How Much Do You Really Know About Your Immune System?

This year has led to many more people searching for ways to keep their bodies healthy and boost their immune systems. If you’ve been searching for ways to boost your immune system, have you stopped to consider what exactly your immune system is and how it functions?

We thought this would be a good opportunity to check in and share some facts about the immune system, which could help you to make healthier choices.

What is the immune system?

As an article for Harvard Health pointed out, the immune system isn’t a single entity - it’s a system.

Our immune system is essentially what defends our body from invading pathogens. When it’s working as it should, our body is able to fight off bacteria and viruses that might enter the body. It’s really quite incredible that all of this is happening on a cellular level all the time.

To work effectively, the organisation explained, our immune system “requires balance and harmony”.

Although there is still a lot we don’t understand about how our immune system functions, one aspect that the scientific community is in agreement on is that making healthy lifestyle choices is advisable to help keep our immune systems functioning properly.

How can we improve its function?

Some of the best advice to help your immune system fire on all cylinders is to make healthy lifestyle choices, such as not smoking, eating a diet that contains a lot of fruit and vegetables, regularly exercising and getting enough sleep.

Other advice from Harvard Health is to only drink alcohol in moderation (if at all), to maintain a healthy weight and to minimise stress as much as possible.

Where does the liver come in?

The liver plays an important role in our immune systems because, as a paper in the Annual Review of Immunology explained, it is “ideally positioned to detect pathogens entering the body via the gut”.

It’s what the researchers describe as a “key, frontline immune tissue”. What this means in practice is that your liver is an important part of your body’s immune response.

In fact, the scientific research shows that “under appropriate conditions, the liver is able to mount a rapid and robust immune response”. It also reveals that the liver’s default immune status is anti-inflammatory (or immunotolerant), which is essential because the blood that flows through the liver “also transports a large number of foreign but harmless molecules (e.g. food antigens)”.

Once again, it comes back to this word balance and, in the case of the liver, it’s essential that the balance is maintained between immunity and tolerance.

Given that it’s such an important organ in our body’s immune system, what can we do to look after it a little better? One option is to introduce antioxidant liver detox supplements to your routine, such as de-liver-ance^Ⓡ, which has been designed to help keep your body in balance using the power of mother nature.

We have created a unique formula that combines cutting-edge molecular biology with natural herbs, roots and extracts that have been used in traditional herbal medicine for centuries.