Among the million other questions on your mind in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic might be whether that “immune system booster” you've seen in ads and headlines can really help protect you from getting sick. TL;DR: 👇
works, the idea of giving it a quick boost doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, Dr. Knoedler says.Mark H. Kaplan
, Ph.D., chair of the department of microbiology and immunology at the Indiana University School of Medicine, tells SELF. “That's the short answer.” Here’s the slightly longer answer on why there is no magic immune system booster, and what you need to know about how to best support your immune system.Quick recap: Your body’s defense system can be broken down into two main parts: innate and adaptive.
A lot of how your immune system responds to pathogens today depends on what happened in the past. While the basics of a functional immune system are universal, the strengths and vulnerabilities of any one individual’s immune system naturally vary depending on factors out of your control,, Ph.D., associate professor in the department of immunology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, tells SELF.
For starters, your immune system isn’t one single thing that we can pump up on demand—it’s a highly evolved, complicated system. “Our immune system is amazing,” Dr. Knoedler says, and it really knows what it’s doing. “There are so many types of cells involved,” Dr. Knoedler continues. “That’s one of the things that is hard [to make sense of] with immune boosters. What is it specifically supposed to boost? It’s an entire system, it’s not one cell.
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