In this video Clint talks about the three major systems in the body that you need to optimize for you to get rheumatoid arthritis under control.

Book A Call – get a personalised RA strategy to get out of pain. (Only if you’re 10/10 determined to improve and want to get started now) https://www.rheumatoidsolutions.com/book-a-call/

• Three major systems to optimize for RA control: microbial system (gut and mouth), antioxidant system, and nervous system
• Different approaches for Microbial health
• Healthy gut bacteria and plant-based foods
• Glutathione, how to boost it through exercise rather than supplements
• Combining raw and cooked foods to manage RA symptoms while maintaining nutritional benefits
• The impact of stress on biological drug effectiveness
• How optimizing the three systems can lead to improved blood tests and potential medication reduction

Good day it’s Clint here. In this video we’re going to talk about the three major systems in the body that you need to optimize for you to get rheumatoid arthritis under control.

My name is Clint Paddison, I’ve been helping people with rheumatoid arthritis for the last 11 years to achieve maximum health and minimum symptoms. And I’ve learned this the hard way, having had rheumatoid arthritis myself for almost 19 years. So what are these three systems in the body that we need to address? The first one is the microbial system. Okay. So many of you may have heard of the concept of leaky gut. I’m going to talk about this concept how we can optimize our health in this area. The second one we’ll talk about is going to be the antioxidant system. And so I’m going to share with you details about how the antioxidant system is an influencer in the amount of rheumatoid arthritis symptoms. And the third part of this will look at the nervous system, the nervous system, and how that interplays plays with our gut health and how it affects our outcomes if we’re on certain types of medications. If you are able to improve dramatically and let’s say optimize your microbial system, your antioxidant system and your nervous system, then you are going to go a long way to living a life that has maximum health and minimum symptoms.

Let’s start with the microbial system. So in your body you have approximately anywhere between sort of 25 and 32 trillion microbes. So this is an extraordinary presence of non-human living microorganisms. It’s an extraordinary number, and the cells of these microbes exceed our human cells. So we’re pretty much just a walking vehicle to house microbes. These microbes have a massive impact on our health, and they are spread throughout the body, on our skin, in our colon, in our mouth, and other moist, dark areas in the body. The largest source or largest location of microbes in or on our bodies inside our colon, which is approximately 27% of all the microbes in or on us, is in our colon. However, we have approximately 20% of microbes inside our mouth, and so there is a higher density of microbes in your mouth than what there actually is in your colon. The reason I’m sharing that with you is because we often associate the colon as the only place where we get leakiness, where we get bacteria and bacterial particles like lipopolysaccharide into the bloodstream. And this, as we now know, contributes to an inflammatory response and heightened RA activity. It’s not the only place we also get it from the mouth. And so there is growing evidence and certainly a new area of focus for me and my coaching team where we help people with RA is in optimization of the mouth and the oral microbiome, because the mouth has a microbiome just like the colonic microbiome. And so we need to optimize both because leakiness via bacteria and LPs or lipopolysaccharide into the bloodstream from the mouth can not only contribute to overall systemic increased inflammation, but can also influence anti-ccp antibodies. Because it is known that certain bacteria which are common in the mouth, like p gingivalis, can citrullinated peptides. And this is, of course, what the CCP is referring to in the Anti-ccp antibodies, it’s cyclic citrullinated peptides. A peptide is just a small chain of amino acids, so it’s not quite a protein. So they call it a peptide. You can think of it as a mini Protein, and these mini proteins can get changed or citrullinated via the presence of certain bacteria that can originate into the bloodstream from the mouth, and the bacteria can get down between the gumline and the tooth and into the bloodstream. So we need to optimize our microbial systems, that is the gut microbial environment and also the mouth microbial environment. When it comes to these microbial environments there are two different strategies with the mouth. What we need to do is we need to work on elimination, artificial elimination. And so we in our coaching help people through a sequence of mouth washes and even chewing xylitol gum in order to eliminate and preferentially feed the microbes that are in the mouth. In this way, we can help disrupt the biofilms that occur on the surface of the teeth, which are self-preserving, meaning it was very hard for the human natural defenses to bypass the defenses of these biofilms, which are self-supportive for the bacteria, to help them stay in the mouth and to help them adhere to the tooth, and to help them continue to survive on the remnants of the foods that you’re eating.

