Natural Immunity
A rudimentary understanding of your immune system will help you stay healthy against the threats of infection, catching cold, the flu, or even a serious communicable disease.
One should never overlook the important role played by general cleanliness and good hygiene in the prevention of sickness and communicable diseases. Frequent hand washing throughout the day is highly recommended. Your person, food preparation areas, as well as the environment where you sleep and awake each morning, as well as the land immediately surrounding your dwelling should be kept clean and free of debris as much as possible.
Improvements in hygiene in urban areas, or the implementation of public health infrastructure is what actually wiped out most of the major communicable diseases in the United States of America rather than vaccines, which only appeared on the scene after most communicable diseases were already on the way out. Conventional medicine claiming credit for conquering diseases with their vaccines is much like how U. S. Presidents always like to claim credit for everything positive that happened in the United States during their administrations. It makes for a nice fairy tale, but the facts simply do NOT support their claims.
Content of Natural Immunity
- Introduction to How the Immune System Works
- Your Immune System
- The Lymphatic System
- The Immune System in Natural Health
- Innate Immune System
- Adaptive Immune System
- Natural Ways to Strengthen Your Immune System
Introduction to How the Immune System Works
Quite obviously, your immune system is extremely complex. Trying to present a conventional medicine approach to explaining it would literally go on forever and make your head spin, yet would totally fail to explain what most ordinary people would want to know about the subject. This exploratory article communicates to people how they can avoid getting sick. The introductory video shown immediately above provides a good, neutral, overview of how your immune system works without getting too detailed. It is the equivalent of watching hours of more technical videos. [1]
Your Immune System
Just like the circulation system, the immune system essentially exists everywhere in your body.
The Innate and Adaptive Immune Systems
Your body's immune system consists of both inborn and developed protection against all forms of harm. Superficially, it consists of your body's mechanisms of resistance to infection and communicable disease. It is really a lot more global in scope than that, however, and covers everything from the wound healing process, to dealing with foreign invaders, sickness from bacteria or viruses, chronic lifestyle related health conditions, plus dead or dying cells, and abnormal cell growths, such as cancer.
The innate immune system and the adaptive immune system extensively interact with each other making the separation of these two systems anything, but distinctive.
Communicable diseases arise from many possible foreign disease agents - fungus, parasites (ex., worms), bacteria (ex., TB), parasitic protozoa (ex., malaria), and viruses (ex., influenza) - that have many different ways of invading the human body.
White blood cells, or leukocytes, are spherical fuzzy looking cells that are the workers of your immune system. Scientists and physicians use dozens of different names for immune cells that are all ultimately referring to different types of leukocytes or white blood cells.
The Lymphatic System
Your natural immune system is comprised of its own set of organs and circulatory system of vessels; called the lymphatic system.
Organs of the Lymphatic System
The organs of the lymphatic system consist of your tonsils, thymus, spleen, lymph nodes, Peyer's patches, and bone marrow.
Lymphatic Circulation System
The function of the lymphatic system covers more than just the immune system. It is, also, part of your body's fatty acid transport system. Fats, or lipids, pass on to the lymphatic system to be transported to the blood circulation system via the thoracic duct, which is located in your neck.
The lymphatic system is not closed, nor does it have a central pump. It functions as a sewer drain for your immune system. It propels lymph that has a composition comparable to that of blood plasma that essentially contains white blood cells. Lymph movement is slow and happens due to alternate contraction and relaxation of smooth adjacent skeletal muscle. How the Lymphatic Circulation System works explains precisely why sitting around all day is bad for your health. Constant walking and other physical activity is what circulate lymph through out the lymphatic system in a healthy person. Thus, prolonged sitting and bed rest causes your immune system to stagnate. Walking ten minutes every day will help improve your natural immunity.
Spent lymph collects through lymph capillaries. From there it travels through lymph vessels to venues onward to lymph nodes before emptying ultimately into the thoracic and then into a subclavian vein, where it mixes with oxygen depleted blood.
The Immune System in Natural Health
In natural health circles, a healthy gut is often considered the seat of your immune system. The gut possesses the largest mass of lymphoid tissue found in our bodies.[2] As much as 60% of our natural immunity can be attributed to the gut wall.
These health sites are referring to your gut-associated lymphoid tissue (GALT). Peyer's patches, which are considered to be a lymphatic organ by conventional medicine, are a component of the GALT lymphoid tissue which are located in the tail end, and very small portion, of the small intestine that is responsible for absorbing vitamin B-12.
