Boosting our immunity or building resilience?

While the idea of taking a ‘superfood’, medication or touted ‘immune boosting supplement’ is enticing, the truth of the matter is it is not that straight forward, simple or indeed possible.

In fact, we do not want to boost a system that is in any way infl amed already (more on this in a moment). The immune system is precisely that — a system, not a single entity and, as such, is a highly complex web of specialist organs, cells, hormones and chemicals that ebb and flow in response to its surrounding environment. What we are actually striving for is an immune system that is resilient.

A resilient immune system has:

1. The flexibility and capacity to adapt to any challenges (microbial, dietary, environmental) that are presented

2. The fi nesse to respond appropriately (not attack self as in autoimmunity) and return to homeostasis – a healthy state of wellbeing with minimal collateral damage (tissue destruction or overwhelm).

Overall, our immune system does an outstanding job of defending us but sometimes it fails: a germ invades successfully and makes you sick, or there is a feed-forward cycle of unrelenting infl ammation that overwhelms the system and disease states begin to occur. What tips the balance in both these situations is an already present state of chronic infl ammation.

As my diagram here illustrates, lifestyle factors alone cause a rise in unrelenting infl ammation that brings the baseline very close to threshold. If your infl ammatory burden is this close to this threshold and overtime, you experience a number or all these other triggers, or inputs indicated in purple that further raises your infl ammatory burden, then it only takes one more ‘event’ to reach threshold and immune resilience fails.

Immune system resilience is about more than simply avoiding sickness. It’s about maintaining an infl ammatory and immune response that is neither too passive nor too active, 24/7. A resilient response is the immune system responding in the right place at the right time, in the correct way. If we lose that resilience, then some sort of disease occurs.

Framed in this way, the holy grail of optimal health and wellbeing is to build and maintain a flexible and resilient immune system.

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