what kind of walls they have, if they have carpet, if they have pets. Where they work, how old is the building?
Haylie Pomroy: It's so normal for us at the institute to have this conversation. I know that there are tons of listeners that are going, “My doctors never asked me.” Never asked me that or talked to me about that. But I'm going to share something that just happened to me because, I've been, 30 years now, practicing in the nutrition space. I'm so indoctrinated, my kids are so indoctrinated. My daughter just landed in the hospital and it was so interesting to me to watch this 22-year-old, articulate her health history, and what had happened. She said, it's in the back of the truck and I was pulling out this moldy hay that it rained and snowed in Colorado, we were now in Arizona. And as I was smelling it, I felt like my throat was… And the doctor literally cut her off and was, “This is a viral infection.” And I got to squeak. I'm young, I'm healthy, I'm fit, why wouldn't I just kick in a virus? I'm trying to tell you about my environment and all the potential immunosuppressors, I was under tremendous stress, I had just driven my daughter, and I'm sitting there listening because she's over 18 now, so I have to let her talk to the doctors. And she's saying, and I also just drove 17 hours straight and it was super stressed because the person that was supposed to be there to receive the dogs wasn't there. And they’re just going “We're going to do a viral culture.” And I was just like “Really?” I was disheartened, I consider one of the top hospitals in the world with great, compassionate doctors, and nobody cared what her environmental exposure was.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Unfortunately, that part is always fast-forward. You always move on to whatever's happening, I think just physicians don't have the time to allocate to all those, to that such a detailed history and to sit there and listen. Unfortunately, that's the way the system is now, we're blessed that we are able to do and practice differently than mainstream doctors, which is a big plus for our patients because we have the ability to sit down and sit there with them for 2, 3 hours sometimes, and go through a detailed history of everything they've done.
Haylie Pomroy: Something interesting that got brought up in our Friday clinicals, and I talk about that a lot because I love that time when we're all together, but I think it was Dr. Klimas that said, we don't spend 2 hours with people to 3 hours with people, we don't run all these different tests, we don't incorporate nutrition and food because it sounded like a fun thing to do. We did it because it was the only way to get our patients better. And this is coming from an immunologist. This is coming from sitting in there with doctors like yourself, and Dr. Irina, and Dr. Ray, environmental medicine specialist. We're doing all of this because it's the only way to get the patients to do a U-turn in their health and start getting in a healthy way. I'm still shocked when I go out in the wild, outside of the institute, and I face that because I know that that is a hardship that so many people are facing. Getting a handle on one's inflammation, and then I want to talk about stress in a second, do we find with ME/CFS or chronic neuroinflammatory disorders or Mast cells, POTS, whatever we're dealing with in clinic, do we find that looking at their inflammatory response, their immune response, the death of the cornerstone of changing things for people, like if we don't address that, it's hard to get the viral count down, it's hard to get everything else fixed?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I think so, because that's like the foundation. We have to fix that at some level and it takes a while. Sometimes I see patients in there like, “I'm able to do, 5% more than I did last month.” And you're like, 5% is 5%. But their expectations sometimes are higher. They're like, no, I just want to be able to go out and run to the block and back.
Haylie Pomroy: I always felt like in chronic disease, chronic fatigue, ME/CFS, but in chronic disease in general, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory did the biggest disservice, in a way, because it was like, if it's inflammatory, just take a Tylenol or ibuprofen, and I'm going, no, no, no, there's so much more. I wish there was a magic pill. But even if a person has a reduction in the symptom of pain, we'll pull cytokines or blood markers and they're still completely in a cytokine storm or an inflammatory response. It's a whole ecosystem. It's a whole body.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And sometimes they say, “I don't have any inflammation. I don't have pain.” What's not about pain?
Haylie Pomroy: And their C-reactive proteins are like 12.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And you're like. “No, I don’t have pain.”
Haylie Pomroy: “But my feet feel fine.” Great. We need a heart.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Definitely.
Haylie Pomroy: I'm so grateful that so many in the institute, just in general people have embraced inflammation. 20+ years ago, I remember running a CRP on somebody, an inflammatory blood marker, and it cost over $2,000 to have it read. We had a cardiologist in the office that convinced and goosed and squeezed and begged to run it and convinced the client. These do not run them even, hopefully, they’re a routine for us, I hope the routine for everybody.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: They are becoming more and more, people that I talked to and other colleagues, and they are doing them, which is good.
Haylie Pomroy: Which is fabulous. It's a biomarker.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It's change, I think the pendulum is moving towards that way. People are seeing the importance of getting these markers before things get worse and then you have something to track.
Haylie Pomroy: And it can cause everything from diabetes to Alzheimer's. All of it has an inflammatory component,
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It’s all connected. Our bodies are an amazing machine.
Haylie Pomroy: You said the S-word
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Stress?
Haylie Pomroy: Yes! How many letters? S-T-R-E-S-S. You said the 6-letter S-word. You and I had a conversation before we started about stress. You said something that was really, will you please say it again for everybody to hear?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Stress, to me, is the root of everything. It's the root of all inflammation. We are exposed to good stress also, like in my case, this morning, I went to work out, of course, that's stress. But it's good stress. But it still raises that fight or flight because you're working out, there's stress. You could be having a birthday party, it's a good thing. You can still be celebrating an anniversary. It's good stress. But then you have the bad stress. Whether you have an illness, a death in the family, all those are also stress. People always say, I don't have stress. I'm like, hmm?
Haylie Pomroy: Sometimes I add an “or” on the end, stressor. People seem to be a little bit less inclined to be defensive when I say, let's talk about the stressors in your life. It could be that, to your point, that you worked out this morning, it could be that you had an amazing raw salad that your body now has to work to digest. You won the lottery and you've got to figure out how to get to Fiji. But those stressors is our body's ability to adapt. A lot of times, and I just heard this again, which was your stress resilience. Because sometimes as a practitioner, we can't go in and excise the stress from your life. We can't go in and say, I'm going to get rid of the fact that you're going through a divorce or that you lost your father, or that your work environment is very toxic. We can't do that. But what I notice you do a lot is make people more resilient to handle and adapt in a positive way or a less damaging way to the stressors that they're exposed to.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Right because there are so many things people can do to manage their stress.
Haylie Pomroy: Give me some of those. Because it's stressful for me, because I have a lot of stress now, it just happens to be that season of my life. A lot of amazing things that keep me happy through it. But the hardest, the most stressful thing, that someone says is you've got to take some of the stress out of your life. I'm like, here's the scissors, here's a knife, excise it. Get rid of it, I'm game, I'm 100%. It's not under my control. But you help me and you help our patients adapt to the stress more profoundly. Talk to me about some of those modalities that we use for our patients that have chronic disease that people in our community can use.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: First and foremost, I'm big on acupuncture. If they have the ability and the availability to be able to pursue getting some acupuncture, that's number one, because what acupuncture does is it activates the vagus system, it activates the parasympathetic system. It's going to do the opposite of that stress response does. Acupuncture for me is a key.
Haylie Pomroy: I want to say something, because the last time you were on, there was a lot of comments under one of the questions that someone asked was that they couldn't afford acupuncture. Acupuncture was expensive. We have a sliding scale in our office, but that's not always the case. I was so excited about the response, people were talking about underneath that, there were so many comments, people talked about that schools that teach acupuncture oftentimes have free clinics.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: They do.
Haylie Pomroy: I used to go to one. I went to, in LA. I had a horse injury and I went to the clinic all the time over there, on my way home from riding, and I forgot about that it was a free clinic. The other thing that people are talking about is that a lot of individuals can get Medicare, Medicaid, insurance coverage with injury.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Medicare does cover it for chronic low back pain.
