Romilly Hodges - Immune Resilience: The Breakthrough Plan to Protect Your Body and Fight Disease

INTRODUCTION

I wasnt always a nutritionist. In my previous life, I was a research analyst (research has always been my happy place) at a business and technology think tankpretty much as far away from nutrition as you can get. It was my job to gather information about current business practices, understand the complex, evolving landscape of business technology, synthesize trends, and communicate them back out to our executive members across the globe. Then at age twenty-eight, I had my first childa wonderful bundle of joywho struggled with digestive issues from the get-go, including reflux and abdominal pain as an infant, then head-to-toe eczema as a toddler. Everyday things caused skin irritation and hives, even the simple tasks of washing hands, walking through grass barefoot, or eating raw fruits or vegetables. A referral to an allergist helped me understand that all these issues were immune-related. Or, more specifically, driven by an immune malfunction: a riled-up immune system that was misinterpreting normally benign, everyday things as threats.

During this period, other than conventional medication recommendations such as steroid creams, the only guidance I received for my child was avoidance of those things that provoked an unwanted immune response. No expert I saw had any answers to my recurring questions: How did this come to be? How could we prevent this from getting even worse? What could we do to help restore immune tolerance? Without much to go on, I decided to turn my research skills to finding these answers. And what I found was a whole world of potential new understanding of how our immune system works, what it does for us, what keeps it in balance and strong, and what can weaken it.

Through my online sleuthing, and the assistance of a kind, functional medicine-in-training physician, I learned enough to resolve the eczema and dial down the environmental reactions. We added anti-inflammatory, kid-friendly smoothies, vitamin D, fish oil, and probiotics. We identified and removed trigger foods that were causing the eczema outbreaks, but I didnt really understand how these were helping. I wanted to know more about supporting immune resilience, and even perhaps ward off whats known as atopic marchthe progression in over 50 percent of children with allergic conditions from food allergy to hay fever to asthma, and even increasingly another challenging immune disease called eosinophilic esophagitis (an inflammatory condition of the esophagus that can make it hard to swallow). Another nagging thought grew at the back of my mind: if my family was going through this, then there must be otherschildren, adolescents, adultssuffering with an immune system gone simultaneously haywire and vulnerable who would benefit from knowing what I was discovering.

In my early thirties, I went back to school and got a masters degree in human nutrition. I learned from expert teachers in functional medicine about systems biochemistry, which explains the underlying biological mechanisms that either improve or hinder health, i.e., what causes things like our immune system to either work well or not. After I graduated, I worked to complete my supervised hours for board and state certification, and I learned from experienced, groundbreaking physicians and doctorate-level practitioners who were themselves educators of physicians and other clinicians about the biochemistry of our immune system and how to work with dietary and lifestyle inputs to improve resilience. I completed certification through the Institute for Functional Medicine, which teaches practitioners how to harness evidence-based dietary and lifestyle strategies to address the root causes of health and disease. With my ongoing interest in immune health, I continued to build my knowledge of the intricacies of our elaborate defense system, how it must learn to respond appropriately to every new substance it encounters from the moment were born (no small feat!), and how easily it can get derailed by our modern lifestyles. Then in practice, I worked (for many years) in an interdisciplinary team of physicians and nutritionists, providing comprehensive dietary and lifestyle care to hundreds of ticked off and struggling immune systemsmy most powerful teachers of all.

I helped my child, who is still, so far, free of eczema, hay fever, asthma, and other day-to-day immune symptoms, and I hope to help all of you reading this book understand that there is so much you can do to alter how strong your immune system is and how it behaves. By helping my own child, and now helping others through my clinical practice, I have seen its not so hard to do, as long as you know what to do.

And today, unexpected natural events have shown just how important it is to do it. At the very moment of writing this book, the role of immune health has been thrust fully into the spotlight by SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 has made its way to nearly every country, and infected hundreds of millions of peopleall mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children. Sadly, it has taken millions of lives, too. Several times during the pandemic, COVID-19 became the leading cause of death in the United States (as measured by daily rates). It became the third leading cause of death for 2020 as a whole. This situation, never experienced before in our lifetimes, has driven home just how vulnerable our densely populated, hyper-connected society is to highly contagious new diseases.