Boosting the immune system:

Boosting the immune system: can you boost the immune system for natural health and longevity?

Let me announce to you the good news, boosting the immune system with nutritional supplements is possible and effective.

If your immune system is still dysfunctional(hypoactive or hyperactive) despite optimum nutrition, chronic stress relief management, body detoxification, adrenal hormonal balance, and restoring digestive health, then you need to boost your immune system with natural immune boosters or immune modulators.

“Immune system booster” is mostly a misnomer, it is more appropriate to call it: immune modulator or immune modulation. Boosting the immune system implies just boosting a weak immune system, and therefore it is not useful or may be harmful in case of hyperactive immune system.

Immune modulator implies changing the immune system to the best, it balances the immune system. It awakens up a weak immune system and calms down hyperactive immune system.

If the discussion seems complicated, please do not hesitate to ask me

I want you to imagine the immune system as a military army. A powerful army is an army that is getting continuous training or experienced with wars. Imagine that the training is your nutritional immune booster supplements and wars are real infections.

In order for you to have a healthy immune system, your immune system needs to be challenged and kept on high alert. It is challenged continuously by the bowel flora and infections. There are some beneficial infections that actually boost the immune system, and the rest are harmful infections that may trigger systemic infections and autoimmune diseases.

How to modulate or boost the immune system?

The immune system is modulated when it is challenged by simulating beneficial infections without the infection. Some plants components are composed of complex polysaccharides that look like the capsule of beneficial bacteria (bowel flora); therefore your body reacts as getting an infection without having any infection.

Taking those supplements internally will stimulate the immune system to stay on high alert, which boost the immune system and prepare it for fighting infections and cancer cells. The same process, that triggers many other immunological reactions, calms down overactive immune system; therefore appropriate immune responses are triggered against inert foreign materials, such as pollen.

Some of the famous natural immune modulators are the polysaccharides from the famous Aloe Vera plant, and the polysaccharides from Limu Moui called Fucoidan.

Those natural substances have been extensively studied on animals and in laboratories. They are used as dietary supplements to help support the body against immune system challenges.

What objective proofs do we have that those supplements balance the immune system?

Animal experiments:

• Animals exposed to high amount of carcinogens divided in two group. One group is fed with Fucoidan, the other group not fed with Fucoidan. At the end of the experiment, we find significantly higher incidence of cancers in animals not fed with Fucoidan. This give us a reflection that Fucoidan has kept the immune system in those animals on high alert and helped some of them escape from getting cancers.

• Other similar experiments with animals: those animals are challenged with some serious infections. They are divided in two groups, one of them receives Fucoidan, the other doesn't receive Fucoidan. We find at the end of the experiment that the survival of the animals fed with Fucoidan is significantly better. Fucoidan has protected some of those animals from dying from serious infections.

• Other animal experiments showed decrease in the amount of Ig E (indirect reflection of allergies) in animals fed with Fucoidan.

In order to evaluate objectively any immune modulator or other nutritional supplements, you can search the US government archives website at: www.pubmed.gov

How do we extrapolate boosting the immune system with those experiments on humans?

Those experiments reflect that Fucoidan helps boosting the immune system against infections and cancer cells. Fucoidan in Limu Moui is not proven to prevent or cure any disease because simply we do not have the proof in large studies at this time on human beings.

They are marketed for oral consumption as nutritional supplements because they do not show any toxicity.

I personally recommend Limu Moui and Aloe Vera to my patients with weak immune system, because simply there is no medication useful in boosting the immune system!

The experiment on Ig E levels, which shows calming effect on the immune system instead of boosting the immune system, makes us conclude that it may provide help for allergies in human beings. I do recommend Limu Moui for my patients when medical therapy fails or is not well tolerated due to medications side effects.

Limu Moui, brown seaweed, has been used for centuries for medicinal purposes in many cultures. My personal clinical experience makes me believe that many of the benefical effects on animals applies to human beings.

Beware of seaweed extract harvested near developed countries because it may have significant amount of lead. If you want to use seaweed extracts ask about the location where it is harvested, stick with products that fulfill GMP certification.

Nabil Khoury, MD