Haylie Pomroy: One other thing that people said in there, that Dr. Junco talked about, acupressure points, too, and those are things that you can do yourself or you can stimulate yourself.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes. One of the biggest ones is the ear. I always say the best thing to do is just massage your ears innovated by the vagus nerve. All the connections are there. Just by massaging the ear, any time during the day, right there at that moment, you're activating your parasympathetic nervous system. And then if you incorporate that with breathing exercises, you're doing a synergistic effect.
Haylie Pomroy: Everybody out there can afford to breathe.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: If not we wouldn't have many people.
Haylie Pomroy: We wouldn't have many people, yes. I wish the air quality was better, we’ll work on that. But it makes such a tremendous impact, and then massaging of the ear. Do you suggest people use any kind of oils or is there any special technique?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: There's a point right behind the ear where the mastoid processes that has a little indentation right in the middle, that's one of the most important points. And then sometimes people like to massage with lavender oil, you can put a little bit of lavender essential oil. With essential oils, it's like everything, like supplements, you have to be careful. Because there's no FDA, there's no regulatory tests. Yes, you can make your own and you'll know it's safe. It doesn't have any fillers and any other stuff. You have to be very careful what kind of oils you get. And massaging the essential oils in your body is amazing. I know tons of patients have done so well with lavender frankincense. You just massaging that little bone there in the back of your ear and you can just massage your ear, different points, and that relaxes.
Haylie Pomroy: I always tell people, go into the health food store, when they have samples of the essential oils and just like, gently, don't get all, I get on top of it and sniff it up, I have to have a very dramatic response. But I always tell them, just like breathe it a little bit and whichever one makes you go happy or smile, that's yours. There is a list, there are medicinal lists that this oil is used for this, and this oil is used for this, but they don't know you, the person that wrote that book, you know you and trust your body's response. Just like if something feels bad to you, don't ingest it. If it looks bad, when I've had food poisoning where it's like, it was weird, it smelled funny or kind of tasted funny, but I still ate it anyway. Our bodies tell us, you said in the positive way, with these essential oils and rubbing of the ears, like you can't do anything wrong, you can't make a mistake. Blood flow, increasing that. And when you talk about the autonomic nervous system, that goes back to how our body adapts to the stressors.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Because we want to get, we're always in that sympathetic, which is a fight or flight, we want to get our bodies into the parasympathetic, which is the rest and digest. And taking a deep breath, when you inhale, you're activating your sympathetic, so your heart rate goes up. But that's why when I teach breathwork, I always say the most important part is the exhalation, because you're activating the vagus nerve and you have to do it slow and controlled. That's one of the most important things because when you're inhaling, it's sympathetic, when you're exhaling it's parasympathetic.
Haylie Pomroy: And that's so funny, I always write off the exhale. I'm like, breathe. Deep breathe. Take it in. Envision the ions from the ocean. I try to breathe every day, all day, but every time I'm at the ocean, I try to really be very cognizant about breathing in ocean. Thank you.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: That's where the 4-7-8 method comes in. That's why the 8 is the exhalation and it's the longest one.
Haylie Pomroy: Take us through that method 4-7-8. We've talked about it a little.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes we have. 4-7-8 it's very easy to remember, I always recommend it to everyone. And it's you're inhaling through 4 seconds, you hold it for 7, and then you exhale slow and controlled for 8. That is the hardest part. When I have patients tell me I can't do 8, it’s okay, you start with what you can and every day you do a little bit more.
Haylie Pomroy: If they can't do 8?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Still you're still working on that.
Haylie Pomroy: But does it give you an indication that they're having a hard time? I love these things for our community that they can be in awe of their body, like, we have this lemon challenge test where you bite a lemon and check your PH and see how long it takes you to stabilize, how much is your digestive reserve. This is how much is my adaptive reserve.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And your vagal tone, your heart rate variability. All those things are measured by the exhalation. The longer you could exhale, the better.
Haylie Pomroy: It always takes me several times to hear something before it sinks in. I know we've talked about this before. I have written off my exhale all my life. I will never do that again.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It happens to me every day. I always forget.
Haylie Pomroy: But I think that these are critically important and that these can impact inflammation. I just get so worried that we are seeking a pill to resolve something that we don't, first of all, we don't have a pill for. And because it's adaptive, it's an immune response, it's an adaptive response, and then when it becomes chronic, it becomes a resilience, a reversal response. It has to come from here, we have to heal our bodies. And our bodies are made of breath, water, and nutrients. Can you talk to me about some things that you see people consume? I don't even know how we call them food, but that are pro-inflammatory.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Sugar!
Haylie Pomroy: The S-word. I think we're on a roll here. The S-word, sugar. I read a study one time, it was a Stanford study that said, two teaspoons or tablespoons of refined sugar cuts the T cell count by 50% for a two hour period.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And I could see that.
Haylie Pomroy: Isn't that insane? When they talk about your cytokines with the pandemic. Those are T cells, or T cell response, and could you imagine how much sugar people eat when they are sick when they don't feel good? I mean, in the sugar-infested popsicles.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: People usually say, it's my comfort food. You can make healthier choices, have some berries. Which is still, when you say that’s sugar, no, it's not the same.
Haylie Pomroy: I had a psychologist say one time why we crave sugar during stress and it was because our blood has to survive on glucose. If you're already in constant fight and flight, your perception of the next stressor is life or death. Let's say, I told you this is my season right now, I'm working on it, but I've got a lot of stressors that are out of my control. My norm is that of a person that maybe is being chased by a tiger. That's not normal. It's common right now, but it still doesn't make it okay for people. When a new stressor comes in, my body says, this is it. This is the end of the world, that you crave it because the brain literally thinks that you've had, your jugular vein severed and you're both femurs fractured, your spleen ruptured, your spine is broken. And so what do they give you when they put you in the ambulance, is sugar water. The brain says, must have sugar to survive. He was saying, psychologically, the word “okay” is so powerful. You're okay. It's okay. We're going to be okay. Which then tells the brain, I don't need to mainline sugar. Our second S-word is sugar. The frustrating thing is it is hidden in so many processed foods.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It is and that's why I always say, it's important to read labels, because it's not only the sugars, it's all that stuff that's put in there, all those additives, those colors. I always say if it has more than 2 or 3 ingredients, don't buy it because everything else with a letter or a number, it's not going to be good for you.
Haylie Pomroy: It's not food.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It's not food.
Haylie Pomroy: No, it didn't come from the plant. It's not food. I was saying the other day you walk into the grocery store and there's a healthy food section.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: More than half of those are not really healthy.
Haylie Pomroy: For sure. But what are they admitting, the whole rest of the store is?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Unhealthy? I know.
Haylie Pomroy: I mean, it's just a shame. When we talk about combating, whether it's Coronavirus or Epstein-Barr virus, our patient population, or one of the herpes virus strains, or Lyme disease, those are things that we can identify medically that they're combating, but they're actually combating the grocery store and every restaurant you go to.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes. Because you don't know what they're putting in that meal.
Haylie Pomroy: I went to an organic food store, restaurant, the other day, and 2 things happened. I'm allergic to red and blue dye, and I will rash out, it's quite hideous. And I don't care where I'm at, I always have them check the ingredients. I never order paprika, and they said, it's just paprika. And I said, can you go check? And the person came out and his paprika had red dye in it. Then they were serving blue corn chips. And they said, no, we make the corn chips here ourselves. I said, because these are ones that people don't even think about, but I have had to all my life. And I said, can you please just check the ingredients. And they were tortillas. They did make their own corn chips, it was really cool, and a really expensive fancy oil and really expensive machinery. It had blue dye in it.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: If you wouldn’t check, you would’ve reacted.
Haylie Pomroy: I do react, that's why I check. You know what I’m saying? But it was a really cool restaurant that I was spending a lot of money to go eat at. Sugar, additives, and preservatives, those are pro-inflammatory. They can be the cause of heart disease.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Heart disease, insulin resistance, diabetes.
Haylie Pomroy: PCOS.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: PCOS.
Haylie Pomroy: Menopause symptoms.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: All those. Yes, it's a hormone disruptor.
