Without being primed by the news, by all the rumors and noise outside that many times what they create is misinformation, chaos, fear and of course depressing our immune systems!
This information is for you to digest the basics of your immune system and how you have a whole army that is always protecting you in spite of auto-immune disorders that you may have encounter, many of them have a tracking story that most likely would undercover the real root cause and would probably heal you once and for all.
We have been trained to think that we lost our power for so many things, to eat what we were supposed to nurture us, to sleep less because there were some messages of "wasting your time", to be in a sedentary lifestyle because is just more comfortable and you don't really need to exercise that much, or even worse to think that exercise and motion is just a tool to "change your body" because it doesn't fit with the "standards", to be many times ashamed of your emotions because they can show that you're not in control of your life, to keep being busy and having huge to do lists which just distract yourself from paying attention to your life, many times you end up just following a wrongful path due to being numbed into a career or job that you were not completely satisfied and probably you were bought into or forced to study or do it.
All of those aspects that the outside world is misleading you to choose are exactly a huge part of the incredible amount of many times of diseases, new infections and sometimes even some virus strains, that have been manipulated with political or economical purposes to force an equilibrium between "powerful forces" that are selfishly looking for their own benefit.
Nature has its own way to balance the equation, and as we have been witnessing more and more with extreme environment changes in the weather, it all will be restored to a reset point where we have more balance.
Well, exactly the same is happening within you, every time you engage in toxic eating, sedentary lifestyles, emotional turmoil, excess of stress or financial crises you most likely within a few days will be experiencing a low point in terms of your health.
Probably if you already are cursing any kind of disease, then the symptoms are very likely to become heightened.
Why is your body reacting to those external reckless behavior?
This, the immune system role, this is one of the pillars of why we become ill, or we simply turn on some kind of disease, and it is not exactly a turning on point, but it is more a building up threshold that we are reaching and provoking.
So, let's start to dismantle and explaining some of the key features of our internal immune army.
Our immune system is divided into three broad categories:
Innate Immunity. This is comprised by three types of barriers:
Anatomic comprised by your skin as well as your mucosal lining (walls of your body access such as mouth, nose, anus, vagina);
Phagocytic is a set of cells that work as trash trucks that detect pathogens or foreign particles and engulf them to release chemical poisons to destroy them;
Blood Proteins comprised of cytokines, antibodies and complement, all of which will start to attack foreign particles, harmful bacteria, and of course viral infections.
Often times this type of immune system is developed through your inheritance and certain fluids that were exposed to you during your birth, breastmilk, many of your mother’s immune substances are transmitted to you by this fluid, if you were born though natural birth, when you pass through the vaginal canal you were also bathed in many of this amazing set of immune substances, as well as being exposed to many bacteria which allowed your microbiota lining and population to be stronger.
Acquired Immunity. This is a set of defense that is given through your life's interaction with the environment and of course the exposure you have had with some type of bacteria, any other pathogen (parasites, protozoa) and viruses. Additionally inside of this acquired immunity it exists the artificial immunity, which is a provoked immunity by vaccines.
Along with this type of immunity there’s a subdivision of it which encompasses an immune cellular response, awaken by a T cell response which is the one that viruses raise, and our body mounts this response when in contact with an antigen of the virus that can be a protein of the capsid (wrapping cover of the virus) or the virus itself as in the case of an infection.
When this kind of response is generated there are some gossip cells such as the macrophages and dendritic cells, which pass along the message, that there is an internal pathogenic virus, and then your body starts releasing a strong cascade of chemical attacks that destroy all the infected cells by the virus to avoid replication of it and by doing that they lower the infection.
The other type of immune response generated by your body is against bacterial infections and any other pathogen, this is triggered by the “presentation” or detection of antigens (small parts of the bacteria or pathogen) and the generation of antibodies which will detect the antigen of the bacteria or pathogen, and will signal another set of cells named “complement” which will finish the job for them, as well as recruiting a whole army of immune cells such as your neutrophils, basophils, eosinophils and natural killer cells that will release chemical weapons against them.
In both cases, either in a cellular immune response (T cells) as well as in a humoral (antibody) response you will generate a memory of the pathogens which infected your cells, and that memory is the one that is going to protect you against future infections.
Artificial Immunity & Microbiota Influence. The artificial immunity has been widely spread by the use of vaccines, in spite of raising discrepancy against the use of them or not, let’s focus on the mechanism of action of vaccines.
Vaccines are developed to mainly prevent the symptoms of the disease and in some cases it also can help you reduce the symptoms of the disease if you already acquired it.
There are many types of vaccines but the principle of them remains the same, they isolate part of a virus protein, usually from its wrapping, and they use one, two or more proteins to develop a strong immune response towards them, they need to use as well an adjuvant, which is usually a metal derived chemical mixture that will also raise your immune response against the pathogenic virus.
Another type of vaccine, are the ones where they use a death virus, and they just allow your body also to detect the foreign pathogen and raise an immune response.
