Building Your Immune System

The foods we choose—and the ones we don’t—have a major impact on our overall health, but especially our immune system. While we might reach for a supplement during cold season, building a stalwart immune system is a yearlong effort. But it’s not about a single nutrient; it’s about a healthy lifestyle and consistent, targeted nutrition for your own individual needs.

A Brief Introduction

To understand why it’s so important to fuel the immune system through nutrition and healthy habits, it’s important to recognize just how complex it really is. A large network of cells, tissues, and organs that work in tandem to protect you from pathogens, toxins, and abnormal cells, your immune system operates in two distinct modes: the innate immune system (the frontline fighters), and the adaptive immune system (the long-term strategists).

The innate system is your first line of defense and is made up of your skin and the mucosal linings of your airways and gut. When something breaches those physical barriers, like bacteria in a cut or a virus hitting your respiratory tract, the specialized cells of your innate system get to work within minutes. These cells include neutrophils (white blood cells that destroy pathogens), macrophages (consumers of pathogens and cellular debris, as well as producers of cytokines), natural killer cells (patrol officers that destroy infected or cancerous cells), and dendritic cells (messengers that capture antigens to brief the adaptive immune system).  

The adaptive immune system, on the other hand, takes a few days to fully mobilize. However, its work is much more precise. It learns, adapts, and remembers every threat it’s encountered, making it an encyclopedia of your immune memory. Specialized cells in the adaptive immune system include T cells and B cells. T cells are split into two types, the cytotoxic T cells that fight off infection and disease, and the helper T cells that support the immune system more broadly. B cells develop from stem cells in bone marrow and create antibodies that bind to viruses and bacteria to destroy them. Memory B and T cells are long-lived immune cells that remain in your body after an infection or vaccination that help your immune system mount a stronger and faster defense should they encounter the same threat again.

In addition to white blood cells, skin, and mucosa, your immune system also includes the spleen, tonsils and adenoids, thymus, bone marrow, and lymph nodes. This massive system is constantly engaged in cell signaling, cell production, antibody synthesis, and tissue repair, so it should come as no surprise that it requires a massive amount of energy, nutrients, and general lifestyle support to keep it running. This is why consistent, healthful eating year-round is so important. It’s also why maintaining a healthy lifestyle is key.

What Lifestyle Habits Impact Your Immunity?

In addition to a balanced, nutrient-rich diet, you must support your immune system through other healthy lifestyle choices. These include:

1.     Sleep: Adults should get between seven and nine hours of quality sleep per night, as it has a major impact on your immune function. When you don’t get enough, your body produces less antibodies, making you more susceptible to illness; produces more inflammatory cytokines, leading to chronic inflammation; and reduces natural killer cell activity.

2.     Stress Management: Chronic stress impacts your immune system by increasing the stress hormone cortisol, which suppresses immune function by lowering white blood cell counts and increasing disease-causing systemic inflammation.

3.     Exercise: Every week, you should ideally get a mix of aerobic and resistance training. It helps reduce stress, helps to keep you at a healthy weight and lowers inflammation to promote the circulation of virus-killing cells.

4.     Maintaining a Healthy Weight: Being overweight or obese impairs immune function, potentially lowers vaccine effectiveness, and increases chronic inflammation.

5.     Harm Reduction: Smoking impairs immune function, making you more susceptible to illness, as well as increases your risk of autoimmune disorders including rheumatoid arthritis. And, over time, alcohol use also weakens the immune system and creates chronic inflammation, putting you at greater risk of disease. 

How I Can Help You Support Your Immune Health

Specific cells require specific nutrients to function, let alone reproduce. Therefore, gaps in essential nutrients—created by diet or lifestyle—can slow your body’s ability to detect threats, mount a response, and recover quickly. These gaps aren’t necessarily something you feel day-to-day. Living proactively through good nutrition and healthy habits is what will keep you truly well. Here’s how we can work together to achieve that:

·      Assess your “big picture” health. Everything from your sleep patterns, stress levels, digestion, health history, medications, and overall lifestyle have an impact on how your body absorbs and uses nutrients from the food you eat. Taking these factors into account greatly influences the kind of eating plan we develop for you.

·      Identify what to add and subtract from your diet. We will determine any nutritional gaps in your diet to begin to understand how your personal intake or absorption falls short and how we can fill those gaps and increase your nourishment. We will take a look at what needs to be decreased as well to reduce chronic inflammation and damage to your gut health. Over 70 percent of your immune cells live in your gut, so keeping it running healthily is key.  

·      Build a personalized, sustainable action plan. Short-term dietary and lifestyle changes—or inconsistent ones—don’t build long-term immune resilience. We will create an individualized plan based on your own unique needs, and build the habits that work within your real life.

·      Discuss important supplements. I will help you determine what’s valuable to your health, your gut, and immune system. I believe in a food-first approach but supplements can be great at filling nutritional gaps and are strong supporters of the immune system’s many functions.

While most people wait until they have a problem before seeking help, the best time to address your immune health is before persistent problems develop. Working with me to build your immune resilience is necessary if you:

·      Get sick more often than you used to, or find recovery takes longer than it used to.

·      Recently experienced major illness, surgery, started a new medication, or dealt with another high-stress situation that impacted your nutrition.

·      Eat a restricted diet and want to make sure you’re not creating nutritional gaps.

·      Are at a life stage where there are greater demands on your immune system, such as chronic stress, being an older adult, or having young children.

·      Simply want to be proactive about your health and move beyond the guesswork!

Contact me today and together we can build a customized action plan that’s designed for your individual needs.