Therefore, we have to really work hard in the mouth to reverse and almost chip away at these biofilms as if they’re some mold or something on the wall that’s hard to get rid of, that’s the approach with the mouth. With the colon, however, the approach is quite different. It’s about nurturing the bowel, and the bowel bacteria thrive on fermentable fibers. So these are foods that we eat that contain fiber. And there are nine different types of bacteria that the healthy colonic bacteria like to consume. And so you must ensure that your colon is exposed to these different types of fiber, things like fructo oligosaccharides and resistant starch and beta glucans, and different plant based foods contain these different fibers. And so to restore health in the bowel, you need to make sure that your bowel is exposed to these fibers. You can have too much of a good thing too soon, which results in bloating and indigestion and so on. And so the process that we use is to selectively provide the right fibers to the bowel, in order so that we can nurture microbes and diversify those microbes to then allow the accompaniment of further fibers as we go. So in practice, what this looks like is an elimination diet or plant based, where we start on simple foods that includes sweet potatoes and leafy greens and things, and migrate our way eventually into hitting all the plant based foods, including nuts and seeds and tofu. And we’re talking about corn and nightshade vegetables and all sorts of things that you might currently be thinking, I can’t eat those. It’s because you don’t have the current microbial diversity in your bowel to allow the breakdown or fermentation of these foods. It doesn’t mean these foods are dangerous. It doesn’t mean these foods are bad. There’s no dangerous things about plant based foods. It’s just your microbial environment is not currently configured in an optimal way to be able to break down these healthy, supportive, wonderful plant based foods that will enable you to eat out at restaurants, eat with your family members, enjoy massive amounts of diversity and flavors throughout the rest of your life. It just means there’s some work to do if you can’t eat those foods at the moment.

So when we optimize our microbial system, we then have a wonderful, diverse, healthy microbiome in the mouth and a wonderful, diverse, healthy microbiome in the colon. This is a pillar of health, okay? Because so much of our health is dictated by these microbes. These microbes influence the immune response, the tolerance between certain molecules that are in your gut, whether or not they’re good or bad. As you may have heard in the past, 60% of your immune system is right on that gut lining. And so these microbes not only help to repair and restore that intestinal lining by secreting short chain fatty acids, but these microbes also excrete antimicrobial peptides, meaning that instead of having an attack type mentality, which we do in the mouth, in the colon, we go with a nurture based approach where we want to build the right bacteria because they have that attack built into them to take care of the pathogens. So specifically, if we have overgrowth of something like pathogenic microbe Klebsiella, for example, something that’s associated with an overgrowth of many people with ankylosing spondylitis, Your healthy bacteria can actually suppress these pathogens. And so what we want to do is focus on one thing in the bowel, build an army of healthy microbes because they do everything, they totally repair and restore the bowel. So this is instead of chasing down pathogens with antimicrobials, strong herbs, anti-pathogenic, you know, anti uh, microbial and antiviral and antifungal, very high dose herbal treatments, unless there’s something very dangerous, if you’ve just got pathogenic overgrowth and you nurture your bowel, the healthy microbes take care of a lot of the problems for you. Once you have dramatically improved your microbial health, you will notice symptoms go down with rheumatoid arthritis.

In 2023, there was a study that highlighted the correlation between the amount of gut leakiness and the amount of RA symptoms. This has evolved over the last two decades. Getting away from this concept of just a sort of leaky gut in the naturopathic world 20 years ago, and now it’s mainstream research where we see these correlations, where we know that when we reduce the amount of lipopolysaccharide, for example, which is coming from oral or the digestive regions that rheumatoid arthritis symptoms plummet. So we’ve got to seal and heal the walls in the mouth and the colon from this translocation of microbes and their inflammatory substances like lipopolysaccharide. All right. So that is called healing the gut or the gum. It’s called reversing leaky gum reversing leaky gut. And this is one of the major systems that you need to improve to be able to get on top of rheumatoid arthritis.

Number two, now let’s talk about the antioxidant systems, and this is absolutely crucial. We aren’t new to this concept of antioxidants. And I imagine that you’ve heard even through teenage years on packets of things that you’ve purchased, concepts of antioxidants. Or maybe you’ve heard about vitamin C as an antioxidant, vitamin D is an antioxidant, and so on. The true antioxidant in the body is glutathione, and glutathione is an antioxidant that’s an intracellular antioxidant, meaning that we’re built up of trillions of cells. And inside each of those cells, which are building blocks of our body, we have glutathione, and it enables those cells to be kept cool, if you like. So if the cell is an engine generating energy, which it does, we need to cool off like a car that’s running a bit hot, Cool off the engines to keep everything in balance. Glutathione does that really effectively.

