How to Harness Your Immune System for Optimal Health

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One of the secrets to good health and a long life is your immune system. But how does it work and can you strengthen it? Naturopathic Doctor Jacob Wolf explains the immune system: What can strengthen or weaken it and how exercise, gut health and natural remedies like vitamin C, zinc and elderberry impact immunity.

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Matt Eaves
Nearly everyone in my house has been sick over the last few months. Cold, flu, Covid, even my dog is suffering from allergies. Since my kids have started school, feels like they’ve been sick over the first few months, and it really got me thinking: how does the immune system actually work? Is there anything that we can do to strengthen it?

Macie Jepson
Well, surely there is something that we can do to strengthen. I mean, there’s so many things, Matt, on the market right now that are saying that exact thing and promising that thing. I mean, I fell for it last year. I made those frozen immunity bombs with turmeric and which, by the way, we need to find out if it’s “tumeric” or turmeric, because I hear both.

They’re still in my freezer, so I really don’t know. But I’d like to think that there are things we can do to make a difference. I’m curious about how the immune system works. Like can the immune system actually help us fight something like cancer? What role does stress play in our immunity?

Hi, everybody. I’m Macie Jepson.

Matt Eaves
And I’m Matt Eaves, and this is The Science of Health. Joining us today is Dr. Jacob Wolf, naturopathic doctor at University Hospitals in Cleveland. Now, Dr. Wolf, we’ve had you on the podcast before, but because we are talking about the immune system today, I thought it’d be good if you talked about your education and training, because I think that uniquely qualifies you to talk about this topic.

So, where did you go to school and was involved in your training to become a naturopathic doctor?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Yeah, thanks for having me today. You know, I’m a naturopathic doctor. I went to school out in Arizona, a school that was formerly called Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine. It’s been changed to Sonoran University recently, but my training is a little bit kind of more holistic in its view of how we approach healthcare. Trained in the same basic sciences as a conventionally trained physician, but then we add on all this additional training in natural therapies, whether it’s lifestyle stuff like diet and exercise and sleep nutrition, herbs and supplements and the whole gamut of natural healthcare.

Matt Eaves
Great. So in preparation for this, I started doing a lot of research on the immune system. And one of the things I was surprised about is just how complex it is. I had this idea in my head that it was just simply the white blood cells are attacking something, but but it turns out it’s a far more complex system of interworking organs and in systems within the body.

So before we jump into some of the things in the podcast about what’s effective and what’s not, maybe sort of baseline, how does the immune system actually work? What’s going on inside our bodies?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
I mean, the immune system is all of us. So we spend a lot of our body’s energy trying to protect ourselves from foreign invaders. And our immune system is really set up to define self versus non-self. What is us and what do we need to protect and what is not us, and what do we need to get rid of?

And so, it’s really everything. It’s, it’s white blood cells are part of it. But that’s kind of a later state. Our skin is part of our immune self. The tears in your eyes are part of our immune health, the acid in our stomach, our whole digestive system. And so, there’s all these different centers of our body that are trying to protect ourselves from foreign invaders.

And once something kind of breaches that outer level, then we start to engage things like the white blood cells and kind of a more internal immunity that starts to kill off whatever that invader is.

Macie Jepson
So, what exactly happens when it works? I mean, how does it actually get rid of a virus or a disease?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Some of it depends on what’s coming into you. But if it’s a virus or a bacteria, once it’s kind of inside of the body, our body has a number of systems that it uses to help to recognize that something is in there. If it’s something that your body has seen before, it does this really quickly. So we have these memory cells in our body that activate antibodies very quickly and get rid of the invader.

It’s why you don’t get a cold every day every time you pass someone (who) sneezes. Your body’s likely seen that before and knows how to get rid of it really quickly. If we take something like Covid a couple of years ago or something that’s relatively new, it takes some time – our body has to learn that this is something new. How do we deal with it? How do we attack it? And so it takes a number of weeks to clear off those symptoms. So we’ve seen that with some of these illnesses that people get, seasonal flu is new every year. So when you get sick it doesn’t just clear it out or you get a vaccine that teaches your body. There’s a lot of mechanisms that we can use to protect ourselves.

Macie Jepson
A lot of times our body is able to fight that off. Why is it sometimes not able to? What happens when those viruses get through?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Yeah, sometimes it’s something new. You know, all these viruses are adapting and changing all the time to be able to exist the way that they want to exist, but it’s also something that we’re doing, whether we’re not sleeping well or eating well, we’re changing our own immune system by not keeping ourself as healthy as possible.

