Strengthen your Immune Response

Understand how your immune system works and why your gut microbiome health and diet are so important to you beating viruses

We all have immune systems, but I’m guessing most of us are like me; we only think about them when we get a cold or the flu. At that point I try to remember if its “starve a cold and feed a fever” or the reverse and I ask Kirsten if we have a chicken in the freezer for some chicken soup. I also start downing vitamin C and that’s about it. Why does this help? Does this help? What is going on when our immune systems are kicking in to “fight something off” and what should we really be doing to help? I honestly had no idea.

I promised in the last email to “follow this diet, healthy gut microbiome and COVID-19 thread” and I thought it would be quick, but it took way too long to write. I kept opening doors and recognizing very little in the room, but it was fascinating stuff that explained what our immune system is doing when we come in contact with a pathogen like COVID-19 and what kind of support it needs from our microbiome, which leads to what we as the walking host to them can do to support them to protect us. I would share with smart friends who would confide that they really didn’t know how our immune system basically worked either. I would tell Kirsten the latest ah-ha and she would ask how the article was coming. This is often how it goes. At some point my visual brain needed something to keep it all straight so I got a little help from a few movie friends to help explain what I have learned.

4 levels: Block, Id, Eliminate & Remember

Our immune system is always on, always surveying what we are coming in contact with, both on us and in us. Think of your body as a downtown hotel building with a set of big, beautiful entryways in the front of the main avenue and two nondescript ones in the back off the alley. Watching all the entry and exit points, along with all the hallways and rooms in the hotel, is the security system, our immune system.

Each day thousands of things go in and out of your body hotel and our immune system keeps track of all of them, identifying the knowns from the unknowns. The first way our immune system protests us is by creating this protective barrier around our body to protect us from pathogens entering. Secondly, it monitors for any breeches in this barrier and when one is discovered it tries to repair it. Meantime its monitoring internally for any microbes that aren’t on the approved list and when they are discovered they are taken out of the building or otherwise eliminated. Finally, it remembers when something new was found and adds the description of that to the bad guys listing so that in the future they will be detected before entry or right after they enter the door. Let’s understand each of these four better because it will help us understand what’s going on at each phase thus what kind of support our gut microbiome and diet can and should provide.

Level 1 - Build and Maintain a Barrier

The first phase of defense is to build a barrier that keeps pathogens out, but its not like a force field around our body. That’s because we need to take in air and food, allowing these to pass through to our lungs and gut respectively. Then there’s the outbound-it might be helpful to return to our hotel again.

We have one of those grand entries that leads to a big hallway that goes straight to the lungs grand ballroom. You have a steady stream passing in and out of this hallway, but they don’t get to open side doors and end up in our bloodstream or anywhere on their own. This is our respiratory tract; our upper and lower airways and they are lined with a mucous membrane that has layers of epithelial cells. Think of it as the hotel hallway with super think and very long pink shag carpet on the floor, walls and ceiling. Only that shag carpet is alive and senses you and everyone else passing through. Kind of creepy, huh? It gets weirder, just wait.

Okay, same basic kind of setup for our intestinal tract, although this is hopefully more of a one-way sort of journey with food entering and traveling down one of those living shag hallways again. Only this time there is a bit of a saliva shower upon entering the front door, which drenches everything in some lovely antimicrobial proteins. Next stop down the digestive hallway is the swimming pool, which all must pass through only in our bodies that stomach pool has a series acidic pH level, meant again to stop everyone but the food and good guys from getting any further.

Emerging dripping from the acid pool it’s another long and quite winding set of shaggy hallways only this time that living shag is much more active, trying to pull nutrients from everything passing by. Now the walls are reaching out and grabbing choice passersby in the hopes of gaining nutrients for the body. Its like a winding hotel lobby where the staff stand along the walls and pull off pieces of your clothing, rifle through your luggage and bag, taking what they want but letting you pass onward. You notice some of those along the wall aren’t hotel staff but kind of seedy looking characters. Pathogens that have made it this far like to step out of the traffic and take up a free spot along the walls when they can. By the way, if the hotel has just gone through a course of antibiotics then these walls will be pretty sparse as all the staff were taken out along with the creepers. That’s why taking probiotics during and after antibiotic courses is so important, to replace the empty spots along the wall with good guys.

Finally, the large hallway, the large intestine or colon, where things get really funky. Here there are resident microbes looking to hookup or consume or both. This is also where a lot of the power for the whole body (or hotel in our analogy) gets created. If food has made it through the saliva bath, the touchy hallways, the acid swimming pool, the really touchy windy hallway then its likely resistant to our more human-based digestion, but not to those microbes hanging about in this place. When you hear the term prebiotics or resistant starches think of the foods that have made it to this point.

