The Four Steps to Immunity

Audio: The Four Steps to Immunity

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This is Doug Corrigan, the Training and Education Director for Young Living Essential Oils. As usual we have before us today a tremendous group of products to discuss. Of course with Young Living’s vast breadth of products and depth of quality it seems like we never run out of opportunities to discuss products that bring remarkably effective, diverse, and very immediately noticeable health results. This topic is certainly no different as it is one of universal interest and importance; namely, the immune system and how a special blend of essential oils that we commonly call Thieves can be a tremendous support as we go forward and attempt to boost our immunity.

As many of you are aware, the immune system is the body’s defense system against all things that can harm it. If our immune system is not functioning properly this leaves us very vulnerable to many different pathogens. I don’t know about all of you out there, but every time I tune into the news I feel a little bit like that group in the Wizard of Oz that’s walking into that forest, looking around every corner and chanting ‘Lions, tigers, and bears oh my!’ because everywhere we look we have pathogens, viruses, funguses, bacteria; all these different things that are attacking our immune systems, and our immune systems need to be in top condition to handle the different pathogens that we see in our modern society.

What is the state of your personal immune system? If you were to personify the strength of your immune system what would it look like? What we need it to look like is maybe John Rambo or Chuck Norris but for most of us, unfortunately, our immune system looks a little bit more like Barney Fife!

Let’s talk a little bit about the state of affairs out there in modern society. What are those lions, tigers, and bears? I mentioned a few things, but how big a deal is it? Well we see in studies time after time that bacterial strains that are enhanced – perhaps maybe you’ve heard of black mold – these become highly potent inducers of inflammatory and cellular toxic effects. Of course many of us have heard about the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that in 2005 killed an estimated 19,000 Americans. Here we see a problem with a solution. We have modern medicine telling us that to defend ourselves from these different pathogens we take an antibiotic that of course has other repercussions, and then we end up with resistant bacteria that we have no antibiotics for and then we’re even more vulnerable to that. Now what about funguses? A lot of people don’t realize that black mold and fungus really contribute, not that they necessarily give us an infection, but they contribute to things like lung disease, asthma, skin infections, sinusitis, immune dysfunction; and of course all of us have seen the very scary situations that are developing with these methicillin-resistant staphylococcus infections, of which there really seem to be no answers for with flesh-eating bacteria. Again, you start to feel seriously like those folks chanting ‘Lions and tigers and bears oh my!’ So we know that what’s going on there might be a little frightening. We’ve talked about some of these issues that exist in regard to different things that might harm our health and the health of our loved ones; these viruses, bacteria, funguses, all these different things.

What I’m going to present to you today is a strategy that includes four different parts. As we implement different products and concepts that Young Living offers in each of these areas I believe that you’ll improve your immunity, your health, immensely. I’ve done it in my own family; we’ve had great success. I call it Four Steps to Immunity.

The first step that we want to do in helping our immune system is to reduce our exposures, and we can do that. We can do that profoundly with regard to Thieves, specifically diffusing it.

Now the second step – and we’ll talk a little bit more about each of these in depth – we can mobilize and strengthen our defenses using different essential oils and different products so we won’t exclusively talk about Thieves; there are a couple of other products that Young Living carries that can help us to mobilize and strengthen our defenses.

Then at times, as we talked about earlier, we need to have some hired guns. Our immune system by and large might not look great; our immune system might look a lot like Barney Fife. So we need to bring in some of these tougher, more impressive defense mechanisms that can come in and help us when our immune system is compromised or when we’re under attack; we need to bring in reinforcements and that’s the area that I call hired guns.

The fourth area is that we can’t always avoid every illness but we can ease the symptoms, and there are some really great strategies that can help us ease symptoms and get over things quickly once something takes root or starts to affect our health. It starts in this area of reduced exposures.