Macie Jepson
I think we’ve all been in situations where we’re stressed at a particular time in our lives, and we’re not getting a lot of sleep, and we’re just really running on empty. And sure enough, that’s when we’re going to get sick. But I guess what I want to know is what’s happening inside my body that allows those things to to affect me.

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Particularly when there’s issues with sleep, our body can’t do all of its normal processes, you know. You know, you can feel that right away when you wake up from a poor night’s sleep, you know, you’re not functioning optimally. That’s your kind of mental function. But physically, your body has a hard time doing that to you. We need that downtime to be able to recover and replenish and restore all of our kind of body’s functions, and so our immune system gets drained over time, can’t provoke the same response it typically would do.

Macie Jepson
This is kind of a myth that I’m curious about. Can you really weaken your immune system by going out into the cold? And let’s just throw in with a wet head. I mean, that’s what all the moms say.

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Yeah. I mean, it’s your immune system has challenges in the winter. You see that naturally, we know that we get more kind of seasonal illnesses through the winter than we do during the summer. And some of that has to do with our body’s response to the cold. So it’s not necessarily weakening our entire immune system, but the cold affects our mucous membranes. It makes it more difficult for our body to activate that immune system in the nose and the respiratory tracts. And so it’s more easily attacked by these viruses seasonally. And so, wet head or not, you know, just being on the cold makes it more difficult.

Matt Eaves
I live in a pretty competitive household. No matter what, we’re competing on, whether it’s how fast we can get to a restaurant or just anything. Right? It’s always something as it turns into a competition. And this often happens when someone in the house is sick. The healthy person in the house will say, well, I didn’t get that because I’ve been exercising and I’ve been running. Every one in my house exercises and is pretty, pretty healthy, but my son and I are both long distance runners and occasionally will claim that because of that, we then don’t get sick as often. I mean, is there any truth to that? Can certain types of exercise make you have a stronger immune system?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
I think exercise in general is important, you know, that helps to train your immune system, particularly if you’re doing stuff outdoors and now you’re being exposed to more allergens and more concerns as you go. But exercise really kind of boosts circulation, helps the immune system function. Overall, I think it’s an important part. I think that the challenges for people who are more sedentary, sometimes we see the same thing, and so for people who don’t exercise and maybe eat a poor diet, maybe don’t get good sleep, but also don’t get sick, it’s a separate challenge that their immune system isn’t able to engage in that immune response the same way, you know, your body’s learned to fight off all these different things, and when you get sick, you may be able to clear it out within a day or two because you’ve constrained it. But some people might get exposed to an illness in their body, just doesn’t provoke that response quite as well as they should. And so they may have a really prolonged illness to something that’s really easy to fight off for most people.

Matt Eaves
Going back to your comment on (how) the immune system has seen this before, bodies have seen this before. My daughter is going through her internship. She’s going on to elementary education. And so, she’s spending a lot of time in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade classes are exposed to a lot of germs. And my mother in law, who’s a nurse, told her, said, well, that’s sort of the deal, like when you’re around that if you’re around people who are sick, eventually you will develop an immunity to it. Is that true? Is is our immune system like a muscle? If it gets a workout, it becomes better at defending?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Yeah, I would definitely learn things over time. And that’s a kind of a classic example. The school teacher or someone working in healthcare or new to healthcare around lots of kids. Now you’re exposed to all these new things that kids are spreading around because their immune systems are developing, and then you’re getting exposed to it over time, and your body learns that as well. So a new teacher might get sick more frequently than a teacher that’s more seasoned because they’ve seen more things. But again, all these viruses and bacteria morph over time. So, it’s not like a well seasoned teacher is never going to get sick ever again. But their body is more protected than a newer teacher, potentially.

Macie Jepson
So, we’re talking a lot about being exposed to certain things, or maybe even a lack of exposure, but let’s talk about something like MS. My sister-in-law has MS and I’ve read a lot about it and learned that that’s an autoimmune disease that can be caused by an overactive immune system. I mean, the big question our family has always been why? You know, why did she get this? So what would cause the immune system to be too strong? And what happens then?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Yeah. Immunity is really a challenging subject, I would say in a very kind of generalized statement. We don’t know why people get autoimmune – many autoimmune diseases, our body’s immune system has been tricked some way to attack itself, or it’s no longer recognizing what’s proper functioning tissue versus not proper functioning tissue. And so we start to get these challenges.

