Secret herbs and spices and immunity
The immune system has exquisite timing. When you get an infection, immune responses are directed toward the offending agent such as a virus. These responses start on time and they stop when their job is done. This aspect of stopping on time is one we take very much for granted. Imagine that you got the flu, then got over it, but felt like you had the flu the rest of your life. This is what it would feel like if your immune responses to the flu were not smart enough to shut down once the virus had been eliminated. You can’t have it both ways with these responses, they are either waging war or it is peace-time.
A lot of herbs and other natural products are supposed to make us healthier by stimulating our immune systems. The problem is that inappropriate stimulation of our immune systems can get us into big trouble. And this big trouble might be even worse than feeling like we have the flu when we don’t. This could help bring about allergies or autoimmune diseases or possibly even leukemia (a type of cancer of the leukocytes).
During peace-time, you can build up your troop strength, which is good to a point. This is the kind of thing that proper nutrition, exercise and stress reduction can do for the troops of our immune system. But this is very different from actually stimulating immune responses and deploying those troops into battle. With some of these immune system stimulating herbs and other magic elixirs, you could actually be fooling the body into thinking it is infected or has cancer, (unless of course, they don’t stimulate the immune system, then you are just wasting your money and not actually compromising your health).
I am also skeptical about some of the products that claim to prevent cancer because they stimulate leukocytes in cell culture or in experimental animals. First off, in many cases, the agent is administered in different amounts and/or by different routes in these experiments than would be used by humans. Secondly, if these agents stimulate immune responses against pre-cancerous or cancerous cells, you should probably only take them when pre-cancerous cells first arise. Unfortunately, most of us don’t know we have cancer until much later when the immune system faces an uphill battle.
Some people argue that our bodies are not adapted to the level of hygiene which currently exists in developed countries so that our immune systems don’t get stimulated enough by microbes. This is called the hygiene hypothesis. If this is true, then maybe our immune system does need a jolt or two now and then. However, such jolts would be most useful in childhood when our immune systems were still figuring things out. Even if the hygiene hypothesis is true, the best cure for this lack of microbial stimulation is probably the “good” microorganisms such as those in active yogurt cultures or acidophilus milk, that have been found to be safe and inexpensive.
Eat a healthy diet. Give your kids (not your babies) some yogurt. And let your immune system decide when its time to be stimulated. It knows.