What I mean by reduced exposures, there I’m talking about how to implement this tremendous blend of Thieves essential oil which has really been used for many, many generations going back into the Bible. Not to say of course that they used the Thieves blend exactly back in the Bible but inside the Bible, in Exodus, and even in the Koran and in the Torah, they talk about the usage of essential oils. Specifically I’ll refer to a chapter in Exodus that says ‘Also take fine spices of fragrant cinnamon, half as much, even 250 of cassia, 500, and you shall use it to anoint the tent of meeting, the ark of the testimony.’ These were the oils, these were the preparations, that people used to purify their altars, to purify their holy places and to purify their areas of worship.

Again in the medieval times there was a group of thieves who were robbing – if you can imagine the depths of depravity that would accompany people out robbing the victims of the Black Plague – this group of thieves was unaffected by the ravages of the plague because of a vinegar that they made using different essential oils and herbals, but specifically that is really what gave birth to this recipe, what gave birth to the Thieves blend of essential oils that Young Living offers. This Thieves blend can be used in many areas of the four steps to immunity, and it’s effective in several areas but we’re going to talk first about how it can help us to reduce our exposures. As the wise man said, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and I would say it’s worth much, much more than that.

So what is in the Thieves blend of essential oils? This is a blend of essential oils that holds Clove, Lemon, Cinnamon, Eucalyptus, andRosemary. This is a tremendous blend of essential oils, a real gift from the plant kingdom because it employs oils that help us in a variety of ways. First is as antimicrobial; second as antioxidant; and thirdly is really to work with the anatomy and physiology of the body to open our airways, to wake up our minds and help us with mental fatigue and all these different things. First and foremost though, this is a tremendous purifier, a purifier of our environment, and it really starts with the great essential oil of cinnamon. There are numerous studies in regard to cinnamon about how it has antifungal, antibacterial properties. This is one of the great essential oils of all time, really. Cinnamon is so profound. Of course we know that it has other physiological mechanisms that work in our body but in regard to a purifier, it really is the tops.

If we think of antifungal, a lot of people think ‘Antifungal? Do I need to be worried about funguses?’ The answer is ‘Absolutely yes.’ Funguses and molds can severely compromise our health; in fact I was just talking about how a lot of these things have been related to lung disease, asthma, sinusitis, immune dysfunction and other problematic things. In regard to antifungal activity, Cinnamon was the best essential oil tested. It had double and triple the antifungal activity of most essential oils. Cinnamon is the top, Cassia second (as you would think from that Bible passage in Exodus), and then third is Clove. Clove is tremendous as an antifungal but Clove also has other properties; we know that it’s a tremendous antioxidant, which helps our cells to be healthy and better able to fight off unwanted invaders and our immune system is going to be strengthened that way, but just in and of itself it attacks and kills microbes that we don’t want. It has broad, broad-spectrum antimicrobials, it kills bacteria, it has been shown to kill funguses, and it has been shown to kill viruses. So if we think about lions and tigers and bears, well guess what – nature has an answer for each of those different scenarios.

One of the interesting books in recent time that talks about how we can reduce our exposures was written by a gentleman named Dr. Edward Close, who wrote about toxic mold and a breakthrough discovery in regard to toxic mold. He diffused Thieves in these areas that were affected by toxic mold and virtually erased this toxic black mold that can be really harmful. It’s not just the mold where it sits and causes problems, but it releases spores and that can really have negative impacts. A lot of times people who have constant recurring sinus infections usually have problems with fungus or mold of some sort in their homes. Diffusing Thieves is tremendous in that regard; it nullified the mold in these areas, killed it outright, and protected from it coming back again.

In another important study done in 1997 at Weber State University, Sue Chao working in conjunction with Young Living Essential Oils showed how Thieves was deadly for airborne bacteria so we’re helping our surface areas and purifying those, and we are purifying our air as we diffuse Thieves. Really the longer the better was what a lot of the research from Dr. Close showed; that you need to be intermittently be diffusing Thieves in your home and in your living spaces, in your offices as well. The great thing about Thieves is that it smells wonderful, there are not going to be people complaining about the smell of Thieves because it smells like cinnamon, cloves, lemon, eucalyptus, all these great smells that really help us to fight these things off and reduce our exposures.

