Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

The coronavirus pandemic has made many of us very aware of the importance of maintaining and improving our health.

Make that your silver lining.

Because the more positive change we can make to our diet lifestyle, the better.

Today we take a close look at how diet can affect the diseases that attack the immune system.

We start with the benefits of an anti-inflammatory diet with a study from a notable new medical journal.

The International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention, a new peer-reviewed medical journal created to document the science of nutrition and lifestyle to prevent, suspend and reverse disease with an end-during chief no-last prestigious than Dr. Kim Williams, chief of cardiology and Rush, and past president of the American College of cardiology.

I was honored to join their editorial advisory board along with so many of my heroes.

And the best part is it's free. Go to ijdrp.org and put in your email to subscribe for free and you'll be alerted when new issues are out, which you can download info for free in PDF form.

Instead of preventing chronic lifestyle diseases, we doctors just tend to manage them. Instead of curing, we just mitigate why? Because of finance, culture, habit, tradition.

Many of us in the world where trillions of dollars are not wasted on unnecessary medical care.

For this reason comes the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention. After all, without data, you're just another person with an opinion.

Just to give you a taste, how about pitting plants against one of the most inflammatory diseases out there?

Alupus. An autoimmune disease in which your body can start attacking your own DNA. Kidney inflammation is a common consequence. And even with our humanitarian of immune-suppresent drugs and steroids, lupus induced kidney inflammation can lead to end-stage renal disease, meaning dialysis and death.

Unless perhaps you pack your diet with some of the most anti-inflammatory foods out there and your kidney function improves so much you no longer need dialysis or a kidney transplant.

Another similar case is also presented with a resolution in symptoms and normal kidney function unless you deviated from the diet.

Even just cutting out animal products, randomizing people to cut out meat, eggs, and dairy without significantly increasing food and vegetable intake can cut, see, reactive protein levels, a sensitive indicator of whole body information by nearly a third within eight weeks.

But with lupus, they weren't messing around. A pound of leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables a day like kale, fruits, like berries, and lots of chia or flax, and a gallon of water a day.

Basically, a green smoothie diet to extinguish lupus flair. Note though, if your kidneys are already compromised, this should be done under physician supervision so they can monitor your electrolytes, like potassium, and make sure you don't get overloaded with fluid.

Bottom line, with such remarkable improvements due to dietary changes all alone, the hope is that researchers will take up the mantle and formally put it to the test.

Automunic flamethrower, skin disease, reversals can be particularly striking visually. A woman with a 35-year history of psoriasis unsuccessfully managed for a year, after a year with drugs, suffering from other autoimmune conditions like showgreens as well, but put her on an extraordinarily healthy diet packed with greens and other vegetables fruits, not seeds, albacadosome wholegreens, and boom, within a year.

She went from 40% of her entire body surface area inflamed and affected down to zero percent, completely clear.

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