Haylie Pomroy: We have a lot of women that are going through really traumatic menopause episodes and we get the inflammation down in...
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It's amazing what you could do just with nutrition.
Haylie Pomroy: Say that one more time.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It's true. People don't like to hear it and they're like, can I still have a little bit? It's hard.
Haylie Pomroy: It is, but adaptive, rub your ears before you have a margarita. There you go.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: You won't drink the whole thing.
Haylie Pomroy: And then in between drinks have 4-7-8 of your breath rhythm. I love that we should all do that at the bar.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And go out barefoot.
Haylie Pomroy: And go out barefoot! Grounding, talk to me about that, earthing, grounding.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Earthing is great, and I call it vitamin G, because we need that grounding effect and when people ask me why, I don't know if you've seen that show that's on the Earthling documentary, it talks about grounding. And he mentioned something which is very interesting. In the 50s, when sneakers were made with a rubber, back before that, shoes were mostly leather. We were still getting the electron flow from the earth up into our feet, but the rubber is an interference to the electrons. When the sneakers came into play, everybody wears rubber shoes now, so we don't get that electron transfer, which is what we need. We need the electrons from the Earth. Our bodies, our cells, everything communicates. ATP has a positive charge. Everything has positive and negative. We need that negative ions to be transmitted from the ground into our feet or into our bodies.
Haylie Pomroy: Taking your shoes off, getting onto the ground. Something that you said that was interesting because someone I was having a conversation about breathing at the ocean, how we engage with our environment, and they were like, I just think we're being within ourselves that has an entity, yes, we have our own bacterial culture. And then I said that, how come gravity impacts you? How come you just don't float off the earth? Because you actually engage with a gravitational pull, every cell in your body engages.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I find it fascinating because I've had a lot of people that have tried, even if you could be, “I live in a building, what do I do?” I said, you could get a grounding mat. That's better than nothing. But you could just go drive to the beach, drive to a park. And I know it's sometimes scary because you say, the parks that could be sprayed with pesticides. I mean, you have to pick. Just to be out there in nature, I always recommend going out in the morning, getting some sunlight, go barefoot. If you have a backyard, go barefoot, even if it's for 10, 15 minutes, that's all you need. If you go to the beach, even better.
Haylie Pomroy: Or the mountains.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: The salt, the water, or the mountains, yes.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that. I absolutely love that, that's fabulous. What about hydration? Do we need to stay hydrated? Does Diet Coke count?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: No no no.
Haylie Pomroy: It counts towards…
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Towards inflammation.
Haylie Pomroy: Yes, thank you. It absolutely counts. That's one of my top 10s for pro-inflammatory foods.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes for sure. But I think water is critical. Now a lot of times, people ask, what kind of water should I drink? I think this water's great.
Haylie Pomroy: I'm a natural spring water.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I think spring water is great. I think, alkaline, I have people who say, I'm putting an alkaline system in my house or those filters, that's fine, as long as you're drinking pure water.
Haylie Pomroy: And I always tell people, if you're going to do something to manipulate the pH, test the pH. Because, it's like if you're going to take a statin to manipulate the cholesterol, test the cholesterol. The guy, the other day, that came in, 6 years he hadn't had his cholesterol tested, but he'd been on the med. He took the med, was never retested, and they just refilled it, and I went, anyway, he was like 143 or something, and I was like, now in neurology, we're like, no, no, no. And who knows, maybe 6 months after he was okay. Never checked him for 7 years.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: That's what I tell people who are taking blood pressure meds. You don't have to be in all these drugs. I think there's a time, some patients take 2 or 3 different blood pressure medications. If you do what you need to do, which is eat healthy, drink good water, take some supplements to help, you don't have to be on blood pressure meds. You can start winning them off slowly but surely. But patients are just, you get dependent on drugs, you do. And I think the fear is also an issue, they're scared. If I stop taking my meds, am I going to have a stroke?
Haylie Pomroy: I really communicate to people that I'm super conservative with medication perspective. It was how I was raised, it's my personal philosophy. My litmus is always like, do you feel like a million bucks? You're taking this every day. Maybe 4 of them, maybe 10 of them. Are you outrageously healthy because of it? Because otherwise, why are you taking it? Let's do things that get you healthy, not make a lab better. We want to make sure because we're more than a number in a lab. And just heart disease itself. Now we're looking at inflammation being so much more important than your cholesterol number because we saw people, heart attack, left-right strokes on statin drugs for years. I feel like we have homework, we've identified 2 major S-words: sugar and stress. I want everybody in the community to really have an honest review of your current status and look at how you can support yourself through stress and look at your sugar intake because those are anti-foods. Even if you're taking a high-quality supplement and you're consuming additives and preservatives, you're binding. You're using your multivitamin to not get poisoned by some of the poisons that you're ingesting.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It's all about a balance. You’re going to be taking all these supplements and you're so eating unhealthy, consuming a lot of sugar, you're still going to be down there, and you're never going to get to where you need to be. It's very difficult. And then people just get so used to eating and having that Coke or put more sugar in your coffee.
Haylie Pomroy: You know how I feel about coffee.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I like my coffee. 1 cup or 2 a day.
Haylie Pomroy: I know you do. And that's okay, I like that you like it because love is so good for the metabolism. I always tell everybody, I want you to feel, I want you to have as much energy as you have if you had 4 cups of coffee. Then I know we've got it right. I want you to be like, “Oh, I forgot my coffee.”
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: But green tea's good, too.
Haylie Pomroy: I know there are some antioxidants but to real organic green tea. Absolutely. We’ll get on a whole coffee discussion. Being in the agricultural world, unfortunately, it's one of the dirtiest agricultural products that we have. It bums me out how we decaffeinated. Anyway, we won't have a coffee discussion. We'll save that for next. But that leads me into the next thing. Dietary interventions, breathing exercises, what other modalities do you find can reduce inflammation?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Exercise, moving your body. And I know for patients with chronic illness, a lot of them say, I can't go to the gym for 30, 40 minutes a day or even 3 or 4 times a week. I said, even if you do 10 minutes of movement, and that's where I recommend for patients with chronic illnesses, I always recommend qigong or tai chi or swimming. Swimming is a very neutral, not weight-bearing, not too streaky. You could just get in the pool and just flow, just move. A body in motion will stay in motion, and you need to get that circulation moving. Exercise is going to help.
Haylie Pomroy: I've had clients that have come in that are in such a poor health status that exercising doesn't feel like an option. And so massage, acupuncture, it's a big one that we refer to, qigong, things that are very subtle, even dry skin brushing, getting that circulation going.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I agree, I think dry skin brushing is great. It improves the lymphatics, it's great. It's a great thing to implement.
Haylie Pomroy: How do people get to see you in clinic? Do they come in through the institute?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes.
Haylie Pomroy: Okay. So they go to the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And they call, and they get an appointment, and that's where we start the journey of healing.
Haylie Pomroy: That's awesome I love that. I've got one more question for you. My thing is, I have any questions from everybody after. When we talk about inflammation, does it affect other hormones in the body? Can inflammation, I've been reading a lot about inflammation causing insulin resistance or infertility or sex hormone dysfunction, how can inflammation cause such other problems? Are the hormones related or how does it work?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I know that it's related because I've had patients that have done so much better either way. I've had patients with insulin resistance that once you target the inflammation, their symptoms get better. I had a patient that just with nutrition intervention he reverses insulin resistance. His hemoglobin A1C, it was like 5.9, and came down to under 5. It was like 4.9 or 4.7, just with diet, proper nutrition. His inflammatory markers went down and it does work. And it's all tied together, the whole hormone, the whole insulin.
