How to boost your Immune System

It's a common belief that anything that doesn't kill you just makes you stronger.

that being healthy makes you wealthier.

And since we have all had this experience, it appears logical.

When you experience adversity, you frequently emerge stronger and more prepared to deal with adversity in the future.

What doesn't kill you, it turns out, occasionally makes you weaker.

So what occurs when you become ill?

The Weapons of War

Imagine yourself as a big country that has a big army to protect it.

Enemies that want to seize your resources, energy, and land surround you. Your body has developed to be sensitive to harm and the presence of foes because this is a life-or-death situation. Because of this, quick action is required because an invasion could occur at any time.

Let's launch an invasion and monitor the situation. When your cells detect a problem, they flood the body with cytokines, which are signalling proteins.They act like air raid sirens, activating a variety of immune cells that then produce a large number of additional cytokines, increasing the alert. Then you are swamped with signals, which cause precautions and defences to be taken. It's time to mobilise.

Your brain turns on illness behaviours and rearranges your body's defence priorities.

The first thing you notice is that your energy level drops and you get sleepy.

You feel apathetic, often anxious or down and you lose your appetite.

Your sensitivity to pain is heightened and you seek out rest. All of this serves to save your energy and reroute it into your immune response.

You become a country under attack switching into a war economy, because properly activating your immune system is intensely disruptive and draining.Just like war is expensive for a country as industry switches to building tanks, your immune system demands huge amounts of energy, amino acids and micro elements to build its weapons.

Take fever: it speeds up your metabolism and makes your cells work harder and faster, while creating heat that is pretty stressful for many invaders – but it uses up a lot of

calories to maintain. Then, your immune system begins to clone millions of specialised immune cells to respond specifically to the enemy infecting you. B Cells produce millions of antibodies every second, each requiring hundreds of amino acids to construct.

Billions or even trillions of proteins need to be made to refresh the complement system, a minefield inside your blood.

Cytokines, the mobilisation and information signals, also need constant refreshing. Usually you acquire your resources by eating.But when you are sick, your body slows down your digestion because it needs a lot of energy you can’t spare. So it reaches for the easiest source of amino acids and starts breaking down your muscles. All that muscle that you worked so hard for is sacrificed to keep you alive. If you are young and healthy and fit, you will make up for that quickly once you are

Better. But if you are old or very young, weak or suffer from chronic illness, this may be way too draining. Your body is literally consuming itself to keep the defence going. If your whole system is already strained, when you get sick, just keeping your immune responses going can overwhelm your capacities.

Your Immune System is a Jerk. Our enemies too.

Your immune system is as dangerous to you as it is to enemies.

There is a very fragile balance between the damage caused by an infection and the collateral damage caused by immune cells.

One of your first responders are Neutrophils – imagine crazy aggressive chimps with machine guns. If a Neutrophil encounters enemies it showers them with chemicals that cut them open but can also damage civilian cells, especially if the patient is already compromised, for example by smoking. On top of that the microorganisms that invade you often release chemicals and toxins that can cause significant damage and cell death.

Therefore, a severe infection frequently results in numerous tiny lesions, or even actual organ holes. Your body works quickly to patch any holes or wounds in your organs because, as you might understand, this is not good. The majority of the damage is quickly repaired by regrowing cells, thanks to the assistance of your neutrophils and macrophages, which release chemicals that tell the body to begin repairs. However, some are loaded with collagen, an organic cement that acts as a type of universal fix and gives your squishy tissue structural structure. Scars on your skin are the effect that you can see. The original tissue and a scar are two different things. It is like a patch of cement that was poured haphazardly since it lacks any functional cells. What the original tissue could do, it cannot. Your heart beats a little bit more slowly when it has a scar. Lungs with scars can no longer hold oxygen. Your liver functions worse if it has scarring.

Thus, the functionality of your organs may decline as you live and battle serious illness after serious illness. This damage can be permanent but is typically not severe enough to impair your quality of life. Although it may sound dismal, there is something you can do to prevent most of this harm and strengthen your immune system!

The most effective method of immunity training.

You have a special immune system. Everybody has a somewhat unique immune system that is more effective against some adversaries and less effective against others. Which makes evolutionary sense, as this protects our species from being wiped out by a single infection. Collectively, the immune system of the human species is a spectrum: most people respond well enough to an infection, a few are super-responders and a few don't respond well and die. Some people survived the black death, are more resistant to HIV or Corona virus or even resistant against Ebola. Others are killed easily by the flu or highly vulnerable to certain bacterial infections. Where you are on this spectrum is impossible to predict. And you also respond differently to every possible infection.

This is why seemingly very healthy young people died from Covid while for some elderly people it was more like a mild flu. The idea that you can weather all sorts of diseases if you never get a cold is wrong. You never know what your immune system is good at until it is tested. Getting sick is a gamble in life’s casino with your health always on the line.

But there is something you can do: hacking one of the best features of your immune system. When you survive a disease, usually you have better defences against it afterwards – you gain memory cells that are very good at killing the specific enemy you fought that day. So you either don’t get the disease again or the next infection is much milder. And you can use an incredible achievement of human ingenuity that taps into this mechanism to prevent damage from disease and train your immune system: Vaccines. Vaccines basically pretend to be a disease and train your defences to be ready if it ever shows up for real. The goal is to create the same memory cells that you would get after surviving an infection. But if you can feel some side effects, why should you still do it?

Nature Vs Vaccine Dojo You have two options to train your immune system: Vaccine Dojo and nature dojo. In vaccine dojo you train with paper weapons and learn to defend yourself. Sure, you might get a black eye or a bruise.Sometimes after a vaccine, you get sick for a few days, but that’s generally it. No scars, no permanent damage.

On the other hand, getting a disease to become immune means going to a nature dojo. In nature dojo, you train with real weapons, sharp knives and swords. Things might still work out, but with way more cuts and wounds. But from time to time someone will die, be it a kid from measles or an adult from influenza. Nature dojo is just way more risky. On top of that, the immunity you get from a vaccine is often better than the natural resistance, because they are engineered to engage your immune system in a more productive way. Of course vaccines are not magic and sometimes they do not protect us as well as we’d like

them to. Maybe because an enemy mutates too quickly, like the Omicron coronavirus, or because your specific immune system does not respond well to the vaccine and builds less of a defence. Still, being vaccinated is one of the best tools to train your natural defences.

In the end, if we look at the stunning progress humanity has made in the last century, eventually we may overcome disease for good.

But until then we can do our best to take care of ourselves and others - your body and your older self will be grateful to you. Diseases are not the only problem humanity can address if we work together.