iThrive Wellness Summit 2020

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

iThrive

Leif Christiansen

Immune System: What Do You Got?

Leif Christensen, a very knowledgeable and somebody with a lot of experience.

He has 32 years as an internal medicine doctor.

Practices medicine in Reading, Pennsylvania.

And he has completed osteopathic education and he has specialized in internal medicine.

Christensen specializes in different interventions that can help communities change their whole lifestyle.

So he has organized and run multiple community lifestyle programs such as Diabetes Undone, Breed Free programs to help people quit smoking, and Creation Health, and many other community events to help the communities around improve their lifestyle.

Life Christensen, is going to talk to us about the importance of immunity.

I'm going to speak today about the immune system.

And so it's just going to be an overview actually of the immune system to kind of give us a background on our understanding of what we can do here for it.

So the first thing is going to be an overview.

I'm going to talk a little bit about what can boost the immune system and then actually lastly talk a little bit about the immune system when it goes wrong as some of the problems that occur with it.

The immune system is a host defense system comprising many biological structures and processes within an organism that protects against disease.

So that's very broad and it's a lot more detailed than that in actual reality.

So we actually have disease states and we call them really an immune deficiency disorder.

And Again, our immune system fights diseases.

Basically, we can say it's comprised of white blood cells, and those white cells kill pathogens.

They also defend against viruses, bacteria, parasitic worms.

Actually, these cells, we're going to go into a little bit more detail later on, are macrophages, are neutrophils, are eosinophils, are basophils.

There's a variety of things underlining some of our white cells, the lymphocytes are another 1.

And these pathogens are engulfed upon entering our body and the various systems that really help in this are your spleen.

Many of us don't have tonsils anymore, but bone marrow, the lymph nodes.

So these are the types of things that we have in our body system to help out with it.

It can help off doing those types of things.

And so we have cancers, we have fungal infections, we have lymphomas.

These are things that occur when our body doesn't work appropriately and correctly.

For example, malnutrition, unsanitary conditions.

We've had certain diseases, I think we're all familiar with AIDS as another component to it.

The biggest thing that we heard right now is our coronavirus.

We get bronchitis, we get skin infections, varietis things, even meningitis.

So those are things that go along with it.

We've talked a little bit about the pathogens or the immune system beforehand with the white cells, but Complement is another big component of it.

I'm not gonna spend a lot of time today with the complement, but it is an important component.

It's basically circulating blood proteins.

They work together to promote immune and inflammatory responses.

And this complement measures the amount of activity or complement of proteins in the body.

And these infections can be seen when you have decreased complement.

We have your autoimmune diseases, you've heard of lupus, rheumatoid.

We have variety of things like affect the kidneys like glomerulonephritis, we have cirrhosis, hepatitis.

And then if you have increased complement, you can see cancers, ulcerative colitis, thyroiditis, Those are the types of things.

I'm not gonna spend as much time with it, just so you're aware that complement is a component to it.

So let's talk a little bit about the immune system.

I'm gonna first of all talk about things that can boost the immune system.

Our body has a way of delivering its white cells to the areas that are needed to fight infections.

So these are the types of things I found.

These are things that are really, we call over the counter types of things or things you can find by buying these things in terms of like, we'll start off with elderberry.

Elderberry is actually a wonderful fruit.

You can actually utilize it in a variety of things.

Many people have elderberry jam as well, but you can make elderberry juice out of it as well.

And we can buy it as an immune support supplement.

As you can see, it contains a variety of vitamins and C and E.

And they have done some studies with this.

And they found that elderberry, when compared to placebo, helps actually in a cold situation.

So you see a lot of elderberry particularly giving out for cold.

So the elderberry actually improves the immune system to fight it and in this study that they did people who used elderberry cut their time in half in terms of having colds.

It's a flower really, but here they did several studies in echinacea and found again that echinacea could reduce a person's chance of catching a cold by about 58% and also reduce the cold duration.

You see a lot of echinacea that boosts the immune system in regards to that.

It's included in the immune support supplement as a no brainer, and especially when you combine it with echinacea.

It contains a substance called berberine, which has a very strong antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory response.

University of Maryland did some study on that and found a very important ingredient to fight respiratory infections and actually sore throats.

It's actually in some of the Chinese traditional medicine.

And it has shown also to have given a lot of support in terms of that.

So these are types of things that can very much help you out in terms of some of these findings.

1 of the things I found, particularly when we talk about the GI tracts, a lot of these things are more important to provide in a liquid format.

It seems to also improve the digestion process or absorption capacity for this.

And so they're a little bit easier to be bioavailable.

So it's just something to look at liquids are sometimes the more important part for it.

It's not an absolute, but it's just something to do.

Now, the other thing, there are central immune boosting minerals also.

There are several that have proven to be beneficial.

These are again, not an exhaustive component.

These are just some of the most common ones that in the research I did, I think are beneficial.

And so let's just name a few of these types of things.

And so when we supplement that and get our soils back to a selenium it can be very much beneficial in terms of the foods that we digest.

Back to Menu

Immune System: What Do You Got?

Transcript

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Related

Wes Youngberg on COVID-19

Optimizing Our Immune System: Natural Strategies for Preventing and Treating Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Infections

2h 9m

Of Bowels, Bacterium, & Brains…

48m

Brain Studies

1h

Track 2 & 3 Seminars

Foundations of Health Ministries, Part 2

38m

Kickstarter Series '15-'16

Enhancing Emotional Intelligence

37m

Food and Mood

53m

Wes Youngberg on COVID-19

Simple Home-based Strategies for Prevention and Management of COVID19

1h 5m

Reengineering Genetic Risk

How to Turn Good Genes ON & Bad Genes OFF!

1h 18m

Total Community Immunity Series

Fight Coronavirus with Sleep - Part 10

5m

Ag and Your Health

Plants and Gut Microbiome – What’s the Connection? Part 2

42m

Track 1 Seminars

WIN! Wellness Homes of Hope & Health, Part 1

1h 23m

Diabetes and Beta-Cell Regeneration

37m

Sound Doctrine