We see it in rheumatoid arthritis in the joints. We see it in things like lupus where it’s attacking systemically. MS In the brain and others. The body can’t figure out what’s what’s itself and not self anymore and starts to attack internally.

Macie Jepson
And so I guess if we knew exactly what was causing that, then we would be able to stop it.

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Yeah, we know that there’s likely environmental factors, whether it’s toxins and pollutants in the environment, changes in diet, allergens, triggers or something that’s triggering the body. There’s also probably genetic components to it that predispose people to these conditions. We know some autoimmune diseases travel in genetic linkage to families. And so it’s multifactorial. But there’s no one single answer.

Matt Eaves
So we think about an overactive immune system, think allergies like certain people in just a food and have an allergic reactions. For some it’s simply you develop hives or maybe a little bit of uncomfortableness. For others, it’s anaphylactic shock and you, you’re having trouble breathing and potentially could cause death. Where is that? How does the immune system – why is it an overreaction in some like to a severe overreaction causing really bad things like death versus oh, it’s just causing me hives or some uncomfortableness.

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
It’s kind of a different level of allergic response. We have a bunch of different ways our body can respond to immune invaders. The bee sting that causes anaphylaxis is one very quick type of immune response that gets kind of overboard very rapidly. We have other types of immune responses, like to food allergies or food sensitivities that could be more slow.

Maybe you eat something today and you can take a couple days for to kick in, rashes, you know, itchy eyes, whatever that may be. We even have other, even more bizarre immune responses to things like poison ivy that hijack the system by binding molecules together and causing trouble. So there’s lots of different ways that our immune system responds.

It’s not just on or off. And so, particularly with looking at kind of respiratory allergens versus anaphylactic allergens, they’re kind of different pieces of response in different molecules that are getting involved.

Matt Eaves
So, Dr. Wolf, once we do get sick, is there anything we can do to accelerate the healing process or getting back to well?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
There’s certainly things that, as you’re starting to feel unwell, you can start to bring on board. We talked a little about vitamin C and zinc. That’s the best time to start taking those things. It’s a time to make sure you get good rest and hydration. There are some supplements you can bring on board early on, particularly in kind of cold and flu season.

I like things like elderberry. It’s good at activating the immune system specifically against that group of viruses. We know that there are things like echinacea, which are good to help to get the immune system engaged, and there are a number of products that make combinations of both that can really get you feeling better a little bit faster. When we’re looking at cold and flu, we’re not talking about it’s going to be gone that day, and we’re looking at shortening the course of your illness by a day or two. Your body still needs to go through its typical healing process of getting rid of the virus and recovering the tissues, but it can shorten that timespan some.

Macie Jepson
So to what extent can we control our immune system?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
We have a lot of control over our immune system, and its kind of general day-to-day function. We have things that we can do to keep it healthy so it can be activated rapidly. This is things like proper sleep, good nutrition and making sure your stress level is well managed. There are things that we can do also to up-regulate and down-regulate kind of modify our immune system function.

We know that there are a lot of different supplements and nutrients that help to train up or train down our system. It could be a challenge to figure out what to do when, though, you know, we talked a little bit before about autoimmune disease, and that’s a time where we need to be really careful in up-regulating our immune system because it’s already working overboard.

And so there are times where maybe like allergies, where we want to calm down, train it and calm it down, because that response is just inappropriate to whatever pollen is out in the air. We don’t need to have this overboard response. There’s things we could do. You know, we can use some supplements to turn things on and turn things off.

Matt Eaves
And so on the immune response, obviously, you can take things that would suppress the immune reaction to to pollen in the air. What about the other way? You know, there’s these things you can get at the airport. These vitamin C, you know, packed with vitamin C. Does that help or can that help keep off viruses or illness. Can I do it in short bursts where I take a bunch of vitamin C, and that’s going to help protect me when on my plane flight?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Yeah, I mean, there’s things that we can do to help in the kind of short term to help to get our immune system respond a little bit faster. Vitamin C and zinc are really common ones. They work very rapidly to uptrain the immune system. Zinc is important in getting those white blood cells to kind of go to the right form and do the right thing to help, to protect ourselves.

