You might have been taught that the immune system is a series of white blood cells, and this is true. But that’s not all…
It also functions as a complex system that protects and is responsible for your total wellness including life and death. There are 6 body functions and 1 vital requirement essential for proper function. Yes, to keep this wonder of a protection going Mother Nature made it dependent on a series of her own bounty coming from – you guessed it, beneficial food. It is essential that you know what to eat.
One of the first signs that you are not keeping up with supplying the troops what Mother Nature intended, shows up in your skin. Teen agers are familiar with ‘the breakout’. Your skin is a major defense help to the system. It is very well supplied at its surface with an acid barrier to keep organisms from attacking and penetrating.
But if you are living on white bread, fries and Coke, and not getting the required Vitamin C, Beta Carotene, (think yellow vegetables and fruit), and lysine, an essential amino acid found in protein to support this system, it lets you know it at an early age. It is essential to know the food wise way at any age.
Your Respiratory system with its mucous membranes, lining the nose throat, and lungs is the trapping mechanism of the immune system- a healthy mucosal lining actually aids the system by destroying and detonating these unfriendly invaders from your body. Eating an overload of simple sugar can cause this system to malfunction even causing asthma and allergies. Or, you might have to start buying expensive sprays to guard your membranes.
Your intestinal tract has an army of microbes known as probiotics. They are essential to the immune system, exclusively catching alien microbes and fortifying overall immune capacity. Nature’s essential grains, beans, sprouts and spirulina, and well crafted yoghurt without high fructose corn syrup but with accommodating bacteria are the foods required here.
Then there are the systemic immune cells. They have different function and names like lymphocytes, basophiles, neutrophils, macrophages. They are the white portion of blood and are also found in lymph nodes, the areas that hurt when you have an infection and they are overworked helping you to get rid of infections. Foods rich in vitamin A such as egg yolks, liver, dried apricots, carrots and other yellow fruits and vegetables will boost your immunity and assure that you don’t feel the pain of a swollen lymph node.
The immune system must have excellent nutrition for maximum protection to take place. Actually the whole system is relying on good protein support, because their job is to manufacture defense enzymes. All enzymes in the body are proteins. If you don’t have the building blocks of protein known as amino acids and essential minerals like zinc, which you can easily get from protein rich foods like eggs, this job will not be done. Protein is essential to boost immunity.
This leads us to consider the ability of the immune cells to produce essential chemicals to do the job in a timely manner.
Enter cytokines, hormone like proteins produce by immune cells to coordinate the whole defense response. This part of the defense process has to be done in a timely fashion to speed up or turn off immune reactions.
All this is done unobtrusively with the aid of nutrition as long as you make food wise choices of protein and other antioxidants like vitamin C rich foods and shiitake and maitake mushrooms to help support this process. Cancer is actually a disease of the immune system. It occurs in response to constant, prolonged poor nutritional choices. So stop fighting, marching and start eating well.
The lymphatic System found in the lymph nodes is the part of the immune system that we can actually feel pain. With good nutritional support we might seldom experience this pain.