Haylie Pomroy: Insulin is based on hormones. Are pro-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory hormones, and none of our hormones work alone. In the fertility space, when doctors would refer people to us that didn't stimulate well, they were on a prostaglandin modifier or gonadotropin and something to get them to ovulate, and they didn't stimulate well, the first thing that they would do would shift them over to us, we'd put them on an anti-inflammatory protocol, they'd go back into what they call stimulator stem, and they would be like, we got amazing things. They were so happy.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I've treated a lot of patients with infertility, and as soon as you start targeting the inflammation, they get pregnant. With the help, obviously, sometimes they do need the AUI or the IVF, but just the combination of using acupuncture, meditation, nutritional intervention, it's all about that stress and then inflammation, and they do, they have the babies.
Haylie Pomroy: If someone were to say I would love to just think about 1 herb and 1 food because we've got, we're going to all rub our ears, we're all going to breathe for 4-7-8.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: We're all going to go out barefoot and run around.
Haylie Pomroy: Yep. We're all getting barefoot and run around. It was like, “They must see Dr. Jackie!” It's rubbing your ears, barefoot, running around town. That's just the signature of your patient, I love it. But they will also have what food in their hand, and they are taking what herbal? They're going to be doing qigong, they're going to be doing some dry skin brushing.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: The truth is it's very, now that it's complex, I think vegetables are it. That's number one. Green leafy color, red peppers, and just colored. Colored veggies are it, and then second to that, fruits.
Haylie Pomroy: We have 2 hands here today, I'm gonna have fruits in one, veggies in the other. Set them down long enough or eat them all, then I'm going to rub my ears. I'm just loving this.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And then for supplements, it's very difficult. I recommend a lot of mushrooms. I like functional mushrooms because you also target the inflammation and for the brain, the cognitive effects. They've been proven now to have a lot of nerve growth factors. Lion's mane is great, I've had people take that and it improves their focus, their memory. Cordyceps is great for energy. The combinations, the 2 of those are very synergistic. I work a lot with functional mushrooms, that's one of my key. Magnesium is one of the most important supplements.
Haylie Pomroy: I was hoping you were going to say magnesium.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: 200-400mg a day
Haylie Pomroy: There's studies all over the place, but there's been a very large population study that talked about something like 83% of the US population has, not even subclinical levels, like horrifically low levels. We are a population that's deficient in magnesium. I think we're not getting in our food sources, but I also think it's the anti-foods. Then I went to go, but why? Because that's what I am obsessed with. And a lot of the additives and preservatives and chemicals that we ingest require magnesium to not poison us and get excreted from the body. It's not that we're not necessarily always consuming enough magnesium, but not enough magnesium for the stress we're under.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I think that's one of the critical ones.
Haylie Pomroy: I always tell people if you're not doing well from a health perspective, assess how many vegetables you're eating, and however many you're eating, I really don't care, eat twice as much. And then we're going to reassess and reassess and reassess. But the first thing that you can do, I'm going to talk about one more s-word just so we take the negative connotation away from the letter S, and that's sleep. How does sleep play a role in reducing inflammation?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Because it works with the cortisol and all the good hormones, all our pro-hormones are going to be the growth hormone, all the wonderful healing is going to happen, and especially I know in Chinese medicine we learn the best hours to be sleeping are from 11 to 5 in the morning. That should be like a total sleep, those are critical. You have to be sleeping during those hours.
Haylie Pomroy: Is that like the organ clock?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes, because that's when the liver works. The liver is a major detoxifier. Everything happens during that period of 6 hours.
Haylie Pomroy: We interviewed a neuropsychologist the other day and she was saying that there are thousands of metabolic processes that cannot will not happen unless you are in deep sleep. It's not like you do them less better during the day or you do them not as efficiently during the day, they actually cannot happen. And one of them is reducing the inflammatory response in the brain. That there is nothing that can happen in waking hours that allows the body to reduce inflammatory response in the brain.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It’s pretty amazing. Your body detoxes, it cleans up all the stuff that needs to be put out. And if you don't sleep for those hours, it's not going to happen. I have people that say, I only see 4 to 5 hours. I'm like, we'll see 20 years down the line. I'll be seeing you.
Haylie Pomroy: If you don't take out the garbage, it’s going to pile up. I adore you for a million reasons and I know you know that. But on behalf of our community, one of the reasons why I always have to have you back is because you give us realistic, practical things that you can do. Many people, and I'll use the word gaslit, sometimes by their practitioner, their doctor, to believe that there is either a) a pill that can fix it, or b) they just need to mind over matter. That there's not something practical from a lifestyle perspective, which leaves people without hope, really leaves people without hope. Our community, we hear so many people that just, sometimes walk out of their visits with someone that they're seeking help from, in tears because they don't get hope. I'm excited to go do this. I can envision your patient, I can envision our community being your virtual patients and being healthier because of this interview.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It works.
Haylie Pomroy: Oh, yes, it works.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It works, and it's not a pill.
Haylie Pomroy: It works well, and it works when other things don't work. Dr. Harris, the other day, in the interview, said, it takes 10 years and 20 doctors before people land at the institute, without resolution.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And then they come and they're like, hopeless, and that's where they need us.
Haylie Pomroy: I can't thank you enough. Promise me you'll come back.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes, always.
Haylie Pomroy: I know I'm going to get tons of questions, and they're going to ask you all these things, and we're going to talk about S-words, good and bad. No sugar, no stress, and lots of sleep. Thanks, Dr. Junco, I really appreciate it.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Thank you, Haylie. Always a pleasure.
Join my upcoming Facebook Live session “How to Start A Cleanse” on January 7, 2025!
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Managing stress is so important for improving your health.
In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Jacqueline Junco, a board-certified physician, specializing in chronic illness management and environmental medicine.
Dr. Junco talks about the role of inflammation in various health conditions, including chronic fatigue, neuroinflammatory disorders, and cardiovascular disease. She shares practical tips on how to manage inflammation through diet, stress reduction, and other lifestyle interventions.
This is your chance to gain valuable insights on reducing inflammation and enhancing your overall health.
Tune into the Fast Metabolism Matters Podcast – Stress Management Tips with Dr. Jacqueline Junco.
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Jacqueline Junco, M.D. M.P.H, A.P., IMD a physician at the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine is a renowned expert in providing traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) services. Dr. Junco is a medically trained doctor who is certified in acupuncture, Chinese herbology, and oriental medicine from the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. Her knowledge of Western medicine and natural alternatives creates a powerful combination of modern technology and ancient therapies that are used to treat a vast majority of health conditions.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr.jackiejunco_/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-junco-775507162/
Transcript Below:
Haylie Pomroy:. I am Haylie Pomroy, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fast Metabolism Diet, and the former Assistant Director of the Integrative Medicine Program at the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine. I say former because you guys, I am a lifelong learner, just like you all, and I have actually decided to go back and get my PhD in neuroimmunology. I stayed in the institute for it because there is no other place in the world that has a grouping of the most brilliant researchers, scientists, and practitioners. Of course, today we're talking about a very hot topic, and that is inflammation. What did I do? I grabbed one of our leading doctors in our clinic, Dr. Jackie Junco, and she's going to join me today and we are going to talk about, what is inflammation? What do you do with that bad inflammation, how does it impact the body, and how can you get your body back on track toward health? Dr. Junco, thank you so much for coming again today. You are a huge fan favorite and we get tons of questions after every podcast that you do. And so you tackling inflammation was a big one for our community.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Great. Thank you, Haylie. It's great to be here once again and congratulations on your new endeavor.
Haylie Pomroy: Thank you. I heard that after a little bit of a lot of education and clinical practice, that you just knocked something off as another title, you're also now the Department Chair of Integrative Medicine, but something else just happened.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes. I just got board certified from integrative medicine.
Haylie Pomroy: Which is funny because you've been practicing integrative medicine for?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: 26 years.
Haylie Pomroy: What is this with us successful women just collecting titles? I love going through our clinicians' offices and seeing all the...
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: All the alphabet behind our last names.