It also helps with how viruses are able to attach to different membranes and how cells are dividing. So, it can be helpful in the short term. Some of those over-the-counter things that are kind of urban nutrient combined, some of them are based off of traditional Chinese herbal formulas that have been around for a long time. And we know that there’s some research that, that you can get the immune system engaged when we take them when we’re sick.

But kind of like we mentioned before, these are things to take when you’re sick, not to take every day. Vitamin C and zinc, maybe okay seasonally to take every day these kind of deeper immune support with herbs. When we’re trying to teach our immune system to turn on all the time that it has trouble turning on when it needs to, we take these things acutely when needed, and not every day.

Macie Jepson
Let’s talk a little more, though, about the things we can do every day. I see the green drinks. Or maybe it’s just we don’t want to do that. It’s sticking, you know, a bunch of kale and spinach and good things into our blender. Does it make a difference?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Yeah. Nutrients play an important role in our immune system, an important part of our whole wellbeing overall. I think those kind of green drinks are nice, but vegetables and fruits are better. It’s kind of a hack for people who don’t have the time or the energy to eat, or fruits and vegetables during the day, or stick those things in the blender. You can mix some of that up. It’s never going to be better than eating a good, healthy diet all day, but it’s good, additional support.

Matt Eaves
So I listen to podcasts and I always interested in these are travel podcasts that people that are doing exploring. And every once in a while the reference that they run into a tribe that has had very little human contact. And as part of it, they have to keep a certain distance from them. And so, you know, back to the question of like your immune systems getting a workout, is that what that’s for? Is that because they’ve just even though they’re human beings just like us, because they haven’t been exposed to common things like the cold, those things could have a much more severe effect on them.

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Sure. And it could potentially be both ways. So, their communities may have been exposed to viruses or bacterias that we’re not exposed to as well, so our bodies hasn’t learned haven’t learned how to defend themselves either. Now, this is kind of the old concept of people coming to the early Americas and bringing diseases from Europe and causing challenges with native populations in the United States is that the native populations had never seen these viruses and bacteria before, and so end up causing lots of challenges.

So, (the) same kind of philosophy is happening there with remote tribes.

Matt Eaves
We’re talking a lot about things that we ingest, whether it’s supplements or foods that are healthy for you. Yeah. How important is gut health to to the immune system?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Gut health is critical. You know, it’s a huge part of our immune system. We again, as we mentioned earlier, we kind of think about the immune system as getting that end step, the white blood cells. But our gut is is a critical part of preventing exposure. I think of our body as a donut. It’s not a way that people like to think of their body, but we have an outside of our body, which is our skin, but we have a hole on both ends of our digestive tract, which is also outside of us, is protecting yourself from foreign invaders.

And so, we have a lot of immune cells within our gut lining that can protect us. And, we spend a lot of time breaking down those nutrients and extracting and purifying to get things into our blood cells, to separate it out from the stuff that we don’t want the bacteria in the viruses. So, gut health is really key to keeping you healthy.

Macie Jepson
And so, what is your recommendation to having a healthy gut?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
You know, eating well is one of the biggest ones. So, getting rid of all the processed foods, adding lots of fruits and vegetables, healthy fiber is important. We are slowly kind of shifting our mindset from things like probiotics, that kind of healthy bacteria, to things like prebiotics, things that help feed the bacteria. So we can finally kind of manipulate our gut health better by feeding the healthy bacteria versus, you know, supplementing the specific strengths.

Matt Eaves
What specifically should we be putting in our bodies, what types of foods? So fruits and vegetables or specific types of fruits and vegetables, certain supplements.

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Yeah. I mean for fruits and vegetables I’d focus on things that are a little bit higher fiber. So looking at you know, our leafy greens are really good. They have lots of great antioxidants, foods that are higher in fiber that we don’t often think about, things like plantains and our root vegetables and things that provide some good, healthy food for the probiotics.

It’s also a good advantage to fermented foods, things like sauerkraut and, yogurt if you’re able to eat dairy. These provide healthy bacteria to support our gut health. There’s lots on the supplement, and I like to look at probiotic products for folks who don’t like to eat fermented foods. The more strains, the better or the more, potency, the better to help to repopulate the gut.

And now they may have all sorts of prebiotic products. These are the digestible and digestible fibers that feed our gut and help to support these bacteria.