Of course when we talk about reducing our exposures, the next places that we need to talk about are a couple of key battlegrounds. First and foremost, how can Thieves help us with winning the battle in regard to our hands, and how can we keep them pure and clean. Our hands are crucial in our battle for maintaining our health and avoiding these different pathogens and colds and flus. Study after study shows that if we can win the battle of our hands – and that means washing your hands frequency and often. Important to note is that when you use products that have been strengthened with this Thieves blend of essential oils you’re going to be miles ahead. Of course many of you are familiar with ourThieves Foaming Hand Soap; it’s an awesome opportunity and you need to have that foaming hand soap in every bathroom or by every sink in your house. Also it leaves a protective layer, and what we’ve seen in the studies that we’ve done is that the essential oils actually remain on the hands and can form a protective barrier. Another product that can help tremendously with that – because you can’t always stay within arm’s reach of a sink and our Thieves Foaming Hand Soap, you have to go out in the real world and there is not always a lot of stuff available to you – so for that we have developed the Thieves Hand Purifier. That’s a gel agent, they are small bottles of a gel that you can take with you wherever you go, and this has been fortified and enhanced with our Thieves blend. This again builds up a tremendous protective barrier. Not only are there things in there that kill on contact as far as killing what you might be carrying around with you but it also keeps killing, keeps preventing over time. You can’t just be constantly reapplying again and again so the Thieves is so much better than a lot of the other hand purifiers because those essential oils stick around, they’re not like an alcohol that just quickly evaporates, these essential oils actually stick around on your hands and can form a great protective barrier.

Now the other battleground where it’s so essential for us to win and keep our health is the mouth. The mouth is this exchange; oftentimes it’s the hands that go to the mouth or the other mucous membranes like the nose; those are the areas where we often encounter those pathogens and they’re brought into the body. We breathe them in; we eat food that might be contaminated; we touch our mouth with our hands; and inside our mouths is a tremendous battleground and exchange for these bacteria, viruses, and funguses and all the different things that can cause us problems. One of the great ways we can reduce our exposure is by concentrating on our mouth and making sure it’s as clean as possible. That means as far as toothpaste goes, there’s a great Thieves Dentarome Toothpaste. This toothpaste has been reinforced with the different Thieves essential oils. There’s also a Thieves Mouthwash which is amazingly strong and really powerful, and you can rinse your mouth with that. There have been all kinds of different studies showing how an essential oil mouth rinse like the Thieves is so much more effective than other mouth rinses. It keeps your mouth not just free of bacteria as we were talking about; it reduces the plaque and it does that significantly. We can really compare the efficacy in multiple studies of an antiseptic mouth rinse enhanced with essential oils, how much better that works. In fact it even works better than a lot of fluoride toothpastes that are out there. That’s important for immunity, but what’s really fascinating is how dental hygiene can help you in other areas of your health. Maybe you’ve seen the studies from the American Heart Association that talk about how good dental hygiene is correlated to preventing heart infections, so surely you’ll be helping yourself to stave off different colds and flus and different things like that by keeping your mouth clean, but you may also have other things happening that are protective for your health in regard to preventing heart infection and other things like that. What a great option for us to improve our dental hygiene, the hygiene in our mouth with a couple of things that we’ve talked about – Thieves Toothpaste, Thieves Mouthwash, and then one of the products that I love that we don’t talk about enough is Thieves Lozenges. If we have those Thieves Lozenges with us all the time then anytime we think we might be compromised a little bit, if we pop a Thieves Lozenge in our mouth, you can see that we’ll have immediate effects that will last. You can see a lot of areas where we can reduce our threats of exposure with the Thieves products from hand soap and sanitizer, lozenges, of course cleaning our environment with the Thieves Household Cleaner; we can really set ourselves up to reduce our exposures in all these critical areas, and that is going to help us tremendously with regard to avoiding problems.

