Hello, this is Monica Reinagel and you're listening to the Nutrition Deva

podcast and this week we're talking about the effective diet and

nutrition on your immune system.

Do certain foods or nutrients really boost the immune system?

It's a recurring theme that we see on the internet, lists of immune boosting foods and recipes for tonics and teas and soups and other concoctions that will allegedly strengthen your resistance to disease or infection. They're always popular during cold and flu season. your are essential to proper immune function.

If you are malnourished,

your ability to resist infection will almost certainly be impaired.

Eating a healthy and a balanced diet

will help ensure that you're getting all the protein, vitamins, and minerals that you need

for your immune system and all your other biological systems to function properly.

But doubling or tripling up on the recommended amounts of foods or nutrients doesn't necessarily make

your immune system function more properly. In fact, overloading the body with too much, Vitamin A or zinc, two of the most touted immune

boosting nutrients, can actually impair your immune response.

When we think of boosting our immune system, we might think immune just like spinal tap looking for that extra edge.

We're looking for a special immune system amplifier

that gives us the option of turning up the volume to 11.

But in reality, the immune system doesn't just have a single volume knob.

Picture instead a sound mixing board with dozens of sliders that each modulate different aspects of the sound across lots of different channels.

When you're operating a mixing board, you don't get the best sound just by moving all the

sliders to maximum.

Instead, you're trying to find just the right balance

of all the different frequencies and channels.

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