Now, glutathione is also a key antioxidant to protect against dietary free radicals. So when we consume foods, there are free radicals that we might be consuming. Anything that’s a cooked fat contains free radicals because the cooking process exacerbates the free radicals in the food. So we’re talking about, say, cooking any kind of fat, whether it be animal fat, plant fat, and especially oils. So if you extract oils from their source or extract fats from their source and turn them into an oil, whether it be olive oil, coconut oil, grapeseed oil, sunflower oil, doesn’t matter. Heat that and then you’re generating a huge amount of free radicals. And so when that then goes into the body, your body’s natural antioxidant systems are there to protect your cells from being exposed to those free radicals and suffering electron loss. Because a free radical is in an extreme demand of electrons to create molecular balance. So we have built into our mucosal lining that runs all the way from the beginning of your small intestine all the way down to the large intestine, a built in antioxidant resources, including glutathione. And so when we consume free radicals, the antioxidants are able to donate electrons and to neutralize this. So it doesn’t create a catastrophic effect. However, if we have a depleted amount of glutathione, which can occur when we’re exercise deficient, when we’re not eating a raw food intake, that’s adequate enough when we’re taking in, for example, fruits and vegetables or leafy greens. That deficiency can make us vulnerable to taking in high free radical food sources, such as heated oils in particular, or cooked fats. As a result, these free radicals can start stealing electrons beyond the mucosal lining from the cell wall itself, especially if we’ve had a depleted mucosal lining because of our lifestyle, because we’re not eating the right foods to remember the microbial system, to produce a short chain fatty acids, to keep a protective layer on that gut wall. And so then we can lose electrons to free radicals directly from our cell wall. And now our cell wall is only one cellular layer thick. So you’re going to experience some direct gut leakiness. If there isn’t an antioxidant protective system and there is exposure of free radicals to the delicate gut wall, okay. If you have a depleted mucosal protective layer as a result of this, you can literally create leaky gut at a substantial and noticeable level in your joints from just one meal.

I experienced this myself back in 2017, where we went out for an evening meal and it was late at night. I did not have any protective antioxidants with my meal, and I ate a high free radical deep fried meal and next day got symptoms back again after I’d been symptom free for many years. And so we need to be very careful with our food combining and to protect from a meal-to-meal antioxidant load. And we also need to build up an antioxidant reservoir, just like money in the bank for future use by becoming physically fit. Because the best way to get our master antioxidant to the highest possible levels is through exercise. You can supplement glutathione, it’s very ineffective way of doing it. You can do IV infusions of glutathione, which may be a transient benefit, but the only way to truly improve glutathione and take it to the level that you need to restore your insurance for your future self is through exercise. And so you hear me say over and over again, exercise defeats inflammation and I will never stop saying that. I may get to the point where I say that exercise is more important than diet. Now, how could you possibly say that? It’s because exercise can improve the diversity of the microbiome, so it can help the microbial system that we need to work on, and it dramatically increases the antioxidant system, therefore providing us with this protection against the food to food abuse that comes in from what we’re consuming. So the ideal way to do this is to become physically fit and to also on a meal to meal level, consume antioxidants with your meals so that you’re not actually providing a packet on a meal to meal case, like a packet of food. Another packet of food three times, maybe four times a day you’re doing this where these foods are stealing electrons, but in many cases having a neutral effect and sometimes even a net positive effect if it’s something like a green smoothie where you’ve got nothing but antioxidants and no free radicals in that particular packet of food.

What works best to eliminate RA symptoms is to combine raw foods with cooked foods. Because we need the cooked foods, we need it for energy levels, and we need it for our microbiome. It makes no sense to avoid foods that are associated with longevity, like nuts consumption associated with longevity, lentils consumption associated with longevity, and we love these foods. Who wouldn’t want to eat more protein? Have nuts that you can snack on? Why would we ever want to avoid those foods? The way that we graduate to those foods is go through the elimination process that I described earlier. And then what we do is we’re able to tolerate more and more foods because our microbial diversity has increased, our fat tolerance has increased because our antioxidant system has increased, which we’re doing in parallel through exercise. Okay. So we need both to optimize both our microbial system and our antioxidant system. We need to eat plant based diet, starting out, eliminating food sensitivities and start to nurture the bowel and then expand it all the way through to all the plant based foods in the plant based kingdom, as well as start out wherever we’re at with our exercise levels. If we can only walk ten paces, then we start with that. But we build, we incrementally build until we’re hitting the highest possible physical expression of our capabilities that we can, because at that level, we have a better microbiome, we have better strength. We have a reduced chance of fracture by having a fall, and we have a better antioxidant system in the form of glutathione.