Haylie Pomroy: We are a lifelong learning institute. And it seems like we are attracting a lot of listeners that are really fired up and very excited about learning more about, not only their health personally but what they can do about it. We're going to try to tackle inflammation. I was just interviewed, someone from the American Heart Association the other day, and we were talking about that, they say if you want something done, have a woman do it. But we are now, women, are beating in, from a gender perspective, for heart disease, for stroke. And they're talking a lot about that being inflammatory-based. Is inflammation more than just breaking a bone in healing?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes. Haylie. I think inflammation is so important because, like you mentioned, it's not just having pain in your foot or you strike something and you get hurt. Inflammation goes far beyond that. We have inflammation, we have changes that occur in the brain, where we have the cognitive fog that you can’t think very well, you can’t focus. We have inflammation in the heart, which yes, us women, as we get older we have to be careful of that. The #1 leading cause of death in women is heart disease, then there's a lot of cardiac inflammation. There's inflammation in the gut which we know affects a lot of the whole gastric biome. There's inflammation all over the body.
Haylie Pomroy: Does the problem come in, I mean, we're supposed to have inflammation, it's part of our adaptive immune response. It's triggered to heal us when we have a toxic exposure or a viral exposure, insult, or injury. We don't want to be a noninflammatory being, we want to have that response, correct?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes, it's a normal response, but when it becomes chronic is when these things get affected.
Haylie Pomroy: Why does it become chronic? Is it that the body can't fix the insult? Or is it that the body gets where it doesn't shut off the initial response?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I think it's both and there's a lot of factors that could contribute to that, versus, what you're eating, things that you're exposed to, our stress level. There are so many factors that could make or break that response.
Haylie Pomroy: We're supposed to have an inflammatory response to an insult or injury or virus or bacteria or whatever it is, we call it in our community a hormetic event, something that we're supposed to adapt to, a change. Our body's supposed to self-soothe, supposed to re-regulate, at some point.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It's supposed to, but the majority of cases it really doesn't. We live in such a fight-or-flight environment, and our bodies are so induced to so many different toxins out there. Your cell phone emits EMF that causes inflammation. There are so many things, the pollutants in the air, mold exposure, so many things that are out there that hinder your body to do what it needs to do.
Haylie Pomroy: I think it's interesting that you brought up environmental medicine pretty darn fast. You brought up two things so far, and I'll get to the other one, which is I know impacting everybody, but so is environmental medicine. I think sometimes we think we're living in a little bubble or something, we forget that we engage with our environment. In the institute, we call it environmental medicine. Looking at what type of approaches can we help heal the body when it has had an insult from the outside environment?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And I think that's why it's important that we do take, when we first see a patient, part of our history, which takes a while, is doing a very thorough environmental history. What they were exposed to as children, what they were exposed to as adults. What kind of diet do they eat? Where they source their water from? How old their house is, what kind of walls they have, if they have carpet, if they have pets. Where they work, how old is the building?
Haylie Pomroy: It's so normal for us at the institute to have this conversation. I know that there are tons of listeners that are going, “My doctors never asked me.” Never asked me that or talked to me about that. But I'm going to share something that just happened to me because, I've been, 30 years now, practicing in the nutrition space. I'm so indoctrinated, my kids are so indoctrinated. My daughter just landed in the hospital and it was so interesting to me to watch this 22-year-old, articulate her health history, and what had happened. She said, it's in the back of the truck and I was pulling out this moldy hay that it rained and snowed in Colorado, we were now in Arizona. And as I was smelling it, I felt like my throat was… And the doctor literally cut her off and was, “This is a viral infection.” And I got to squeak. I'm young, I'm healthy, I'm fit, why wouldn't I just kick in a virus? I'm trying to tell you about my environment and all the potential immunosuppressors, I was under tremendous stress, I had just driven my daughter, and I'm sitting there listening because she's over 18 now, so I have to let her talk to the doctors. And she's saying, and I also just drove 17 hours straight and it was super stressed because the person that was supposed to be there to receive the dogs wasn't there. And they’re just going “We're going to do a viral culture.” And I was just like “Really?” I was disheartened, I consider one of the top hospitals in the world with great, compassionate doctors, and nobody cared what her environmental exposure was.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Unfortunately, that part is always fast-forward. You always move on to whatever's happening, I think just physicians don't have the time to allocate to all those, to that such a detailed history and to sit there and listen. Unfortunately, that's the way the system is now, we're blessed that we are able to do and practice differently than mainstream doctors, which is a big plus for our patients because we have the ability to sit down and sit there with them for 2, 3 hours sometimes, and go through a detailed history of everything they've done.
Haylie Pomroy: Something interesting that got brought up in our Friday clinicals, and I talk about that a lot because I love that time when we're all together, but I think it was Dr. Klimas that said, we don't spend 2 hours with people to 3 hours with people, we don't run all these different tests, we don't incorporate nutrition and food because it sounded like a fun thing to do. We did it because it was the only way to get our patients better. And this is coming from an immunologist. This is coming from sitting in there with doctors like yourself, and Dr. Irina, and Dr. Ray, environmental medicine specialist. We're doing all of this because it's the only way to get the patients to do a U-turn in their health and start getting in a healthy way. I'm still shocked when I go out in the wild, outside of the institute, and I face that because I know that that is a hardship that so many people are facing. Getting a handle on one's inflammation, and then I want to talk about stress in a second, do we find with ME/CFS or chronic neuroinflammatory disorders or Mast cells, POTS, whatever we're dealing with in clinic, do we find that looking at their inflammatory response, their immune response, the death of the cornerstone of changing things for people, like if we don't address that, it's hard to get the viral count down, it's hard to get everything else fixed?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I think so, because that's like the foundation. We have to fix that at some level and it takes a while. Sometimes I see patients in there like, “I'm able to do, 5% more than I did last month.” And you're like, 5% is 5%. But their expectations sometimes are higher. They're like, no, I just want to be able to go out and run to the block and back.
Haylie Pomroy: I always felt like in chronic disease, chronic fatigue, ME/CFS, but in chronic disease in general, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory did the biggest disservice, in a way, because it was like, if it's inflammatory, just take a Tylenol or ibuprofen, and I'm going, no, no, no, there's so much more. I wish there was a magic pill. But even if a person has a reduction in the symptom of pain, we'll pull cytokines or blood markers and they're still completely in a cytokine storm or an inflammatory response. It's a whole ecosystem. It's a whole body.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And sometimes they say, “I don't have any inflammation. I don't have pain.” What's not about pain?
Haylie Pomroy: And their C-reactive proteins are like 12.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And you're like. “No, I don’t have pain.”
Haylie Pomroy: “But my feet feel fine.” Great. We need a heart.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Definitely.
Haylie Pomroy: I'm so grateful that so many in the institute, just in general people have embraced inflammation. 20+ years ago, I remember running a CRP on somebody, an inflammatory blood marker, and it cost over $2,000 to have it read. We had a cardiologist in the office that convinced and goosed and squeezed and begged to run it and convinced the client. These do not run them even, hopefully, they’re a routine for us, I hope the routine for everybody.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: They are becoming more and more, people that I talked to and other colleagues, and they are doing them, which is good.
Haylie Pomroy: Which is fabulous. It's a biomarker.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It's change, I think the pendulum is moving towards that way. People are seeing the importance of getting these markers before things get worse and then you have something to track.
Haylie Pomroy: And it can cause everything from diabetes to Alzheimer's. All of it has an inflammatory component,
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It’s all connected. Our bodies are an amazing machine.
Haylie Pomroy: You said the S-word
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Stress?
Haylie Pomroy: Yes! How many letters? S-T-R-E-S-S. You said the 6-letter S-word. You and I had a conversation before we started about stress. You said something that was really, will you please say it again for everybody to hear?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Stress, to me, is the root of everything. It's the root of all inflammation. We are exposed to good stress also, like in my case, this morning, I went to work out, of course, that's stress. But it's good stress. But it still raises that fight or flight because you're working out, there's stress. You could be having a birthday party, it's a good thing. You can still be celebrating an anniversary. It's good stress. But then you have the bad stress. Whether you have an illness, a death in the family, all those are also stress. People always say, I don't have stress. I'm like, hmm?
