How To Build Your Immune System- The Way That Science Supports.

There comes a point in your nursing career, where you genuinely feel like you have heard it all, and it is no different when it comes to the strategies patients employ, and swear by, to build up their immune system. A spoonful of Turmeric, a daily multivitamin, Vitamin drips, B12 injections at the local salon, 5 Almond nuts soaked in water one hour before breakfast…There is an entire industry who are making these recommendations to us, or selling us these products, with the promise that it is going to improve the workings of the immune system, to make it stronger and more effective in its role.
Now here is the truth- you can’t build the immune system, certainly not in the same way you can strengthen a muscle in the gym, because that’s not how the immune system works. As an overall system it can become supressed or weakened, this can happen just from aging or becoming pregnant, it can also occur after taking certain medications, or from having various health conditions. The opposite, super strength, is not possible, and I can provide you with the supporting evidence as to why you are wasting your money and efforts in trying. I am generous enough to also let you in on a BIG secret of how you can help your immune system…for free!
To understand why we can’t just take a magic pill and get the superman effect, we need to start with truly understanding the immune system and how it works for us. The immune system is extremely coordinated and is made up of a vast network of cells, tissue that are all working together with one common purpose- to protect you! Imagine this is how an army serves to protect its country. There is not one simple soldier or platoon that is working in this role, an army is made up of lots of different components, different teams, and the immune system is the same.
Let’s explore…
One of the most important parts of our immune response is your Leucocyte cells (white blood cells) who are literally living their entire cell lives on the lookout for anything suspicious going on in the body. This is the frontline of your army, patrolling around ensuring no foreign invasion is going on.
As soon as anything foreign is noted (basically anyone looking a bit dodgy) the alarm bells are rung, which is responded to by a specific type of Leucocyte known as a Macrophage. He’s like the cell version of Rocky, I imagine him to be full of muscles and wearing a headband in army print. Rocky the Macrophage gets down to the area where the suspicious guy is. What makes Rocky Macrophage super terrifying is that he’s not there to ask questions, he is there to destroy, he just eats that foreign invader right up. So, perhaps our very own version of Hannibal Lecter and not so Rocky. Feeling quite pleased with himself, the Macrophage reports back the intel to base. He tells the army headquarters what this foreign invader looked like (i.e., which antigen was on the surface)
Next, this new information is passed onto the special operations part of the army, known as the T-cells. These guys are slightly more sophisticated in their approach to killing, compared to the Macrophages. I imagine the T-cells to all have incredibly posh British accents. Anyway, they go out on a scout for any foreigner who is wearing the specific antigen that Macrophage Rocky has told them about, they probably sit on the top of a building and sniper out each invader one by one. This becomes their core mission.
Back at headquarters, B cells, who will most definitely be wearing a lab coat and goggles, join with other members of the T cells gang, and work on designing a secret weapon, which we call antibodies. Based on the information they have received from the Macrophages, and what they know about the Antigens on the surface of the invader, they can look for its own opposing antibody
The whole function of the Leucocyte army is to stop the escalation of the foreign invader- Viva la resistance! But, as you can see its quite a lengthy process and going through these stages each time gives the invader an advantage, like taking over the whole body and …well we would become very sick or even die. So, the Leucocyte army have developed an effective strategy, once they create a secret antibody weapon in response to an antigen, they pop it in the cupboard for when it might next be needed, which they can deploy it straight away once the invader comes back. They are ready.
This is just one segment of the immune system.
Which brings me back to the idea of what do we really mean by boosting the immune system? Which cells are you looking to strengthen and how exactly are you going to do that without throwing it all off balance? Give Rocky the Macrophage too much strength and likely he will start eating his comrades.
Take the example of using Vitamins to improve immunity. I passed through Westfields shopping mall a couple of weeks ago, where I saw a stand advertising Vitamin drips. You could literally select what vitamins you would like to have pumped into you at a hefty cost. I could not work out if this was stupid or dangerous (unless you have an ACTUAL severe B12 deficiency as diagnosed by blood sample) this is going to make absolutely no different to your overall immune response, and not increase your B12 levels either, since your body has a limited capacity for storage. You will inevitably end up providing your toilet bowl with the excess B12- yes, you paid for expensive urine. More concerning than this, would be an excessive intake of vitamins such as Vitamin A, as a minor reaction to these increased levels you can cause dizziness, headaches and at the more worrying end comes comas and death! We even have a term for this- hypervitaminosis (too many vitamins!) Which tells you that you don’t need loads!
Remember that your immune system is doing its thing each day, on average we are exposed to literally billions of bacteria, virus, fungal spores. All these challenges, you may consider, could make the immune system a bit tired – but, believe me, that there is no Vitamin drip out there that money can buy, not for all the Turmeric in the world, that is going to be a miracle immune boosting cure.
The good news is that refuelling your immune system is free and simple.
Our greatest superpower is …. wait for it…sleep!
Yes. Sleep.
There is sufficient scientific evidence that tells us this is the tool we need to restock the immune system, so that when you wake up each day, its more robust and ready to go. When we start to pull apart the studies, we can see that even less than 7 hours sleep each night increases the risks of catching a cold; less than 5 hours sleep could mean more serious infections such as pneumonia. The greatest man-made tool we have for boosting our immune response is vaccination, but even the effectiveness of this is also closely linked to the amount of sleep we get, for example, less than 4 hours sleep each night would result in 50% less antibodies produced in response to a vaccine, compared to someone who was receiving more hours at night.
Along with eating a well-balanced diet, not smoking and getting vaccinated- plenty of sleep is the scientific answer to strengthening the immune system. You’re welcome.