Simple ways to keep your IMMUNE SYSTEM fighting fit

Nurturing your gut health is one of the best ways to ward off illness. Now an essential new book by immunologist Dr JENNA MACCIOCHI shows you how to do it

YOur immune system is your greatest health asset and does so much more than merely protect you against infection. research shows that it plays a major role in every single aspect of your mental and physical health. When it’s working properly, your immune system will reduce your susceptibility to infection and disease, improve your ability to recover if you do get sick and stave off unwanted inflammation, age-related immune decline and chronic disease.

Your immune system is made up of incredible immune cells, cell subtypes, organs and molecules, all of which want to unleash their superpowers to keep you healthy.

Like players in a football team, each aspect of the immune system has unique (though sometimes overlapping) roles. If the team is poorly configured or imbalanced, it won’t function effectively, resulting in unwanted inflammation, low energy levels and ageing — and leaving you vulnerable to infection, autoimmune conditions (such as psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis) and allergies.

Like an athlete, the immune system needs to balance training and practice with rest and repair to become strong and adept.

DON’T BOOST — JUST BALANCE

‘Immune boosting’ is a phrase that I can’t get along with. The benefits of quick fixes and ‘immune-boosting’ supplements have been touted for decades, but as an immunologist, I find that most conversations around building a strong immune system are woefully inadequate.

Of course, it’s always a good idea to do everything you can to get your immune system firing away at full speed, but it is important to know that an over ‘boosted’ immune system is potentially harmful because it could lead to a state of chronic inflammation.

Inflammation is your immune system’s response to germs, damage or disease but also the key risk factor for a multitude of chronic diseases such as cancers, heart disease, neurodegenerative disease and metabolic conditions such as type 2 diabetes — and others that are now overtaking infections as the leading cause of poor health and premature death worldwide.

not only that, inflammation can also subtly impact quality of life, leading to fatigue, headaches, fertility issues and premature ageing. Scientific evidence supports the fact that inflammatory imbalances — too much or too little inflammation — can make it challenging for the body to manage infections such as flu and even Covid-19.

Chronic inflammation is an immunological Goldilocks: for some people it can lead to an over-boosted immune system, but in others it can lead to a weak system that struggles to deal with infections. Or both.

The aim is to achieve an immune system that is ‘just right’.

A well-functioning immune system — or a state of immune fitness, as I like to call it — is where a person’s immune system is both balanced and resilient. This doesn’t mean never getting sick, but it’s about the capacity to respond and adapt to challenges effectively, followed by a return to a baseline healthy state of wellbeing.

And luckily there is much we can do to set things on the right path.

The entire immune system turns itself over rapidly, with millions of new white blood cells being

produced in the bone marrow every second and a complete turnover every 100 days.

This means you have the opportunity to change the cycle with the decisions you make about what you eat and how you live your life.

If you are nourishing your body, you are more likely to be pumping out good, strong new immune cells better able to withstand environmental insults and less likely to malfunction and cause unwanted inflammation.

Fortunately, we are discovering more and more ways to support our metabolic health, which has important knock-on effects in optimising immune function. The ray of hope is that poor metabolic health is largely driven by diet and lifestyle factors, which means these are also tools we can use to treat, prevent and reverse it.

Although everyone’s immune health is highly individual, we all have a degree of ‘immuno-plasticity’ which refers to the ability of the immune system to undergo change in response to the world around us and the lives we lead.

We can all start to improve the fitness of our immune system to gear us up to any specific challenges we might face in life.

SUPPORT YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM

The key elements of a strong immune system include diet, activity levels, the extent to which you prioritise sleep and rest, mitigate stress and reduce harmful elements in your environment (such as pesticides or air pollution).

We know being physically active keeps us more resilient to infections and reduces their duration. Without doubt, an active lifestyle can alleviate many chronic inflammatory disease challenges we face.