Haylie Pomroy: Sometimes I add an “or” on the end, stressor. People seem to be a little bit less inclined to be defensive when I say, let's talk about the stressors in your life. It could be that, to your point, that you worked out this morning, it could be that you had an amazing raw salad that your body now has to work to digest. You won the lottery and you've got to figure out how to get to Fiji. But those stressors is our body's ability to adapt. A lot of times, and I just heard this again, which was your stress resilience. Because sometimes as a practitioner, we can't go in and excise the stress from your life. We can't go in and say, I'm going to get rid of the fact that you're going through a divorce or that you lost your father, or that your work environment is very toxic. We can't do that. But what I notice you do a lot is make people more resilient to handle and adapt in a positive way or a less damaging way to the stressors that they're exposed to.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Right because there are so many things people can do to manage their stress.
Haylie Pomroy: Give me some of those. Because it's stressful for me, because I have a lot of stress now, it just happens to be that season of my life. A lot of amazing things that keep me happy through it. But the hardest, the most stressful thing, that someone says is you've got to take some of the stress out of your life. I'm like, here's the scissors, here's a knife, excise it. Get rid of it, I'm game, I'm 100%. It's not under my control. But you help me and you help our patients adapt to the stress more profoundly. Talk to me about some of those modalities that we use for our patients that have chronic disease that people in our community can use.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: First and foremost, I'm big on acupuncture. If they have the ability and the availability to be able to pursue getting some acupuncture, that's number one, because what acupuncture does is it activates the vagus system, it activates the parasympathetic system. It's going to do the opposite of that stress response does. Acupuncture for me is a key.
Haylie Pomroy: I want to say something, because the last time you were on, there was a lot of comments under one of the questions that someone asked was that they couldn't afford acupuncture. Acupuncture was expensive. We have a sliding scale in our office, but that's not always the case. I was so excited about the response, people were talking about underneath that, there were so many comments, people talked about that schools that teach acupuncture oftentimes have free clinics.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: They do.
Haylie Pomroy: I used to go to one. I went to, in LA. I had a horse injury and I went to the clinic all the time over there, on my way home from riding, and I forgot about that it was a free clinic. The other thing that people are talking about is that a lot of individuals can get Medicare, Medicaid, insurance coverage with injury.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Medicare does cover it for chronic low back pain.
Haylie Pomroy: One other thing that people said in there, that Dr. Junco talked about, acupressure points, too, and those are things that you can do yourself or you can stimulate yourself.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes. One of the biggest ones is the ear. I always say the best thing to do is just massage your ears innovated by the vagus nerve. All the connections are there. Just by massaging the ear, any time during the day, right there at that moment, you're activating your parasympathetic nervous system. And then if you incorporate that with breathing exercises, you're doing a synergistic effect.
Haylie Pomroy: Everybody out there can afford to breathe.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: If not we wouldn't have many people.
Haylie Pomroy: We wouldn't have many people, yes. I wish the air quality was better, we’ll work on that. But it makes such a tremendous impact, and then massaging of the ear. Do you suggest people use any kind of oils or is there any special technique?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: There's a point right behind the ear where the mastoid processes that has a little indentation right in the middle, that's one of the most important points. And then sometimes people like to massage with lavender oil, you can put a little bit of lavender essential oil. With essential oils, it's like everything, like supplements, you have to be careful. Because there's no FDA, there's no regulatory tests. Yes, you can make your own and you'll know it's safe. It doesn't have any fillers and any other stuff. You have to be very careful what kind of oils you get. And massaging the essential oils in your body is amazing. I know tons of patients have done so well with lavender frankincense. You just massaging that little bone there in the back of your ear and you can just massage your ear, different points, and that relaxes.
Haylie Pomroy: I always tell people, go into the health food store, when they have samples of the essential oils and just like, gently, don't get all, I get on top of it and sniff it up, I have to have a very dramatic response. But I always tell them, just like breathe it a little bit and whichever one makes you go happy or smile, that's yours. There is a list, there are medicinal lists that this oil is used for this, and this oil is used for this, but they don't know you, the person that wrote that book, you know you and trust your body's response. Just like if something feels bad to you, don't ingest it. If it looks bad, when I've had food poisoning where it's like, it was weird, it smelled funny or kind of tasted funny, but I still ate it anyway. Our bodies tell us, you said in the positive way, with these essential oils and rubbing of the ears, like you can't do anything wrong, you can't make a mistake. Blood flow, increasing that. And when you talk about the autonomic nervous system, that goes back to how our body adapts to the stressors.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Because we want to get, we're always in that sympathetic, which is a fight or flight, we want to get our bodies into the parasympathetic, which is the rest and digest. And taking a deep breath, when you inhale, you're activating your sympathetic, so your heart rate goes up. But that's why when I teach breathwork, I always say the most important part is the exhalation, because you're activating the vagus nerve and you have to do it slow and controlled. That's one of the most important things because when you're inhaling, it's sympathetic, when you're exhaling it's parasympathetic.
Haylie Pomroy: And that's so funny, I always write off the exhale. I'm like, breathe. Deep breathe. Take it in. Envision the ions from the ocean. I try to breathe every day, all day, but every time I'm at the ocean, I try to really be very cognizant about breathing in ocean. Thank you.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: That's where the 4-7-8 method comes in. That's why the 8 is the exhalation and it's the longest one.
Haylie Pomroy: Take us through that method 4-7-8. We've talked about it a little.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes we have. 4-7-8 it's very easy to remember, I always recommend it to everyone. And it's you're inhaling through 4 seconds, you hold it for 7, and then you exhale slow and controlled for 8. That is the hardest part. When I have patients tell me I can't do 8, it’s okay, you start with what you can and every day you do a little bit more.
Haylie Pomroy: If they can't do 8?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Still you're still working on that.
Haylie Pomroy: But does it give you an indication that they're having a hard time? I love these things for our community that they can be in awe of their body, like, we have this lemon challenge test where you bite a lemon and check your PH and see how long it takes you to stabilize, how much is your digestive reserve. This is how much is my adaptive reserve.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And your vagal tone, your heart rate variability. All those things are measured by the exhalation. The longer you could exhale, the better.
Haylie Pomroy: It always takes me several times to hear something before it sinks in. I know we've talked about this before. I have written off my exhale all my life. I will never do that again.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It happens to me every day. I always forget.
Haylie Pomroy: But I think that these are critically important and that these can impact inflammation. I just get so worried that we are seeking a pill to resolve something that we don't, first of all, we don't have a pill for. And because it's adaptive, it's an immune response, it's an adaptive response, and then when it becomes chronic, it becomes a resilience, a reversal response. It has to come from here, we have to heal our bodies. And our bodies are made of breath, water, and nutrients. Can you talk to me about some things that you see people consume? I don't even know how we call them food, but that are pro-inflammatory.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Sugar!
Haylie Pomroy: The S-word. I think we're on a roll here. The S-word, sugar. I read a study one time, it was a Stanford study that said, two teaspoons or tablespoons of refined sugar cuts the T cell count by 50% for a two hour period.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And I could see that.
Haylie Pomroy: Isn't that insane? When they talk about your cytokines with the pandemic. Those are T cells, or T cell response, and could you imagine how much sugar people eat when they are sick when they don't feel good? I mean, in the sugar-infested popsicles.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: People usually say, it's my comfort food. You can make healthier choices, have some berries. Which is still, when you say that’s sugar, no, it's not the same.