Unspeakable partying happens, which sometimes you as the host might get a sense of from the excess air being pushed along to our last stop. There are a pair of double doors that everything just ends up leaning against and all of the sudden they open, to a short narrow hallway and another set of double doors. The first set are pretty smart really, sensing if its air or more solid matter waiting and passing a message along to the outer doors to see if the time is right. You might think about these as those flagging crews on the highway, except this is always a one-way game.

Its simple stuff, like if air and the host is all alone, bring on the air and let it pass. Sitting on a wooden church pew next to the parents while everyone is silently praying? Hold the air at the first door please. Even easier computations for solid matter. Something on the order of are we standing? Then keep the doors shut. Sitting and ankles report pants around them, okay to go. No letting anything go back through those double-double doors. One way, by design.

The urinary tract is kind of the same thing but with more of an aquatic vibe, just one double door at the end of the ride with a pressure tank upstream and usually there is a waterfall at the end, which is kind of nice really.

The last barrier is our skin, like the outside walls of the hotel, tough and not easily broken into but its not impossible. All sorts of things are always trying to get in but seldom do.

When a pathogen does slip through a door as someone is leaving, or finds a window that wasn’t locked, they gain entry and are inside where they aren’t supposed to be, causing us to move to level 2.

Level 2 - Find the Bad Guys

Roaming about are our immune system’s working cells, the hotel security team if you will, made up of types of white blood cells called macrophages and monocytes and dendritic cells, which are antigen-presenting cells. They are armed with pattern recognition receptors, which are calibrated to look for microbe-associated molecular patterns. Most of the time they only find the folks that are supposed to be there.

If one of those pattern receptors match a known pathogen pattern its game on to level 3. That’s really important to understand because in the case of coronoavirus, like SARS-CoV-2, we want their signature spike glycoprotein to be recognized and set-off the response team.

Level 3 - Its time to Toast some Baddies

There are different processes for taking out bacteria, that typically don’t end up in our cells, and viruses, which do invade our cells. For the bacteria the white blood cell macrophages and the dendritic cells swallow up the bacteria, releasing antigens that lead to antibodies being created by B cells and T cells and they come to coat the bacteria and take it out.

If pathogens are recognized by our receptors it triggers inflammation and killer cells show up. Killer cells seem to do what they were named for, they kill the cells that have been invaded by the pathogen. Kind of like security officers arriving outside a hotel room that has been reported to have a loud party going on of unregistered guests and they blow up the room. Everything is documented afterward in the clean-up so the body learns who was in there and can look for more of their kind in the future.

At this point I finally began to understand conditions like what my mother has lived with for over 40 years, rheumatoid arthritis, as well as allergies, and diabetes. All cases where our security staff continue to overreact, often times targeting not the unwanted but the registered guests or hotel staff just pushing a cleaning cart to the next room.

Level 4: Commit it to Memory

After all of this close combat the body remembers, adding its new knowledge of the pathogen encountered and eliminated to our immunological memory, so that hopefully next time they are stopped sooner and there isn’t so much to cleanup in the hallways. This happens in two ways.

The antibodies circulating around in your body right now have been there for days to decades, and are a result of your life experience. Also the ones with the guns stand down but they don’t forget and remain ready for the next fight. Next time that same antigen is discovered in the body they will spring to action with exactly what is needed to take them out quickly.

What’s my Gut got to do with it?

It’s the shag man. Remember our walk down the mucosa-lined intestinal tract hallways? That mucosa is our body’s largest immune tissue, and unfortunately just like a fine 70’s shag carpet that looked killer in the day, but now its not exactly looking like it did. In us this is called immunosenescence and it means basically that our security staff aren’t what they once were due to age. Still on the job, yes, just not as quick, not as killer as they once were.

Immunosenescence may be one factor that predisposes older people to more severe COVID-19 - Dr. Phillip C Calder¹

In older people, and given my age I’m going to point out that for most of the research I read that line started at age 65, this functional decline makes it even more important that we are supporting our immune system, through its support by our gut microbiota, with a healthy diet. Actually it becomes super important.

A healthy, balanced diet can offer the necessary macro- and micronutrients, prebiotics, probiotics, and symbiotics in elderly that can restore and maintain immune cell function… - Dr. Ioannis Zabetakis, et al²

Microbiome vs Microbiota

It might be a good time to talk about this word microbiota for a second because you hear a lot of microbiomes and microbiotas thrown around these days in the media. As you know, we are host to trillions of microbes, both on us and in us. Also we learned from the past newsletter Zombie Chefs & Thier Meals for US that there is more to benefit from than just the live microbes. In fact the dead probiotics, or the fractions of their bodies, are also important to us. The best definitions I have come across describe the live microbes in a particular place as microbiota and the total of the microbes, their metabolites and their parts as a microbiome. I’ll try and keep them straight from here but go easy on me when I get them reversed.