The second step today is to energize and improve our natural defenses. As great a wall and fortress as we can build in regard to immunity, some stuff is going to get through. Some stuff is going to get past, down the mouth, down the hatch, it’s going to get into our sinuses and we’re going to have exposures. It just happens; there are too many things out there to take into account. When that happens, what is going on in our body? Well the immune system, that’s where it really kicks in. We’re going to assist our immune system by reducing the number of pathogens, but we can also help to boost our immunity, re-energize or energize and improve our natural defenses, and there are several products that are tremendous for that, not the least of which is NingXia Red, which is a tremendous product for boosting your immunity. In fact studies have shown, measuring macrophages and phagocytes, that it improves immunity by 81% just by drinking your daily dose of NingXia Red. Other great products that take advantage of wolfberries and other effective nutraceuticals would be ImmuPro; ImmuPro is strengthened with wolfberries and also other beta glucans that are derived from mushrooms like maitaki, and these mushrooms help to strengthen our immunity and really act to boost things.

Of course Life 5 cannot be underestimated. A good portion of the immune system in the body is really controlled and triggered by our gut, so if our gut is healthy and working properly, and Life 5 can do tremendous things in regard to that, then you are much more likely to be able to neutralize those pathogens as they come into the body. I should mention here that Life 5 has several different strains of species in it that double the immunity of our immune cells. An important double-blind study done in 2006 involving 248 children tested the effects of the super strains that we have in Life 5, the super strains of beneficial bacteria, Bifidus lactis and L. rhamnosus. The children were tested from November to May, when they were most susceptible to colds and flus, and what they saw was that they reduced the number of sick days by almost 50% and reduced the need for antibiotics by 80%. So if you have anybody who is going to school, school-age children, they need to be taking that Life 5. Anybody who is encountering the rigors of the workday, encountering other people, needs to be taking Life 5. You can see it reduced the number of sick days by 50% and the need for antibiotics by 80%; what a benefit that is, to be able to reduce the intake of antibiotics! When we start to think about the things that have made our immune systems look like Barney Fife, one of those things is the fact that so many people are taking frequent antibiotics, which has disastrous effects on our natural and innate immunity, so much so that they think that just one course of antibiotics can really damage your immune system for a prolonged period of time. So if we can avoid those things, and we can do that by taking a natural alternative with no downside like Life 5, like boosting your immunity, like doing some of the other things that we’ve talked about, how much better will our immune systems be when we encounter that next problematic event? Life 5 also works against other aggressive pathogens; one of the best things it does it helps people who have bacteria-induced diarrhea, Life 5 can really help in regard to Salmonella poisoning and protecting against some of those different things, so here you have a tremendous product that helps your immunity in a variety of ways.

Now we’ll move on to the next area – hired guns. What happens when we do get sick? What happens when boosting our immunity isn’t quite enough, what happens when there is a hot infection and different things are going on? Are there natural alternatives at that point? Yes, the answer is a resounding yes! You have to continue to take your Life 5. The other thing that is so tremendous and really is built on the back of the concept of the Thieves blend is a product called Inner Defense. I call this nature’s ultimate purifier. It is jam-packed with so many tremendous oils. This is meant to be ingested so Inner Defense is a soft gel preparation, really of Thieves but Thieves in addition to several other essential oils that really make it a product like none other on the market. Inner Defense not only has all those different things we talked about before – Clove, Cinnamon, Lemon, and Eucalyptus; all these different products that can really help to attack those pathogens and help to boost our immunity and give our immune system support as it tries to stave off these different things that are attacking it – but it also has a tremendously special blend of Oregano that contains 4 different Oregano species. Oregano is jam-packed with phenols. Of course many of the different essential oils that we have in Thieves are also jam-packed with phenols, which have tremendous ability to resist bacteria, to resist funguses, and resist all these different things. It is phenols that a lot of people will know under the name carvacrol; perhaps you’ve heard of this tremendous phytochemical that has really great ability to fight off bacteria and other things; cinnamaldehyde in Cinnamon Bark; and eugenol in Clove. Eugenol has great properties for antioxidant but it also has great properties in fighting off different things that might be affecting you. A great study that looked at penicillin versus Oregano essential oil (this was again researched at Weber State University) showed that 12 micro liters of Oregano had the antibacterial equivalent of 10 units of penicillin. So that’s pretty amazing stuff when you stop to think about how effective these different essential oils can be, and they really work and they work where you need it the most.