Haylie Pomroy: I had a psychologist say one time why we crave sugar during stress and it was because our blood has to survive on glucose. If you're already in constant fight and flight, your perception of the next stressor is life or death. Let's say, I told you this is my season right now, I'm working on it, but I've got a lot of stressors that are out of my control. My norm is that of a person that maybe is being chased by a tiger. That's not normal. It's common right now, but it still doesn't make it okay for people. When a new stressor comes in, my body says, this is it. This is the end of the world, that you crave it because the brain literally thinks that you've had, your jugular vein severed and you're both femurs fractured, your spleen ruptured, your spine is broken. And so what do they give you when they put you in the ambulance, is sugar water. The brain says, must have sugar to survive. He was saying, psychologically, the word “okay” is so powerful. You're okay. It's okay. We're going to be okay. Which then tells the brain, I don't need to mainline sugar. Our second S-word is sugar. The frustrating thing is it is hidden in so many processed foods.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It is and that's why I always say, it's important to read labels, because it's not only the sugars, it's all that stuff that's put in there, all those additives, those colors. I always say if it has more than 2 or 3 ingredients, don't buy it because everything else with a letter or a number, it's not going to be good for you.
Haylie Pomroy: It's not food.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It's not food.
Haylie Pomroy: No, it didn't come from the plant. It's not food. I was saying the other day you walk into the grocery store and there's a healthy food section.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: More than half of those are not really healthy.
Haylie Pomroy: For sure. But what are they admitting, the whole rest of the store is?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Unhealthy? I know.
Haylie Pomroy: I mean, it's just a shame. When we talk about combating, whether it's Coronavirus or Epstein-Barr virus, our patient population, or one of the herpes virus strains, or Lyme disease, those are things that we can identify medically that they're combating, but they're actually combating the grocery store and every restaurant you go to.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes. Because you don't know what they're putting in that meal.
Haylie Pomroy: I went to an organic food store, restaurant, the other day, and 2 things happened. I'm allergic to red and blue dye, and I will rash out, it's quite hideous. And I don't care where I'm at, I always have them check the ingredients. I never order paprika, and they said, it's just paprika. And I said, can you go check? And the person came out and his paprika had red dye in it. Then they were serving blue corn chips. And they said, no, we make the corn chips here ourselves. I said, because these are ones that people don't even think about, but I have had to all my life. And I said, can you please just check the ingredients. And they were tortillas. They did make their own corn chips, it was really cool, and a really expensive fancy oil and really expensive machinery. It had blue dye in it.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: If you wouldn’t check, you would’ve reacted.
Haylie Pomroy: I do react, that's why I check. You know what I’m saying? But it was a really cool restaurant that I was spending a lot of money to go eat at. Sugar, additives, and preservatives, those are pro-inflammatory. They can be the cause of heart disease.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Heart disease, insulin resistance, diabetes.
Haylie Pomroy: PCOS.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: PCOS.
Haylie Pomroy: Menopause symptoms.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: All those. Yes, it's a hormone disruptor.
Haylie Pomroy: We have a lot of women that are going through really traumatic menopause episodes and we get the inflammation down in...
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It's amazing what you could do just with nutrition.
Haylie Pomroy: Say that one more time.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It's true. People don't like to hear it and they're like, can I still have a little bit? It's hard.
Haylie Pomroy: It is, but adaptive, rub your ears before you have a margarita. There you go.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: You won't drink the whole thing.
Haylie Pomroy: And then in between drinks have 4-7-8 of your breath rhythm. I love that we should all do that at the bar.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And go out barefoot.
Haylie Pomroy: And go out barefoot! Grounding, talk to me about that, earthing, grounding.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Earthing is great, and I call it vitamin G, because we need that grounding effect and when people ask me why, I don't know if you've seen that show that's on the Earthling documentary, it talks about grounding. And he mentioned something which is very interesting. In the 50s, when sneakers were made with a rubber, back before that, shoes were mostly leather. We were still getting the electron flow from the earth up into our feet, but the rubber is an interference to the electrons. When the sneakers came into play, everybody wears rubber shoes now, so we don't get that electron transfer, which is what we need. We need the electrons from the Earth. Our bodies, our cells, everything communicates. ATP has a positive charge. Everything has positive and negative. We need that negative ions to be transmitted from the ground into our feet or into our bodies.
Haylie Pomroy: Taking your shoes off, getting onto the ground. Something that you said that was interesting because someone I was having a conversation about breathing at the ocean, how we engage with our environment, and they were like, I just think we're being within ourselves that has an entity, yes, we have our own bacterial culture. And then I said that, how come gravity impacts you? How come you just don't float off the earth? Because you actually engage with a gravitational pull, every cell in your body engages.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I find it fascinating because I've had a lot of people that have tried, even if you could be, “I live in a building, what do I do?” I said, you could get a grounding mat. That's better than nothing. But you could just go drive to the beach, drive to a park. And I know it's sometimes scary because you say, the parks that could be sprayed with pesticides. I mean, you have to pick. Just to be out there in nature, I always recommend going out in the morning, getting some sunlight, go barefoot. If you have a backyard, go barefoot, even if it's for 10, 15 minutes, that's all you need. If you go to the beach, even better.
Haylie Pomroy: Or the mountains.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: The salt, the water, or the mountains, yes.
Haylie Pomroy: I love that. I absolutely love that, that's fabulous. What about hydration? Do we need to stay hydrated? Does Diet Coke count?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: No no no.
Haylie Pomroy: It counts towards…
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Towards inflammation.
Haylie Pomroy: Yes, thank you. It absolutely counts. That's one of my top 10s for pro-inflammatory foods.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes for sure. But I think water is critical. Now a lot of times, people ask, what kind of water should I drink? I think this water's great.
Haylie Pomroy: I'm a natural spring water.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I think spring water is great. I think, alkaline, I have people who say, I'm putting an alkaline system in my house or those filters, that's fine, as long as you're drinking pure water.
Haylie Pomroy: And I always tell people, if you're going to do something to manipulate the pH, test the pH. Because, it's like if you're going to take a statin to manipulate the cholesterol, test the cholesterol. The guy, the other day, that came in, 6 years he hadn't had his cholesterol tested, but he'd been on the med. He took the med, was never retested, and they just refilled it, and I went, anyway, he was like 143 or something, and I was like, now in neurology, we're like, no, no, no. And who knows, maybe 6 months after he was okay. Never checked him for 7 years.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: That's what I tell people who are taking blood pressure meds. You don't have to be in all these drugs. I think there's a time, some patients take 2 or 3 different blood pressure medications. If you do what you need to do, which is eat healthy, drink good water, take some supplements to help, you don't have to be on blood pressure meds. You can start winning them off slowly but surely. But patients are just, you get dependent on drugs, you do. And I think the fear is also an issue, they're scared. If I stop taking my meds, am I going to have a stroke?
Haylie Pomroy: I really communicate to people that I'm super conservative with medication perspective. It was how I was raised, it's my personal philosophy. My litmus is always like, do you feel like a million bucks? You're taking this every day. Maybe 4 of them, maybe 10 of them. Are you outrageously healthy because of it? Because otherwise, why are you taking it? Let's do things that get you healthy, not make a lab better. We want to make sure because we're more than a number in a lab. And just heart disease itself. Now we're looking at inflammation being so much more important than your cholesterol number because we saw people, heart attack, left-right strokes on statin drugs for years. I feel like we have homework, we've identified 2 major S-words: sugar and stress. I want everybody in the community to really have an honest review of your current status and look at how you can support yourself through stress and look at your sugar intake because those are anti-foods. Even if you're taking a high-quality supplement and you're consuming additives and preservatives, you're binding. You're using your multivitamin to not get poisoned by some of the poisons that you're ingesting.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It's all about a balance. You’re going to be taking all these supplements and you're so eating unhealthy, consuming a lot of sugar, you're still going to be down there, and you're never going to get to where you need to be. It's very difficult. And then people just get so used to eating and having that Coke or put more sugar in your coffee.
Haylie Pomroy: You know how I feel about coffee.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I like my coffee. 1 cup or 2 a day.
Haylie Pomroy: I know you do. And that's okay, I like that you like it because love is so good for the metabolism. I always tell everybody, I want you to feel, I want you to have as much energy as you have if you had 4 cups of coffee. Then I know we've got it right. I want you to be like, “Oh, I forgot my coffee.”
