Immune system

Immune system

Trust Marandure
When it comes to maintaining good health, the immune system is the body’s most precious asset. By helping the body to resist infection and avoid cancer, it offers protection against many of the world’s most widespread and deadliest diseases.

Yet, despite modern scientific understanding and major advances in medical treatments, infection is still the commonest cause of illness and death worldwide. Also, cancer of the lung, stomach, breast, cervix, bowel and the prostate continue to be scourges of the modern world responsible for over 2.5 million deaths worldwide per year.

What is going wrong? Why hasn’t our detailed knowledge of the immune system enabled us to enhance our body’s defence mechanisms in a sustainable way? In the process of developing even more powerful means of attacking and destroying micro-organisms and cancer cells, have we lost sight of the need to strengthen our innate protective systems and nurture our inner environment?

In the early 1950s, with antibiotics, general vaccination programmes, radial cancer surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy moving into the medical front line, it seemed clear to most people that scientific know-how was going to provide more effective solutions than old fashioned naturopathic method designed to encourage self-healing.

Now, 60 years on, we are faced with the spectre of malaria and tuberculosis which are on the rise once again, new strains of drug resistant superbugs outwitting our most powerful technologies, vaccinations that sometimes harm as well as protect, a rising incidence of cancer, immunodeficiency syndromes such as Aids, and new influenza epidemics.

History suggests that, when things go wrong, human beings have a tendency to continue doing what doesn’t work — even doing it harder. Despite value short-term tactical advances in the management of infectious diseases and cancer, we are singularly failing in our strategic goal of improving world health in a sustainable manner.

This is because we have attempted to usurp the power of the natural world, attacking it with crude weapons and loosing ourselves in a maze of technical detail, instead of working with nature and doing everything we can to enhance our natural powers of healing and self-defence.

Just as the pioneers of microbiology — Didier Bechamp, Claude Bernard and Louis Pasteur — explained that micro-organisms should be thought of as agents of disease and not as causes, we need to understand that our detailed, valuable and hard-won knowledge of the process of immunity is not the same as an understanding of its purpose.

We have superimposed a dualistic, male-oriented, warlike model on the scientific observations we have made, and assume that life is a battle between ourselves and the micro-organisms and cancer cells, that we inhabit a dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed biological universe.

The effect has been to focus our attention on external factors, while neglecting an inward looking, broader approach to healing that attempts to observe the interaction between the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of self, and to understand how these affect health and our susceptibility to disease. As a result, we have developed a range of medical weapons that are becoming increasingly hazardous to use.

As a society, we seem to find it easier to spend our money on weapons and drugs rather than on food, basic sanitation and clean water for those most at risk of disease. Therefore, we do not even keep faith with the knowledge that we do possess — that immunity is profoundly compromised by malnutrition, that poverty and overcrowding create the perfect environment for the spread of disease, that the typical Western diet and lifestyle lead to cardiovascular problems and cancer, that fear and stress create an internal bodily environment that is prone to disease because they suppress the immune system.

This article is written in the knowledge that good health involves paying attention to body, mind and spirit; that the immune response is the fundamental physical process of healing, and that health and healing are encouraged and enhanced by good food. Over the past 30 years, systematic scientific studies have confirmed that poor nutrition impairs the immune response, and that a diet based primarily on minimally processed and chemically unadulterated plant foods is the most effective way of enhancing immunity.

A recent global survey carried out by the World Cancer Research Fund together with the American Institute for Cancer Research concluded that plant-based diets protects against cancer. Hundreds of reliable studies show that fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains, and pulses are packed with immune-boosting phytochemicals.

Since the early 1960s, research has repeatedly confirmed that a diet high in natural fibre from vegetables, fruits, and unrefined grains protects from a wide range of serious disease. Nutrition experts and scientists worldwide agree that high intakes of saturated fats from meat, dairy products and convenience foods are linked with coronary heart disease, and that the activity of the immune system is improved by decreased total fat intake.

Large numbers of fish caught for human consumption have been shown to contain toxic heavy metals, hydrocarbons and radioactive contaminants, and those reared in fish farms are commonly dosed with antibiotics and treated with dyes. Oily fish contain unsaturated fatty acids that may protect against coronary thrombosis, but increasing fish oil intake without reducing saturated fat intake is unlikely to have a significant effect on the development of coronary heart disease.

Taking fish oils in a concentrated form may cause excessive production of free radicals, which can interfere with immunity.

Unlike fish oils, plant sources of polyunsaturated fatty acids are high in natural antioxidants, which combat the effects of free radicals.

Despite its reputation as a natural staple food, cow’s milk may compromise immunity. Some people [particularly children] are allergic to milk protein and may develop eczema, hay fever or asthma as a result of consuming it, and people with catarrhal problems and allergies often experience substantial relief when they exclude milk products from their diet.

Milk is also high in cholesterol and thus associated with an increased risk of heart problems.

Milk sugar [lactose] is digested in the stomach by an enzyme [lactase] that most humans stop producing at around the age of five, making it difficult to digest milk products efficiently.

Contamination of milk products with hormones, antibiotics and other agricultural chemical residues may also produce unpredictable and unexpected adverse reactions.

Based on this overwhelming evidence, eat to boost your immunity follows a plant-based approach to improving immunity that is relevant to every style to eat-carnivore, piscivorous, vegetarian and vegan.

It is designed to help you tailor your personal food choices to the benefit of your immune system, increasing your intake of health enhancing foods and cutting down on those that increase the immune system workload.

About the writer: Trust Marandure is a Naturopath practitioner based in Bulawayo. He can be contacted on 0772482382 or email [email protected]

 

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