What makes for a Healthy Gut Microbiota?

My gut microbiota versus yours is different, guaranteed. Their different between members of the same family, who in lockdown were finally eating roughly the same thing every day. In fact, there are going to be differences between identical twins in the same family. Its honestly one of our most unique traits so embrace it, unless its not so great, which might look like a lack of diversity and more of the harmfull microbes than you would expect for a healthy balance. Given there are as many bacteria in our colon as stars in a galaxy - 100,000,000,000 - or one hundred billion, you can see where getting out of balance involves a lot of microbes going sideways. The great news is that this can change, pretty dramatically and in a relatively short time, through a few factors.

We’ve already talked about aging, which is one of the factors. Nothing to do about that one, at least the fact that you are ageing. Environmental factors also seem to be at play as researchers have found significant differences within a country between those living in residential care facilities and outside them.1 Diet is a major factor in the health of our gut microbiota and thus in our health and that we can do something about.

Diet is Habit

How many times have you gotten to this point in an article where the author is about to reveal that super food or diet hack that if you would just take or eat or do would give you promised benefits that you want? This isn’t that article, its rarely that simple in life and certainly not in our bodies. With regards to COVID-19 I want to be clear. There is no nutrient, nor whole food or even fermented food, that has been clinically shown to prevent the infection of SARS-CoV-2.

However, it must be noted that, to date, there are no known evidence-based therapeutics or treatment strategies available to prevent the incidence or severity of COVID-19 infection. - Dr. Ioannis Zabetakis, et al2

This view was echoed in another recent paper entitled Food science and COVID-19, which when on to state “animal studies suggest that micronutrients, food bioactives or functional foods may carry the potential to augment viral defense. However, the specific roles of food components in viral infectious diseases in humans remain unclear.”³ Still the author goes on to acknowledge the critical role of a healthy diet to our immune system.

While no foods, single nutrients or dietary supplements are capable of preventing infection with COVID-19, a balanced diet containing sufficient amounts of macronutrients and diverse micronutrients is a prerequisite of an optimally functioning immune system.3

In the first paper I cited they offer that “there is clear evidence that probiotic bacteria, particularly some lactobacilli and bifidobacteria, can modify the microbiota, modulate the immune response and protect against infections including of the respiratory tract. Many plant foods, fibre and fermented foods play a role in creating and maintaining a healthy gut microbiota and so will also help to support the immune system…Therefore, having a healthy diet could be an important factor, but one of many, in determining outcome in individuals should they become infected with coronavirus.”

So what is the diet advice? From all the papers I read for this (9) it was surprisingly the same advice and super simple.

1. Protect your hallways. If you have to do a round of antibiotics be sure and chase them with some quality probiotics and lots of the following two, so that those opportunistic pathogens don’t get a chance to stick to your shag. Maybe that should be a new mantra” “No pathogens in my shag baby!” Maybe not.

2. Eat plants of many colors. Seriously, they aren’t just painted different colors, they tell us about what they contain that’s good for us. Kind of something else I didn’t really understand. Try for at least two dozen different vegetables and fruits a week. Once you start counting you will be surprised I think.

3. Eat fermented foods. In the last article I gave you a simple recipe that a lot of you have enjoyed making. If you have caught the bug here are a couple of options to keep learning. First, if you best learn by books, you could grab a copy of our Fermented Vegetables, which covers about 64 different veggies. If you learn by watching someone else show you we have a couple of classes in the fermentation school that could be fun. Mastering Fermented Vegetables is just what it promises while Learn to Ferment Sauerkraut and Pickles keeps it to a popular two.

4. Limit the junk. Its true, not everything that passes through those entry doors is good for you. Processed foods, deep fried foods, alcohol, caffeine, sugar - so good for a moment on our tongue and so bad from then on. Little steps, just keep going forward.

As always, thank you for your time and let me know how I can make this better for everyone. Be safe out there Ferment Nerds.

-Christopher

1. Calder PC. Nutrition, Immunity, and COVID-19. BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health 2020; 3:e000085. doi:10.1136/bmjnph-2020-000085

2. Zabetakis, Ioannis, et al. "COVID-19: the inflammation link and the role of nutrition in potential mitigation." Nutrients 12.5 (2020): 1466.

3. Lange, Klaus W. "Food science and COVID-19." Food Science and Human Wellness (2020)