Michael A. Weiner - Maximum Immunity

PART I

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TheImmunity Connection

Immunity the word itself is magic. Ourimmune system is the bodys legacy from millions of years of evolution. It is amultipart, many-tiered, incredibly sophisticated system by which our bodies areable to naturally resist disease and infection to fight off the invadingbacteria, viruses, and other organisms that surround us constantly in ourpotentially hostile environment.

Maximum Immunity will show you how to use properdiet, vitamins, exercise, and plain common sense to enhance your bodys naturalimmune system and make it as strong as it possibly can be. That will allow yourown body and its defense systems to ward off and fight off simple illnessessuch as the common cold and the flu. We will also show you how to build up yourresistance to complex illnesses such as rheumatoid arthritis and AIDS.

But we are not talkingabout throwing away all of medical history. Maximum Immunity is aboutusing all the natural nutritional devices that you can put your hands on simplyto enhance and strengthen your bodys own immune system and to show how you canuse these in conjunction with the developments of modern science.

The problem with modern-daymedicine a problem acknowledged by most medical educators and thinkersthemselves is that it is a reactive medicine. Instead of focusing on the preventionof illness, modern medicine, and all its arsenal of

IMMUNITY

pharmaceutical weapons,focuses on the disease after it invades the body and goes into battlewith the immune system.

The age of antibiotics isfast coming to a close. Because of their great numbers, viruses and bacteriahave quickly evolved resistant strains for almost every major manmadepharmaceutical. Positive preventive health is becoming more and more important.

How many people go to adoctor when they feel fine? Not many; you usually go to the doctor after youhave become ill. And by then, it is generally too late to use your naturaldefenses alone to fight the disease because the invading bacterium or virus hasalready attacked you and is already locked in battle with your immune system.You can still benefit from adding nutritional strengthened vitamins,minerals, and amino acids to your diet to help your immune system fight offthe attack, but you may want the additional power of drugs at that late date,once the disease has already taken hold.

Maximum Immunity will show you how to use the mostpowerful weapons you have to strengthen your bodys own resistance to illness.These are your mind, the food you eat, the exercise you get, and the rest youtake it really is almost that simple. Every major and minor diseaseeventually becomes a disease of the immune system, because the immune systemincorporates the bodys total response to illness from early warning, tofull-scale battle, to a state of siege. The result of human evolution is thatour bodies have become finely tuned instruments that have the capability offighting against almost every kind of invading organism or every internaldisturbance. But once an invading microbe has taken hold, latched onto yourbody, and started to attack you within, you can not just add a couple ofvitamins as supplements and expect your body to be able to repel that invadingparticle. At that point, large doses of specific immune-enhancing nutrients anda modified diet are essential. If that fails, drug therapy may be necessary;but even here, a solid immune-enhancing program should speed recovery.

But Maximum Immunityis about going beyond drugs. In Chapters 2 and 3, you will see in detail whatyour immune system consists of and how it works. Remember that a finely tunedimmune system has to be provided with the proper vitamins, minerals, and othernutrients to operate at peak efficiency. And the irony of it

The ImmunityConnection

all is that those of uswho live in the most developed countries often have the most unbalanceddiets. The manufacturing processes that provide us with convenience foods, thatallow our food chains to be artificially manipulated, remove some of theessential elements of a balanced diet needed by our immune system. So in this,the most affluent nation in the world, more and more people have dietsdeficient in essential nutritional substances substances whose importance tothe immune system can be overwhelming. Modern urban man is overweight andmalnourished, overstressed and unfit.

In the early part of thetwentieth century, the prevailing wisdom called for treating the invadingmicrobe as it attacked the body. In the late twentieth century, we have begunto realize that the way to approach disease is first to build up the strengthof the body, the preventive aspect, and then also fight the microbe. In otherwords, it is no longer valuable simply to attack the disease without buildingup the strength of the immune system first.

YOUR IMMUNITY QUOTIENT ATEST

At this point, it is ofsome use, both for learning about the immune system and for evaluating your ownimmune strengths, to move on to a simple test. The following quiz will give youa fairly good idea of your Immunity Quotient, or Im.Q. Admittedly, therating scale is subjective; but the test scores will give you a quantitativemethod for estimating your general state of immunity. The total you achieve byadding up your scores from the individual blocks will give you an initialrating. But as you begin to incorporate more of this books self-help hints,you will see your Im.Q. and your immune function improve. Retake this quizat the end of one month and then at three-month intervals to reevaluate yourIm.Q. and your resistance. At first, you may not understand all of the termsused or the reasoning behind the scores. As the book unfolds, each chapter willadd to your understanding of the items scored in this test of your ImmunityQuotient.