You probably already know that the immune system is the body's defender: it identifies, tracks down, and destroys biological troublemakers before they can damage the body. Those troublemakers may be, for example, bacteria from a cut or splinter, a measles germ, a cold bug, a deadly rare fungus, or even a cancer cell.
These "invaders" try to take over our tissues and feed off our body's nutrients. If they succeed, we become sick or, sometimes, even die. It's your immune system's job to destroy these invaders before they destroy you.
MEET YOUR FOUR VITAL IMMUNE FRIENDS
The immune system is tremendously complex, but there are really only four key parts of it that you need to understand in order to put the principles of the Immune Power Diet to work for you. They are: the thymus, the T cells (a special kind of white cells, or lymphocytes), antibodies, and macrophages ("scavenger cells"). Rather than give, you a biology lesson, I'll introduce this cast of characters by showing you just what they do inside you.
Say you picked up a flu virus last week. Perhaps it entered your body through a cut, from a drinking glass, or just from the air you breathe. Of course, you never felt it at all, but the virus stealthily made its way into your bloodstream, constantly replicating. These viruses have one goal: to take over your cells. Inside your body's warm corridors, they will try to enter crucial cells and disrupt their normal work. Eventually, left unchecked, these viruses would damage so many cells that you would weaken, or worse, become seriously ill.
But this marauding flu virus didn't count on your immune system. As it multiplies in your bloodstream, it is met by a certain kind of white blood cell, the lymphocytes. Lymphocytes are the crucial foot soldiers in the immune battle that keep you alive. Remember these cells because you'll be hearing a lot more about them in this book, because keeping them healthy is the key to keeping you healthy. Later on, you'll see how what you eat can dramatically help or hurt your vital lymphocyte protectors.
IMMUNE FIGHTERS
Lymphocytes teem in numbers that tax the imagination. Thousands of them could fit in the period at the end of this sentence. Your body holds about a trillion—that's 1,000,000,000,000—of them, or about 3,000 in every drop of blood. Since you began this very sentence, over 800,000 of them have been created and destroyed.
Some of these lymphocytes pass through a small, walnut-sized organ at the base of your neck called the thymus. Here, special hormones turn lymphocytes into aggressive fighting cells, called T cells ("T" for thymus—immunology isn't so complicated after all). You'll be hearing more about the thymus, too, because what you eat directly affects how well this organ makes the T cells you need to keep healthy.
These immune cells have one terrific talent: they can distinguish friend from foe, what should be in our bodies from what shouldn't. They do not affect the body's healthy cells, yet they attack everything that is foreign to our bodies such as germs, transplants and grafts, even our own cells which have turned malignant. |
