This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

My friends, it's Annie Grace at this naked mind and I am answering readers questions.

And today I have a question from Sarah. Sarah says, does alcohol affect your immune system?

And it's a great question. And I think that I'm just going to read a bit from my book

because I think that I really address this and I added some more details.

But your immune system is your single most powerful weapon against disease.

And doctors will tell you the same thing. And alcohol actually really does affect it in multiple ways

because germs are always surrounding us and that means we always are using our immune system to fight off disease,

whether it's through our skin or through our membranes or our orifices.

Our skin protects our body obviously from infection and disease and it germs make it into the body.

Then we have these two different systems within our immune system.

We have our innate system which friends off first time during the exposure.

So the first time your body is exposed to a certain germ, you have your innate system.

And you have your adaptive system. And that's a really cool part that it helps you to build immunities to things

because it retains information about prior German vision and defeats repeat attackers much more quickly than the first time.

And alcohol actually suppresses both systems and I'll put the links to these articles below.

But our immune system uses something called kaitokines and these are small proteins.

They send out chemical messages about infection and you could call them sort of an early alert system.

And alcohol disrupts the production of these.

So when it's working correctly, these kaitokines, they alert our immune system to intruders.

And our immune system therefore responds with white blood cells that attack and surround and actually swallow harmful bacteria.

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