The other great thing that Inner Defense will bring to you is protection against different parasites; that’s maybe lions, tigers, bears and alligators out there, the alligators being the parasites. I’m telling you there are a lot of folks out there who don’t even know that they have parasites but they are compromising their health. The great thing about essential oils is they also have a lot of antiparasitic action and will help to defend in that arena as well.

So now we have these hired guns and we’ve brought these things to bear. We are feeling a lot better because even though we may be struggling a little bit with our own personal innate immunity where we might be compromised, we can bring some of these essential oils that have developed inside plants and helped to protect plants from all these things – parasites, funguses, bacteria – all these different things the essential oils have evolved to protect the plants from, we can now take those things as long as we’re using pure authentic essential oils, we can take those things into our bodies and into our environments and know that they’re going to be helping us as we battle against these things.

The last section is really to ease the symptoms, the things you can do briefly to help you get through if you may be suffering from some of the illnesses that are associated with cold season. Of course there are a lot of different essential oils that you can use in regard to that but it’s important to note that continuing to take products like Inner Defense, continuing to use Thieves and reduce your threats of exposure, continuing to do all those things will help to ease the symptoms and especially to get you through to where you can get on the other side of an illness. As much as we’d like to avoid it, we all get sick sometimes and it’s really not whether you get sick that shows how strong your immune system is, but how quickly you can get over that illness. For that we have all kinds of great products; one of my absolute favorites is Breathe Again, also linked closely with the oil blend RC. These products can help tremendously to get our lung capacity back, to improve our circulation, to keep mentally aware and functioning properly so that we don’t get bogged down in some of these symptomatic things that often accompany the cold season like coughs and sinus congestion and drainage. So you have all kinds of different opportunities there to ease your symptoms with those products, not the least of which is simply Peppermint. Researchers in Great Britain showed how profoundly Peppermint could affect our ability to take in oxygen and that L-menthol would cause a highly significant enhancement of nasal sensation of airflow. One of the most important things for you to do when you’re starting to get over a cold is to get that airflow back, to get your energy up, and that will help you get through almost anything rather quickly.

So in review I hope that we’ve given you several key strategies that can assist you in your efforts to stay well and keep your family well. It’s truly a battleground it seems sometimes with some of the seasons; not to mention allergy season. A lot of these same strategies will help you tremendously with allergies because they work in a lot of the same ways. As you start to reduce your exposure with all these different methods that we talked about – using the Thieves products, as we start to reinforce and energize our own innate immunity by using great nutritional products and Life 5, then we at times need to bring in the hired guns like Thieves, Inner Defense, and again Life 5, and then as we start to affect our health by easing our symptoms and really helping us to get over things quickly. I’ve used this protocol and this strategy in my own health and in the health of my family and for years now we have been able to avoid taking antibiotics, we’ve been able to avoid a lot of those really serious conditions that sometimes can develop into pneumonia or can develop into more serious long-term conditions. We’ve had tremendous success with these strategies. We try to keep the house in order by using these different essential oils and we try to affect our health naturally, and we’ve been able to accomplish that. We’ve been able to help a lot of other families do the same thing and it’s just brought a lot of blessings to our lives. This is a great strategy, it works, it’s proven, these are strategies that people have been using for generations and generations, way back into the Bible; they work, and they work great. I am looking forward to the stories that will come in as people start to more fully implement some of these strategies and think about some of these areas where we can really help to boost our immunity and to avoid some of these illnesses that plague our society. All the best to you in your efforts and Godspeed in your quest for health.

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