Your Immune System Saves Your Life Every Day
How to Thank It and Give it a Helping Hand
You should thank your immune system every day for what it does to protect you and maintain your health. You could actually get down on your knees to offer your thanks, which would be good for your circulation!
Did you know that every day a few cancer cells are formed in your body? Your 37 trillion cell strong body produces about 350 billion new cells every day (1% of the total, which means a mostly new you every 100 days!). Just a few of these new cells have mis-reproduced DNA cell nuclei and are cancerous. If your immune system is healthy, it spots them and gets rid of them before they can multiply and do any damage, along with other potentially harmful cells. (Your immune system gets rid of about 350 billion dead or damaged cells every day, see below.)
Our immune system is perhaps the biggest mystery of our bodies. Research scientists are learning more about this amazing, and essential, workhorse every day.
As we get older our immune systems naturally weaken but can remain strong if we maintain a robust health practice. Keeping the tireless and complex work my immune system does in peak condition is at the core of my health and longevity practice – and should be the core of everyone’s health and longevity practice.
After my “aha moment” years ago when I realized I had to focus on my health for the sake of my young daughters, I started learning about the immune system. This unsung hero really captured my attention! Over the years, I have continued to read research articles and books to learn more about the extraordinary, hardworking role it plays to keep us healthy and safe. It is at the heart of the vital healing process we need to maintain.
We normally think of immunity as protecting us from the outside world, invaders like harmful bacteria and viruses. The frontline “guards” of that defense network include our skin; the mucus and saliva in our mouths, throats, and lungs; our tears; and the hydrochloric acid in our stomachs. If any invaders get past those obstacles and into our bloodstream they are met by an army of inner protectors, over 300 different types of immune cells and a host of organs like the spleen and thymus gland as well as our lymph nodes and bone marrow, which keep the battle going until hopefully it is won. This aspect of immunity is extremely complicated and involves certain immune cells “remembering” previous invaders and how to fight them, which forms the basis of vaccines and immunity from many diseases.
Another Aspect, Often Overlooked
But the other side of immunity, the maintenance and housekeeping side, is just as important when it comes to preventive health, keeping our organs and systems in tip-top shape. This maintenance and housekeeping aspect of the immune system gets rid of any toxins we ingest, whether from our food, water, air, or environment, as well as our own dead or damaged cells before they can become a problem. All these potentially harmful bodies are targeted by the immune system just like a virus would be, although at a lower and steadier alert level.
The lifetime of a cell in our bodies varies depending on what that cell does and where it is located. Many organs, like the skin and liver, have a high turnover rate and replace themselves every few days, weeks or months, growing new cells and eliminating old ones. Our brains, on the other hand, have many cells that last our entire lifetime. This constant renewal work is the primary function of the housekeeping side of the immune system.
The body needs to remove irritants, toxins and cells that reach their lifespan or become damaged in some way, which allows newly reproduced cells to take their place. In the case of muscle cells, if we exert them (i.e. stress them with exercise) more new cells grow in place of the removed one, which is how our muscles get bigger and stronger with effort. In a healthy body that is constantly renewing itself (a process I am trying to keep in high gear, especially as I get older), scrubbing away these old or damaged cells is largely the function of white blood cells, a full-time job. Even more of this activity happens when we sleep. (See my article in this issue: “Sleep: The Ultimate Fixing Machine”).
How Immune Systems Can Weaken Over Time
I have found that my immune system works at two alert levels, something I’ve learned with practice, study, and paying attention to how I feel and what makes sense to me. The first is short and sharp, a high alert, like when my body is fighting off a pathogen or disease. I notice that I get very tired, because my body is prioritizing and using most of its energy to eliminate or neutralize the threat.
The immune system’s second, lower-level activity is the steady maintenance that is required to conduct its daily housekeeping: removing dead, damaged or potentially harmful tissue. This steady maintenance helps us stay healthy, enables us to recover when overstressed, and continuously takes care of lower-level environmental or dietary threats. It is the level I experienced when I did my first detox and allowed my immune system to reset and recover by giving it more time to do its vital work. During this time, I ingested fewer irritants and toxins than in my regular, modern-life diet, and have tried to eat this way ever since.
Problems arise when our immune systems can’t keep up with all the work they need to do. This happens due to poor, toxic-laden nutrition (think about the lists of chemical additives in processed food); lack of exercise and circulation; and not enough time to do their jobs, that is, not enough sleep, rest, and lower-level activity. Hectic schedules in modern life, which wreak havoc with mealtime, sleep time, lack of exercise, or the stress of work, interfere with our immune system’s natural rhythm.
When our immune system feels overwhelmed, it has no choice but to kick into its higher alert level, even though the threats are not that dire. In that state our bodies begin to treat housekeeping chores as if we are being invaded, resulting in a chronic state of low-level inflammation and over-alertness. This condition, which is never really resolved because of the amount of work this system needs to do, results in an immune system that is overloaded and on high alert 24/7. Many studies have indicated that this is the ultimate root cause of some auto-immune diseases. (Hint: in these cases our immune systems are just doing what they were programmed to do. They just can’t keep up with the amount of toxins that need to be neutralised or eliminated.)
In his book Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body’s Natural Ability to Heal Itself, Dr. Alejandro Junger likens this never-ending work to an ambulance crew that never gets a rest and starts making bad decisions as to what is serious and what isn’t. High-level alerts shut down other, less immediately essential parts of the body to deal with the threat, thereby further impeding recovery and starting a vicious cycle.
This lower-level but chronic and constant inflammation weakens our immune system over time and makes us much more susceptible to incoming pathogens and to diseases that stem from inside us. Cancer, arterial problems like heart attacks and strokes, dementia, and diabetes all have a common source: the reduced immune function and increased inflammation that come with not enough housekeeping.
Under normal circumstances, the body’s housekeeping “sweeps away” dead and damaged cells as well as toxins during sleep, rest, and lower-level activity. Without this regular housekeeping, the toxins left behind start a cycle that begins with metabolic disease and progresses to other vulnerable parts of the body. Too many calories, too much sugar, our modern processed diets, environmental toxins, lack of exercise, the pressure of relentless stress, and lack of enough quality sleep keep our immune system in this compromised state.
Ways to Start the Healing Process
The only way to heal and restore our immune system to its full capacity is to allow it to do its work and not overload it with the many needless burdens we place on it in our modern lives. We need to eliminate the toxins we ingest when eating processed food or foods we are intolerant of (for example, dairy or gluten).
You could try a two- or three-week “elimination” detox to reset your immune system. (This means no sugar, caffeine, dairy, alcohol, gluten, or anything processed, while relying on fresh, natural food.) Fasting, either intermittently or some other fasting regime, is also a way to begin healing your immune system.
In addition, more movement is essential. This increases circulation and stimulates the housekeeping, rebuilding, and strengthening functions of the immune system.
Whatever you choose to do is up to you. Strengthening and restoring your immune system is probably the single most important thing you can do for your later-life health and longevity. Do your own research and come up with a plan that works for you. I submit that most people, especially oder people, in our modern world do not know how it feels to have a robust immune system. You will be doing yourself an incredible favor if you work at boosting it.
And one final thought, without which any immune system boosting might be incomplete: allow yourself to acknowledge the wonder and tireless work your immune system does for you every day. Respect your immune system, revere it, befriend it, and support it any way you can. It is your lifeline to a later life that is disease-free and full of passionate energy for everything and everyone that matters to you.
