Nutrition and the Immune System

Do certain foods or nutrients boost the immune system? It’s a recurring theme on the internet: Lists of immune-boosting foods and recipes for tonics, teas, soups, and other concoctions that will allegedly strengthen your resistance to disease are always popular during cold and flu season and never more so than today.  

It is true that various nutrients are essential to proper immune function. If you are malnourished, your ability to resist infection will almost certainly be impaired. Eating a healthy and balanced diet can help ensure that you are getting all the protein, vitamins, and minerals you need for your immune system—and all your other biological systems—to function properly.

Doubling or tripling up on the recommended amount of foods or nutrients doesn’t necessarily make your immune system function more properly.

But doubling or tripling up on the recommended amount 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.

RELATED: Can You Get Too Many Vitamins?

Turning up the volume

When we think of boosting our immune system, we might think of turning a knob to turn up the volume, the way we would on a radio. And, 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 by moving all the sliders to the maximum. Instead, you’re trying to find just the right balance of all the different frequencies and channels. And the optimal balance is constantly shifting, depending on the type of music, which instruments are being featured, the venue, the size of the crowd, and all kinds of other variables.

And so it is with the human immune system; it’s not a single biological function. It’s a vast array of cellular and chemical responses that take place in tissues and organs throughout the body, in response to a wide array of threats. Turning up the volume on every channel at once won’t make any one channel more...

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