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by R.L. Wysong, B.S., D.V.M.
Petcare: Immunity
The immune system stands between health and disease, life and death. It protects against bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, environmental and food toxins and aberrant tissue growth as in cancer.
Science is only beginning to understand immunology and with increasing knowledge it is becoming apparent that it is complex even beyond our imagination. The complexity is indeed bewildering but necessary and certainly must be respected.
The life choices that we make for our companion animals can certainly affect their immune systems. For example, exposure to light can either enhance or suppress immunity. Extreme exposure to light to the point of sun sickness and sunburn suppresses the immune system. Decreased exposure to light during the winter months in northern latitudes and continuing exposure to artificial light suppresses it. Adequate regular natural sunlight, on the other hand, optimizes immunity.
Regular exercise can enhance the immune system. No exercise can suppress it and extreme exercise can also suppress it.
Essentially everything we subject our pets to that is unnatural—that puts them out of context with their natural, wild setting—is immunosuppressive.
Age also affects immunity. There is a linear decline in resistance with age just as there is a decline in all other body functions. The slope of the graph, however, can either be at a steep decline, if we do not take proper care of our companion animals, or we can make the slope much more gradual and thus increase the chance of our pets living full, active, vital, disease-free lives. This depends on the choices we make for them.
Aside from lifestyle choices, there are important nutritional keys to immune health. Natural, fresh, whole, raw foods fed as the majority of the diet provide the key.
There are nutrients that specifically enhance immune function. These include a variety of vitamins such as the antioxidants including vitamins A, C and E, B complex, and minerals such as selenium, zinc and many others. These micronutrients are contained within the natural diet.
Additionally, there is a wide range of phytonutrients such as the flavonoids that are potent antioxidants and which strengthen the immune system:
• Polyglucoses found in natural foods, such as aloe vera and certain nutritional yeasts, have the ability to activate immune cells, in particular the macrophage. Beta-1,3-glucan, a specific polyglucose, attaches to receptor sites on macrophages to stimulate them and a host of other immune cells into activity.
• Amino acids, including lysine and arginine, increase the number of neutrophils and IgG antibody levels. They also seem to retard the age-related decline in thymic function. The thymus is important to the production of a variety of immune system components.
• Inositol is found throughout nature in the bran portion of wheat and rice, in legumes such as soybeans, and in essentially every type of mammalian cell. Inositol is needed by the immune system for the proper function of natural killer (NK) cells, which police the body for cells or organisms they recognize as “nonself.” This includes viruses, bacteria, fungi and even the body’s own cancerous, malignant cells.
• Colostrum is a fraction of the first milk provided to newborns and is particularly rich in passive immune factors. In addition, colostrum has a stimulatory effect on the immune system in a nonspecific way. Colostrum from one species has been shown to have effect on others, for example, bovine colostrum having an effect on sheep, pigs, humans, dogs and cats.
• Nucleotides are fractions of genetic materials that the body is able to produce but which are also received in the diet. Increasing dietary intake of nucleotides has been demonstrated to stimulate the proper development and activation of immune cells such as the T cells and increase concanavalin A and phytohemagglutinin, which stimulate blastogenesis (the production of immune system cells).
• Coenzyme Q10 is particularly important for cellular energy production. The immune cells have a high metabolic rate and can easily exhaust coenzyme Q10 stores since the modern diet is commonly deficient in this nutrient.
• Glutathione is an important intracellular antioxidant in all tissues but particularly within immune cells. The ability of lymphocytes, for example, to regenerate stores of glutathione directly affects their ability to respond to antigenic stimulus.
• Mushrooms, such as coriolus, maitake and shiitake, stimulate the functional maturation of macrophages, promote the scavenging of active oxygen, inhibit the cytopathic effects of various infectious agents, reactivate suppressed immunity, promote antitumor activity, and normalize helper/suppressor T cell ratios.
The supplementation of specific immune-stimulating nutrients to your pet’s diet, combined with appropriate dietary and lifestyle modifications, provides an exciting natural and safe method to enhance and optimize the immune system. This added immunity protection is critical in a world that increasingly compromises immunity while also increasing potential threats to health.
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