And the last type are the ones with an attenuated virus, which is the virus but without the viral infectivity and aggressiveness of the original version, they sort of “disable” the virus in order to protect you from the infection.
Now, there is a new type of immunity that has been discovered with the advent of all the microbiome science and knowledge, currently there’s evidence that if you have a strong microbiota which is raised by and strengthen by what you eat, your sleep and your exercise patterns, then you will be able to have a strong bacterial population that will protect you agains viral pathogens.
This is pretty much the main components of your immune system, of course this is just a very general and overall picture of it, because it is one of the most complex network that we have internally and that is protecting us from any kind of threat.
Nowadays, however, we are also experiencing in a bigger scale a broad spectrum of autoimmune diseases, which they're mainly produced by an excessive and dysfunctional reaction to your own cells, not recognizing them as your own, and kind of identifying them to be a threat.
These kind of diseases, nowadays have been studied from an emotional component view, which in my humble opinion, sounds more congruent. In spite of having a genetic component that of course has certain influence, using the epigenetic science, we are now able to really see the effect of every past behavior, even or emotional trigger that we had in our past or that our parents, grandparents, and at least four generations more, had before and we have been accumulating.
So, it is not a surprise, that now after 5-6 generations we are having more autoimmune diseases, this is just a consequence of many epigenetic marks that have been building up throughout the generations and years that have passed, sort of dormant, but ready to be "activated", usually by a strong emotional even, physical trauma or really painful experience.
That's why we are now able and can start be more responsible with our own set of inner tools, thoughts, emotions and behaviors to become healthier, to stop the course of the disease, to regain balance and homeostasis inside of our bodies, and moreover to clean all those epigenetic marks that we have been accumulating from many generations.
In order to achieve that, let’s take some practical tips and behaviors that we all can start to embrace in our everyday life, and that will greatly boost our immune defense system to be prepared in case you are encountered with any type of bacterial or viral infection.
1. Start being a lot more mindful of the way you eat, as I’m sure you’ve heard many times, your food is your medicine, therefore start including real and natural food instead of your “quick to go food”, green and colorful vegetables will raise your innate immunity by all the antioxidant, minerals and vitamins encountered in them, fruits that have a high content of antioxidant abilities, whether you eat meat or not, protein ingestion is vital for the development of your immune system as many of the “actors” of it are proteins, and of course consumption of more mono and poly-unsaturated fats will enable you to boost and enrich your microbiota as well as the fact that you’ll need a strong profile of them to fight infections;
2. Exercise, moving your body, even if it is a softer kind of impact such as walking or yoga, will enhance your immunity as well as lowering inflammation and toxins in your body. Start doing it little by little, at least 30 minutes of active exercise, three to four times per week;
3. Stress and Sleep. The way you care for your mental peace and allow yourself to include a meditative or reflective practice will enable you to lower cortisol and other “danger like” hormones and will allow your immune system to be prepared for a real threat instead of depressing it with false alarms, therefore look for 5-10 minutes twice in your day to relax, either with nature sounds, silence, journaling or a short meditation. Aim to sleep better, it is proven by several research that we should have from six to nine hours of sleep this will depend of course of your habits (chronotype), but this “simple” activity will repair all your body, renew many of your proteins of your system and raise the threshold of your immunity!.
4. Emotional Resilience. In times when we are faced with bigger issues, than just the traffic, a toxic boss, or some pointless discussion in our lives, we become more aware that we own the power of our emotions, therefore stop being triggered by media, panic and news and start going inside, write down the things that are circling your mind and predisposing you to ruminate or worry, start embedding positive affirmations and happy activities that boost your mood in order to also help your immune system!
5. Supplements and Natural Aids. We all, depending on our culture and patterns, know certain natural remedies, which now many of them have proved to be effective, aim for your Complex B Vitamins which are essential for all your metabolic functions and will benefit the production of high quality proteins, they also are a good baseline source for a healthy microbiota, consume minerals such as Magnesium, Copper, Zinc, Manganese, Selenium and Calcium which are mainly the ones involved in your metabolic and neural functions. Include turmeric, aloe vera, echinacea, oregano, sage, garlic, ginger, ginseng, etc.
All these, I believe kind of "simple" tools can really make a difference in terms of owning your path in terms of your immune response to almost any kind of challenge that you might encounter, and we have seen this response several times with the placebo effect that has to be analyzed in all the clinical trials for every kind of vaccine or new drug, there's always one "arm", one group of people that doesn't receive the active ingredient or the virus in the vaccine, they just receive a salt with water, but the indications, the steps to be mindful with their health, the awareness that they can heal and they will be healed is there.
So, start strengthening your own inner power, start assuming that you can generate a different kind of health, whether you're cursing with some kind of illness or not, you are able to change your thoughts toward your health, you're able to direct your intentions towards mounting or lowering (in case of an autoimmune disease) your immunity, and above all you're responsible of your future and long term health.
I wish you a powerful journey, a strong awakening to start knowing your army and helping it to become really strong and willing to protect you.