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: But green tea's good, too.
Haylie Pomroy: I know there are some antioxidants but to real organic green tea. Absolutely. We’ll get on a whole coffee discussion. Being in the agricultural world, unfortunately, it's one of the dirtiest agricultural products that we have. It bums me out how we decaffeinated. Anyway, we won't have a coffee discussion. We'll save that for next. But that leads me into the next thing. Dietary interventions, breathing exercises, what other modalities do you find can reduce inflammation?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Exercise, moving your body. And I know for patients with chronic illness, a lot of them say, I can't go to the gym for 30, 40 minutes a day or even 3 or 4 times a week. I said, even if you do 10 minutes of movement, and that's where I recommend for patients with chronic illnesses, I always recommend qigong or tai chi or swimming. Swimming is a very neutral, not weight-bearing, not too streaky. You could just get in the pool and just flow, just move. A body in motion will stay in motion, and you need to get that circulation moving. Exercise is going to help.
Haylie Pomroy: I've had clients that have come in that are in such a poor health status that exercising doesn't feel like an option. And so massage, acupuncture, it's a big one that we refer to, qigong, things that are very subtle, even dry skin brushing, getting that circulation going.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I agree, I think dry skin brushing is great. It improves the lymphatics, it's great. It's a great thing to implement.
Haylie Pomroy: How do people get to see you in clinic? Do they come in through the institute?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes.
Haylie Pomroy: Okay. So they go to the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And they call, and they get an appointment, and that's where we start the journey of healing.
Haylie Pomroy: That's awesome I love that. I've got one more question for you. My thing is, I have any questions from everybody after. When we talk about inflammation, does it affect other hormones in the body? Can inflammation, I've been reading a lot about inflammation causing insulin resistance or infertility or sex hormone dysfunction, how can inflammation cause such other problems? Are the hormones related or how does it work?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I know that it's related because I've had patients that have done so much better either way. I've had patients with insulin resistance that once you target the inflammation, their symptoms get better. I had a patient that just with nutrition intervention he reverses insulin resistance. His hemoglobin A1C, it was like 5.9, and came down to under 5. It was like 4.9 or 4.7, just with diet, proper nutrition. His inflammatory markers went down and it does work. And it's all tied together, the whole hormone, the whole insulin.
Haylie Pomroy: Insulin is based on hormones. Are pro-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory hormones, and none of our hormones work alone. In the fertility space, when doctors would refer people to us that didn't stimulate well, they were on a prostaglandin modifier or gonadotropin and something to get them to ovulate, and they didn't stimulate well, the first thing that they would do would shift them over to us, we'd put them on an anti-inflammatory protocol, they'd go back into what they call stimulator stem, and they would be like, we got amazing things. They were so happy.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I've treated a lot of patients with infertility, and as soon as you start targeting the inflammation, they get pregnant. With the help, obviously, sometimes they do need the AUI or the IVF, but just the combination of using acupuncture, meditation, nutritional intervention, it's all about that stress and then inflammation, and they do, they have the babies.
Haylie Pomroy: If someone were to say I would love to just think about 1 herb and 1 food because we've got, we're going to all rub our ears, we're all going to breathe for 4-7-8.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: We're all going to go out barefoot and run around.
Haylie Pomroy: Yep. We're all getting barefoot and run around. It was like, “They must see Dr. Jackie!” It's rubbing your ears, barefoot, running around town. That's just the signature of your patient, I love it. But they will also have what food in their hand, and they are taking what herbal? They're going to be doing qigong, they're going to be doing some dry skin brushing.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: The truth is it's very, now that it's complex, I think vegetables are it. That's number one. Green leafy color, red peppers, and just colored. Colored veggies are it, and then second to that, fruits.
Haylie Pomroy: We have 2 hands here today, I'm gonna have fruits in one, veggies in the other. Set them down long enough or eat them all, then I'm going to rub my ears. I'm just loving this.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And then for supplements, it's very difficult. I recommend a lot of mushrooms. I like functional mushrooms because you also target the inflammation and for the brain, the cognitive effects. They've been proven now to have a lot of nerve growth factors. Lion's mane is great, I've had people take that and it improves their focus, their memory. Cordyceps is great for energy. The combinations, the 2 of those are very synergistic. I work a lot with functional mushrooms, that's one of my key. Magnesium is one of the most important supplements.
Haylie Pomroy: I was hoping you were going to say magnesium.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: 200-400mg a day
Haylie Pomroy: There's studies all over the place, but there's been a very large population study that talked about something like 83% of the US population has, not even subclinical levels, like horrifically low levels. We are a population that's deficient in magnesium. I think we're not getting in our food sources, but I also think it's the anti-foods. Then I went to go, but why? Because that's what I am obsessed with. And a lot of the additives and preservatives and chemicals that we ingest require magnesium to not poison us and get excreted from the body. It's not that we're not necessarily always consuming enough magnesium, but not enough magnesium for the stress we're under.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: I think that's one of the critical ones.
Haylie Pomroy: I always tell people if you're not doing well from a health perspective, assess how many vegetables you're eating, and however many you're eating, I really don't care, eat twice as much. And then we're going to reassess and reassess and reassess. But the first thing that you can do, I'm going to talk about one more s-word just so we take the negative connotation away from the letter S, and that's sleep. How does sleep play a role in reducing inflammation?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Because it works with the cortisol and all the good hormones, all our pro-hormones are going to be the growth hormone, all the wonderful healing is going to happen, and especially I know in Chinese medicine we learn the best hours to be sleeping are from 11 to 5 in the morning. That should be like a total sleep, those are critical. You have to be sleeping during those hours.
Haylie Pomroy: Is that like the organ clock?
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes, because that's when the liver works. The liver is a major detoxifier. Everything happens during that period of 6 hours.
Haylie Pomroy: We interviewed a neuropsychologist the other day and she was saying that there are thousands of metabolic processes that cannot will not happen unless you are in deep sleep. It's not like you do them less better during the day or you do them not as efficiently during the day, they actually cannot happen. And one of them is reducing the inflammatory response in the brain. That there is nothing that can happen in waking hours that allows the body to reduce inflammatory response in the brain.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It’s pretty amazing. Your body detoxes, it cleans up all the stuff that needs to be put out. And if you don't sleep for those hours, it's not going to happen. I have people that say, I only see 4 to 5 hours. I'm like, we'll see 20 years down the line. I'll be seeing you.
Haylie Pomroy: If you don't take out the garbage, it’s going to pile up. I adore you for a million reasons and I know you know that. But on behalf of our community, one of the reasons why I always have to have you back is because you give us realistic, practical things that you can do. Many people, and I'll use the word gaslit, sometimes by their practitioner, their doctor, to believe that there is either a) a pill that can fix it, or b) they just need to mind over matter. That there's not something practical from a lifestyle perspective, which leaves people without hope, really leaves people without hope. Our community, we hear so many people that just, sometimes walk out of their visits with someone that they're seeking help from, in tears because they don't get hope. I'm excited to go do this. I can envision your patient, I can envision our community being your virtual patients and being healthier because of this interview.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It works.
Haylie Pomroy: Oh, yes, it works.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: It works, and it's not a pill.
Haylie Pomroy: It works well, and it works when other things don't work. Dr. Harris, the other day, in the interview, said, it takes 10 years and 20 doctors before people land at the institute, without resolution.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: And then they come and they're like, hopeless, and that's where they need us.
Haylie Pomroy: I can't thank you enough. Promise me you'll come back.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Yes, always.
Haylie Pomroy: I know I'm going to get tons of questions, and they're going to ask you all these things, and we're going to talk about S-words, good and bad. No sugar, no stress, and lots of sleep. Thanks, Dr. Junco, I really appreciate it.
Dr. Jacqueline Junco: Thank you, Haylie. Always a pleasure.