But the way we eat is a very good place to start — and the most effective dietary strategy you can adopt to build strong immunity is to take care of your gut microbes.

masses of studies show that what and how we eat matters for immune function, infection protection and reducing unwanted inflammation and chronic disease risk. It is useful to think of food as a tool to build up immune resilience.

But it’s easy to become trapped by thinking individual foods and nutrients can make or break our health. however, the overall quality of your diet and the pattern of foods you eat over time are a better indicator of general health.

Your focus should be on moving your diet pattern towards an antiinflammatory one, consuming higher amounts of fresh produce, fibre, adequate protein and healthy fats. A healthy diet pattern is centred on whole, unprocessed or minimally processed foods — such as vegetables, fruits, wholegrains, nuts and legumes — retaining the fibre, as well as all the beneficial plant compounds and nutrients.

I like to think of it as an insurance policy — paying into your immunity for the long game, crowding out the foods that may not be supporting your health.

IMMUNITY BEGINS IN YOUR GUT

WE HAVE helpful bacteria living on all exposed surfaces of the body (the skin, lungs and digestive, reproductive and urinary tracts) but the greatest density and diversity is in the gut. Your gut is an ecosystem of trillions of microbes known collectively as your gut microbiota (which most people call ‘microbiome’ but technically that refers to the microbes’ genes).

These bugs outnumber your immune cells by 200,000:1. Which makes your gut and all its microbes and marvellous digestive processes a massive part of your immune health. They support the immune system indirectly by ensuring effective digestion and nutrient absorption.

They also produce ‘postbiotics’ — waste products of digestion that play a huge role in gut and overall immune health (butyrate, for instance, combats inflammation and turns off cancer genes).

Our gut microbes out-compete infectious germs and support the gut barrier cells, neutralising toxic chemicals we might inadvertently consume.

These microbes are so important to our health that we immunolo

Listen to Dr Jenna Macciochi on the Andrew Pierce Show podcast today at mailplus.co.uk

gists very much consider them a part of our immune defences — a supportive organ inseparable from overall physical and mental health.

It is not so much ‘you are what you eat’; it’s you are what your microbes digest and how well they support your gut.

Even if you have the ‘healthiest’ diet, you can only get the full nutritional benefits if you care for your microbes.

In fact, the single most effective dietary strategy you can adopt to build strong immunity is to take care of your gut microbes.

STEPS TO A HEALTHIER GUT

A KEY step is to stop the destruction of your good gut microbes caused by consistently snacking, insufficient dietary fibre, gut-meddling medications (such as antibiotics), too much alcohol, over-exercising, chronic stress and poor sleep.

and focus on eating more naturally fermented foods, which are amazing for your gut microbial diversity.

Live-culture foods and drinks such as kefir, yoghurt, kombucha, kimchi, sauerkraut and natto (fermented soybeans) contain probiotic bacteria which break down and transform the foods, giving a distinctive texture and flavour, as well as delivering beneficial microbes to the gut.

The largest body of evidence is in support of fermented dairy products, in particular kefir, which has many more ‘live and active’ bugs than its dairy cousin yoghurt.

a trial published in 2021 in the journal Cell, by researchers at Stanford University in California, which looked at fermented foods (including dairy) found that diets rich in these increased microbial diversity and reduced inflammatory markers and had a positive effect on the immune system.

AND DITCH THE SWEETENERS

EVIDENCE suggests that sweeteners can affect our ability to handle sugar normally, causing blood-sugar spikes and lowering blood-sugar tolerance (a precursor to type 2 diabetes).

They’re linked to increased appetite and cravings for sweet foods, and may play a role in weight gain and obesity — primarily because they don’t satisfy our hunger signals. In addition, blood sugar spikes can also cause cravings for sweet foods.

ADAPTED from Your Blueprint For Strong Immunity by Dr Jenna Macciochi, published by Hodder on February 24 at £14.99. © Dr Jenna Macciochi 2022. To order a copy for £11.99 (offer valid to 1/3/22; UK P&P free

on orders over £20), visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.