Immune health is paramount to overall wellness. That’s a simple statement – but many factors can affect the immune system. Likewise, there is a multitude of natural approaches to help ensure a healthy immune system.
The immune system is made up of different organs, cells, and proteins. It protects the body from harmful environmental influences and is essential for survival. Aside from the nervous system, the immune system is the human body’s most complex system.
Within the immune system is all the microorganisms in both health and disease – and lifestyle, diet, pharmaceutical drugs, illness, and stress affect our microbiome.
How does the immune system work?
When a virus or other germs attack the body, the immune system defends you. It “sees” and kills the germs that might hurt you. This is called an immune response.
“Our immune system helps repair the damage that occurs during an attack or normal wear and tear,” says Dr. Sunil Pai, one of the first United States board-certified medical doctors in Holistic Integrative Medicine and author of An Inflammation Nation.
“Since approximately 80 percent of your immune system resides in the GI tract, it’s important to understand that certain foods cause inflammation in everyone – and other foods cause specific reactions that are unique to each of us.”
Here’s how an immune response works:
- The immune system sounds the alarm, so your body knows there’s an infection.
- It begins releasing antibodies to fight the germ — think of antibodies as soldiers designed to fight off the specific germ you have. This process can take a few days.
- The antibodies work to attack, weaken, and destroy the germ.
- Afterward, your immune system remembers the germ. If the germ invades again, your body can recognize it and quickly send out the right antibodies, so you don’t get sick!
- This protection against a certain disease is called immunity. In many cases, immunity lasts your whole life.
But when the system doesn’t work right, immune cells can mistake your body’s cells as invaders and attack. This is called autoimmunity. The part of the immune system that orchestrates all of this is the acquired immune system. It remembers foreign antigens so it can fight them if they come back.
Tasks of the immune system
Without an immune system, a human being would be just as exposed to the harmful influences of germs or other substances from the outside environment as to changes harmful to health happening inside of the body. The main tasks of the body’s immune system are:
- Neutralizing bacteria, viruses, parasites or fungi that have entered the body, and removing them from the body.
- Recognizing and neutralizing harmful substances from the environment.
- Fighting against the body’s own cells that have changed due to an illness, for example, cancerous cells.
The body also has an innate immune system that is more primitive. In autoinflammatory diseases, this natural immune system causes inflammation for unknown reasons. It reacts, even though it has not encountered autoantibodies or antigens. Autoinflammatory disorders are characterized by inflammation that results in fever, rash, or joint swelling. These diseases also carry the risk of amyloidosis, a potentially fatal buildup of a blood protein in vital organs.
As long as our body’s defense system is running smoothly, we do not notice the immune system; groups of cells work together and form alliances against germs. But illness can occur if the immune system is compromised if the germ is especially aggressive, or sometimes also if the body is confronted with a germ it has not come into contact before.
Difference between self- and non-self-substances
For protection to be effective, it is important, however, that the immune system can differentiate between “self” and “non-self” cells, organisms and substances. Usually, the body should not work against its own healthy cells.
The immune system can be activated by many “non-self” substances. These are called antigens. The proteins on the surfaces of bacteria, fungi, and viruses, for example, are all antigens. When the antigens bind to, for example, special receptors on the defense cells, a series of cell processes is started. Then the immune system can recall stored “memories” to be ready to defend against known germs more quickly.
The body’s own cells have surface proteins, too. But the immune system does not work against them, because it has already learned at an earlier stage to identify specifically these cell proteins as “self.” If the immune system identifies the cells of its own body as “non-self,” it is also called an autoimmune reaction.
Innate Immune System
There are two main parts of the immune system: the innate and the adaptive immune system.
The evolutionary older innate immune system provides a general defense against germs, so it is also called the nonspecific immune system. It works mostly at the level of immune cells like “scavenger cells” or “killer cells.” These cells mostly fight against bacterial infections.
Adaptive Immune System
In the adaptive immune system, particular agents like the so-called antibodies target particular germs that the body has already had contact with. That is why this is also called a learned defense or a specific immune response. By constantly adapting and learning the body can also fight against bacteria or viruses that change over time.
Yet these two immune systems do not work independently of each other. They complement each other in any reaction to a germ or harmful substance and are intimately connected with each other.
Dr. Pai notes: “A person with a depressed immune system under constant, low-grade attack tends to have more chronic degenerative diseases. Over long periods of time, that can lead to cancer.
“Even low-grade food sensitivities can cause major problems over time in people with weakened immune systems and other inflammatory conditions.”