Understanding Your Immune System
Inflammation gets a bad wrap these days, but let’s be clear – Inflammation is a very important job of the immune system and is a very good thing! Inflammation is an immune response that deals with infections, toxins, and trauma. It is vital to let the inflammatory process due its job. It is removing the problem, cleaning the battlefield, and we must not interfere. If acute inflammation is suppressed, chronic inflammation sets in. Certainly herbal medicine can be helpful to reduce symptoms associated with inflammation but herbs, alone, don’t suppress immune function.
Colds & Viruses are Cleanses
The body can use the virus to help clear and cleanse the body. Let your body rest and sleep during the viral infection. Feed the immune system with hot soups, stews, meat stock, animal fats, sour cream, fresh eggs, and oily fish.
Furthermore, celebrate your fever! A fever is an immune enhancing tool – a healthy giving practice. “Give me a medicine to produce a fever, and I can cure any disease!” – Hippocrates
Viral infections are activated by fruit, nuts and cocoa; replace with rich soups and stews
Food Allergies & Intolerances
The progression:
- Gut wall is damaged and become leaky and porous
- Food absorbs undigested
- Immune system reacts to undigested food – allergy
- The reaction can be immediate or delayed (up to 2 weeks)
- Reactions: asthma attack, eczema, migraine, panic attack, psychotic attack, skin rash, brain fog, painful joints & muscles, heart palpitations, atrial fibrillation, poor memory, poor ability to learn, etc
- The GAPS Diet heals and seals the gut wall, so food digests well before absorbing. Food allergies and intolerances disappear over time, including anaphylactic allergies !
Immune Health & Your Gut
- Around 85% of your immune system is located in your gut wall.
- What is GALT? – Gut Associated Lymphoid Tissue
- Your Gut is the biggest and most important immune organ!
- Around 90% of all cells in your body are gut flora.
- There is a close, intricate relationship between. your gut flora and your immune system – 90% of you communicate directly with 85% of your immune system!
- The development of the immune system in a baby is dependent on the composition of gut flora from birth.
Gut Flora in Modern Humans
Unhealthy gut flora is an epidemic in developed countries and is getting deeper with every generation. Parents pass abnormal gut flora, large toxic loads and epigenetic damage to their children. Modern environments add in toxins, malnutrition producing abnormal microbiomes. The health of populations decline progressively from generation to generation.
The epidemic in abnormal gut flora underlies the epidemics in degenerative diseases.
Autoimmunity
What We Know:
- Some 200 diseases, pronounced ‘incurable’
- 3rd leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the world
- The highest morbidity is in developed industrialized countries
- 75% of victims are women
- Each disease involves many organs and systems
- Mainstream treatment is symptomatic with serious side effects. It is based on a myth of ‘mimicry phenomenon’, designed to sell immunosuppressive drugs
- All autoimmune diseases come from the gut! This is where the treatment must begin
- Healing the gut with the GAPS Protocol makes autoimmune diseases curable
A Modern Epidemic
Chronic absorption of undigested proteins and toxins from the gut contaminates tissues of the body. The immune system tries to clean these tissues using inflammation, antibodies and other tools. Inflammation and antibodies de-contaminate tissues and remove toxins and dead cells. This de-contamination goes in many tissues and organs at once leading to many symptoms manifesting in many places in the body.
If toxicity and undigested proteins keep coming, the process cannot stop. Toxins and undigested proteins accumulate in the tissues. Different toxins accumulate in different tissues. This produces symptoms in particular organs and leads to a particular diagnosis.
The reality is that all autoimmune diseases are one disease! It originates in the gut, regardless of where symptoms may develop.
Feeding Your Immune System
- Meat, fish, eggs and fermented dairy
- Animal fats are vital! Oil fish, cod liver oil
- Collagen – rich foods: skins of fish and animals, feet, heads, meat stock, bone broth
- Organ meats: liver, kidney, heart
- Probiotic and fermented foods
- Cooked vegetables and stews
