Nutritional Immunology is good for your health. How? By teaching you what our ancestors knew through trial and error. There is a close relationship between what we eat and how healthy we are. All ancient cultures knew this. Healers in every culture knew how to heal using plants and herbs long before the advent of modern science. Even Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine said, “Let food be your medicine and your medicine food”.
We ignored the wisdom of our ancestors. We began eating what we liked rather than what was good for us. Our diets became high in salt, sugar and fats and low in fruits and vegetables causing dietary imbalances resulting in malfunctioning immune systems. We began to suffer from chronic illnesses and we wondered why?
A recent science called Nutritional Immunology (NI) began to study the link between nutrition and the human immune system. It explored how good nutrition improves the health of the human immune system. In simplistic terms, the immune system has four major functions in the body: defending the body (army), monitoring the body (policeman), cleaning the body (garbageman) and repairing the body (repairman). When one or more of these functions breaks down, illness occurs.
Food is the raw material we use to replace, rebuild and replenish over 200 million cells daily and to keep our immune system strong. Through Nutritional Immunology, we discover the benefits of disease-fighting nutrients such as phytochemicals, antioxidants and polysaccharides in plant foods. We learn that foods such as berries, broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts are high in phytochemicals. We learn that foods such as grape seeds, tomatoes, rose hips are high in antioxidants and that foods such as mushrooms (shitake, ganoderma, maitake) are high in polysaccharides. We learn to use these foods in the right combinations to give us the maximum nutrition in our diets.
For example, Nutritional Immunology’s scientific research discovered that grape seeds have 20 times more Vitamin C and 50 times more Vitamin E than oranges while Rosehips contain 50 times more Vitamin C than lemons. By knowing this, we can adjust our diets to maximize our health benefits.
Good nutrition is very important for our health. Learning what to eat, what contains more nutrients than others and what food combinations are more powerful is an important aspect of education in nutritional immunology. The science of nutritional immunology can help you make the difference through prevention. Prevention is much easier and faster than cure.
