How can you improve your immune system? Overall, the immune system does a great job of defending you against disease-causing microorganisms. But sometimes you fail, and a germ successfully invades your body and makes you sick.
Can this process be interfered with and boost your immune system? What if you improve your diet? Take some vitamins or herbal preparations? Making other lifestyle changes in hopes of producing a near-perfect immune response?
What can you do to boost your immune system?
The idea of boosting your immunity is attractive, but the ability to do so has proven elusive for a number of reasons. The immune system is an exact (a system), not a single entity. To function well, it requires balance and harmony. There's still a lot researchers don't know about the intricacies and interconnectedness of the immune response. At present, there are no scientifically proven direct links between lifestyle and improved immune function.
But this does not mean that the effects of lifestyle on the immune system are not that interesting and should not be studied. Researchers are exploring the effects of diet, exercise, age, stress and other factors on the immune response, in both animals and humans. Meanwhile, general strategies for healthy living are a good way to start giving your immune system the upper hand.
Stress and the immune system:
Modern medicine has appreciated the close relationship of mind and body. A wide range of ailments, including stomach upset, skin disorder, and even heart disease, are linked to the effects of emotional stress. Despite the challenges, scientists are actively studying the relationship between stress and immune system function.
For one thing, stress is difficult to quantify. What may seem to be a stressful situation for one person, may not be for another person. When people are exposed to situations they perceive as stressful, it is difficult for them to gauge the amount of pressure they are feeling, and it is difficult for the world to know whether a person's personal impression of the amount of stress is accurate or not. The scientist can only measure things that may reflect stress, such as the number of times the heart beats each minute, but these measures may also reflect other factors.
However, most scientists who study the relationship between stress and immune function do not study sudden, short-lived stress. Instead they try to study more of the recurring stressors known as chronic stress, such as those caused by relationships with family, friends, and co-workers, or the ongoing challenges of doing well in one's work. Some scientists are looking into whether constant stress affects the immune system.
But it is difficult to conduct what scientists call “controlled experiments” in humans. In a controlled experiment, a scientist can only change one factor, such as the amount of a certain chemical, and then measure the effect of that change on some other measurable phenomenon, such as the amount of antibodies produced by a specific type of immune system cell when it is exposed to the chemical.
In a living animal or human being, this type of control is not possible, since there are many other things happening to the animal or person at the time the measurements are taken. Despite these inevitable difficulties in measuring the relationship of stress to immunity, scientists are making progress.
Exercise: good or bad for your immune system?
Regular exercise is one of the pillars of a healthy life. It improves cardiovascular health, lowers blood pressure, helps control body weight, and protects against a variety of diseases. But does it help boost your immune system naturally and keep it healthy? Just like eating a healthy diet, exercise can contribute to good overall health and thus a healthy immune system. It may contribute more directly by promoting good blood circulation, which allows cells and substances in the immune system to move through the body freely and do their job efficiently.
Some scientists are trying to take the next step to determine whether exercise directly affects a person's susceptibility to infection. For example, some researchers are looking into whether extreme amounts of intense exercise can often injure athletes or hinder their immune function in one way or another. To do this kind of research, scientists usually ask athletes to exercise more intensely; Scientists test their blood and urine before and after exercise to detect any changes in components of the immune system. While some changes have been recorded, immunologists do not yet know what these changes mean in terms of the human immune response.
One approach that could help researchers get more complete answers about whether lifestyle factors such as exercise help improve immunity and benefit from human genome sequencing. This opportunity can be used for research based on updated biomedical technology to give a more complete answer to this and similar questions about the immune system.
For example, microarrays or "gene chips" based on the human genome allow scientists to simultaneously search for how to turn thousands of gene sequences on or off, in response to specific physiological conditions - for example, blood cells from athletes before and after exercise. The researchers hope to use these tools to analyze patterns in order to better understand how many of the pathways involved work simultaneously.