The third system that we must optimize if we ever want to have a fantastic euphoric health with rheumatoid arthritis is our nervous system. So this gets really complicated. So the simplest way to think about this is you have a basically a stress based nervous system, which is a fight or flight. And then you have a rest and digest nervous system. Okay. These are the parts of the autonomic nervous system. There’s other nervous systems, but let’s just stick with what we need. Here’s what most people do is they think, how can I be not stressed, not stressed, not stressed. And this is really important because stress based RA patients are associated with very poor outcomes of TNF alpha biologic drugs, namely Enbrel Humira. In a study in 2008, it was shown that patients who had very high levels of stress, which is Measured in a roundabout way by measuring heart rate variability. Because heart rate variability is an indicator of the activity of your rest and digest nervous system, and so you cannot be stressed and happy at the same time. They’re mutually exclusive. So when one nervous system is dominant, the other one is inactive or de-emphasized. How do we use this to our advantage? Well, what we want to do is we want to just start to get better, we just want to start to feel better. Symptoms coming down, strength increasing, less morning stiffness, more optimism. When we notice that we’re getting better, then we’re naturally in an optimistic state, an excited one that has hope. Any positive feeling in the body, whether it be really like obvious or really subtle, just a knowing, a well-being, a sense of well-being. Any feeling good sort of emotion disqualifies the stress based emotion disqualifies this. And this is so important, especially if we’re taking medications, because as I said, a very, very low heart rate variability correlates to a 90% predictability of a very poor response rate with biologic treatment of the TNF alpha category. What I like to do with my clients is we build into their day to day a way of experiencing euphoria and happiness and joy. It doesn’t need to be complicated, it can be a nature walk, it can be doing something you enjoy crochet, knitting, watching a short comedy clip. It can be reaching out to a loved one to have a funny conversation. It can be just doing something that makes you feel like you’re in control of your health. Any dopamine, any kind of endorphins, these kind of happiness hormones when we release them, they suppress the stress based activity in the body and their in themselves anti-inflammatory.

So this is how we open the doorway to total success with rheumatoid arthritis. We optimize our microbial systems, we optimize our antioxidant systems, and we optimize our nervous system. If we do those three things, you will never, never believe how much your health will be thriving and how little your RA is active in your body. And it’s from that achievement that then you go to your doctor and they say you’re doing incredible, your blood tests look great, C-reactive protein, sed rate are amazing and consistently good. And then you can have conversations if you wish around medication tapers. And medication tapers are only an outcome of getting healthy through the three pathways that I’ve just described. They are not in itself a goal. They are if you want to think of it like this, a reward or an outcome of what you’ve achieved. But never in itself a goal to be able to try and eliminate like these disease modifying drugs and biologics. But then anyone would agree, including your doctor. If you don’t need as much of that level of intervention because you’re so healthy. Then it makes sense to explore together with your medical provider, a potential taper if they’re interested in considering that.

So this is how you achieve ultimate success with rheumatoid arthritis. It’s not chasing some shiny object on social media. It’s doing the right things perfectly. We do this every single day with our clients. Everyone starts with us with a discovery call where myself or one of my expert team members have a conversation with people and find out where you’re at. And we’re thinking to ourselves, where are they at with their microbial, their nervous system and their antioxidants? We’re thinking this through how much opportunity have they got to improve? And normally it’s massive.

Thanks for watching this video. If you’re really serious about your health and you want to see how these three systems could be implemented into your life to dramatically reduce leaky gut, to be able to build strength around your joints and reduce inflammation directly through physical therapy, and also to dramatically lower stress and replace it with positive mood states, especially excitement. Then book a call with one of my team members. You can do that right below this video. Just click the link. It’ll take you through to a booking page, and then have a conversation with one of my incredible team members, and they will customize a plan for you to help you head towards maximum health and minimum symptoms. In the meantime, thanks for watching this video. I’ll see you in the next one.