Macie Jepson
Speaking of probiotics, how do we know that we’re really getting what is on that label? What should we be looking for on a label?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
And so whenever I look at a new product, I look at the front of the label first and see what the goal of the product is. Then I flip it over to the back and read the ingredients. At a very basic level, the mission on the front needs to match the ingredients on the back, and you’d be surprised at how often that doesn’t happen.

Macie Jepson
We’ve talked before. You’ve been on our podcast many times, and you do have this philosophy about if it’s being marketed, then what? What is your red flag?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
You know, when you see things on TV, it could be a challenge to decide whether or not it’s there just to be marketed to you as a sales pitch or whether it actually has good health claims. And so, I spend a lot of time taking patients off of products that they found via friends or via the media, because there’s no health data behind it.

It’s research that’s oftentimes done by the company itself, or maybe no research at all. I caution people when they see things that are marketed directly to them for one specific cause. There’s no way to get healthy other than this formula.

Matt Eaves
I’d mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, about my dog being sick, as well as that terrible allergies and talking to fellow dog owners. It seems like this year in particular has been really bad. And to your comment earlier about marketing, what I’m seeing a lot in my social feed is that the reason my dog is having such bad allergies is because he has poor gut health, and if I was just feeding my dog a better diet – and by the way, from a marketing standpoint, these are far more expensive diets. This problem would solve itself. Is it that simple? Like when you’re dealing with an allergy, is it as simple as feeding better food? Or is it a number of things that that have to be working in concert?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
It’s likely a number of things. You know, it’s possible that your dog is sensitive to an ingredient in their food. And so it’s going to be provoking that allergic response all the time, but folks who have a very healthy diet can still get seasonal allergies, animals included. And so sometimes there’s just a factor that our body can’t overcome.

The reason why I think diet is so important, kind of clean living overall, and in the way that I explain to my patients, is this concept of a bucket. Everyone has their own bucket as full as it can get, or as shallow. You can get all those insults from diet and lifestyle and chemicals and toxins. We can only control some of them.

And so you can control diet and decrease how full your bucket is before it overflows and you get symptoms. If you’re eating McDonald’s and junk all the time that your body can’t handle, then you might be more responsive to the seasonal allergens because your bucket is always full and it just can’t deal with that additional thing.

Matt Eaves
Researching this, I’d heard over the course of the life of a lifetime, people will get cancer many, many times. However, the immune system is able to respond and basically get rid of it or take care of it before it turns into something bad. Is that true? Are we having a lot of malformed DNA or cells dividing incorrectly in our body, and our immune system is able to to take care of it?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
To some degree, it’s not really our immune system at that point. So, I think it’s true that our body is multiplying cells all the time. It is copying billions of pieces of code with every division, and there’s bound to be errors. And so, our body is really well adapted to find those errors and destroy the cell.

Sometimes this happens naturally. The cell will just kind of self-destruct because it’s not the right coding. The challenge with cancer is it’s can these multiplication of factors: this change led to that change? There was maybe some chemical that caused some problem or radiation or some genetic factor that led to a whole series of changes where the cell can no longer function properly.

And it gets to the point where the immune system doesn’t recognize it as a problem anymore. So, our body’s not really creating cancer cells every day. It is creating these kind of errors, but they are corrected all the time, naturally. It’s when these kind of series of events happen over time that we form into cancer, and then our immune system has a trouble figuring out what to do.

Macie Jepson
Doctor Wolf, aas we wrap up, I think we all know people in our lives who have done all the right things and that you mentioned and then still end up being sick. But what kind of encouragement can you give to our audience just about harnessing the power of their body?

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
So, I always go back to the basics. I – more or less with any health concern, but immune system in particular, is that you can put all the supplements in your body that you want to, but if you’re not taking care of yourself kind of in a general lifestyle way, they’re not going to do their job. So I always focus on proper sleep. You’re aiming for somewhere around eight hours a day, well rested in the morning. You should be eating a healthy diet filled with lots of colors, fruits and vegetables as the primary source of food. You need to be getting some sort of exercise. It could be walking outside, it could be almost anything. But sitting on your couch is a challenge for your immune system.

You know there’s lots of things you can do, but that really lifestyle core is the most important.

Matt Eaves
This has been a great conversation today. Thanks for your insights. Dr Jacob Wolf, naturopathic doctor at University Hospitals in Cleveland. Thank you for joining us.

Jacob Wolf, ND, LAc, Dipl. OM
Thanks for having me.