"The development of the intestinal microflora [in the GALT] provides the basis for a barrier that prevents pathogenic bacteria from invading the gastrointestinal tract. The composition of the intestinal microflora together with the gut immune system allows resident bacteria to exert a protective function. In addition gut bacteria are involved in vitamin synthesis (espe- cially vitamins B and K) and in the metabolism of xenobiotics.
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It is a long-held belief ... that some gut bacteria are beneficial to health, whilst others may be harmful.
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Although GALT is mainly involved in specific immune protection of the gut, there is evidence for a ‘common mucosal immune system’ [MALT]: an immune response initiated in GALT can affect immune responses at other mucosal surfaces."[2]
The importance of healthy gut flora
The importance of the gut to immune health lies in the fact that your digestive tract provides a physical barrier to foreign invaders. Use of antibiotics by conventional medicine is theorized to break down this barrier by changing the balance of flora in the gut. This creates a window of opportunity for bad bacteria to take root. This imbalance in gut flora results in the development of leaky gut syndrome, where foreign matter, such as undigested food particles, leaks through the walls of your intestinal track into your blood stream, where they are NOT supposed to be. This results in your immune system creating antibodies against parts of our own bodies. This leaky gut process is theorized to be the root cause of all food allergies and autoimmune disorders. Some advocates of this theory, such as Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, even go as far as theorizing leaky gut to be the root cause of autism and other mental disorders in children.
Innate Immune System
Your body's first line of defense, called the innate immune system, is very effective against a broad range of non-specific acute threats to your health. It is fast acting and usually can finish responding within four hours.
Adaptive Immune System
Your adaptive immune system consists of mechanisms that target specific threats to your body. It is slow acting and can take between four and five days to fully kick in. Consequentially, victims of killer diseases often die long before their adaptive immune system can respond to the threat.
Natural Ways to Strengthen Your Immune System
Thus, there is plenty of reason to be concerned about maintaining excellent natural immunity.
Should you trust your personal health to the government and the vaccine industry's imposed vaccines, or to your immune system, that Mother Nature has evolved over millions of years to protect you? Everything that you thought that you knew about vaccines and vaccinations has been a big lie of conventional medicine.
While following the entire Natural Health Perspective Health and Wellness program would improve your immune system the best, there is an easier way to make a dramatic difference to your immune health. Taking the correct nutritional supplements works amazingly well.
Suggested Nutritional Supplement Regiment
- Vitamin D-3 - 5,000 IU daily
- Zinc gluconate - 25 mg daily
- Vitamin A (Retinol) - 20,000 IU once a week
- Vitamin B-3 (Nicotinamide) - 50 mg daily (Taking a B-50 tablet once a day, usually is the most economical approach to getting a number of different B vitamins, at the price of what supplementing with nicotinamide would cost.)
And, of course, if you are not already supplementing with Vitamin C then everyone should be taking 1,000mg of Ascorbic Acid a day, in divided dosages.
While there is a lot of natural health press claiming that the gut is the seat of your immune system, the data is simply NOT there to make any effective recommendations to strengthen your immune system by supplementing with probiotics. There are more than 400 different known strains of probiotic bacteria. Which bacteria strains would improve your immunity, let alone which probiotic products work are simply unknown.
As a test of just how strong your natural immunity is, you should never ever catch a cold or the flu. If you manage to get an upset stomach then, you should be at least able to recover from it within eight hours. Anybody still catching an occasional cold should put more work into strengthening his or her immune system.
Vitamin B-3 (Nicotinamide), known for its ability to treat potentially deadly staph infections, is, also, highly effective at curing nausea.
Then in the remote event that you develop a high fever taking therapeutic dosages of vitamin A, on a temporary basis, should be able to do the trick. Other possible follow ups in the event of prolong illness would be taking high dosages of vitamin C up to bowel tolerance, as well as up to 3 grams a day of nicotinamide.
Please read our Medical Advice Disclaimer.
Please read our Nutritional Supplements Disclaimer.
- Immunity
- Your Immune System 101: Introduction to Clinical Immunology
Katherine Gundling, MD, MPH, Professor, Division of Allergy and Immunology at UCSF presents an overview of the immune system, how it functions and what can go wrong.
Series: "UCSF Mini Medical School for the Public." - Functional food science and gastrointestinal physiology and function.
Salminen S, Bouley C, Boutron-Ruault MC, ...
Br J Nutr. 1998 Aug;80 Suppl 1:S147-71. Review.
PMID: 9849357 [Full Text PDF]
