Here’s a brief explanation.

Stress can alter the bacterial composition of the digestive tract. When that happens, good/bad bacteria are out of balance. When bad bacteria rule the roost (in the gut), the ability of the body’s immune system to operate at top efficiency is compromised. Gut bacteria are the “educators” of the body’s immune cell behavior, signaling aggressive or passive response as needed, depending on the kinds of pathogens or antigens that enter the body and alert the immune system.

An even better, but lengthier, discussion is here. The author likens immune balance as a “four-way seesaw” that needs to maintain balance to work.

Go, stress, gut, immune. They make your health world go round. That’s why stress management over the long term is so important. It can impact so many other parts of your health and eventually, your quality of life.

The pardox is this: We want to keep babies and young kids–whose immune systems are weak and still forming–free of germs and viruses, so they won’t get sick. However, it is the exposure to germs and viruses at a young age that “trains” and shapes the immune system, making it stronger and more effective as one grows older. Kids who grow up in a relatively sterile environment–no playing in the dirt, no daycare, no pets, no running around on the farm (as kids did decades ago)–do not get exposed to microbes at a young age. Therefore, when they get older, their first exposure to pathogens or antigens triggers severe over-reaction of the immune system, making for more frequent illness, and longer duration and greater severity of symptoms.

The new study mentioned above concluded that newborns not exposed to a variety of bacteria at birth or shortly after did not develop a healthy balance of microbiota (beneficial bacteria) in the gut, thereby weakening immune function  and increasing risk of developing allergies. Gut bacteria is a major determinant of immune system effectiveness.

So this holiday season, let your young kids play in the snow, pet the horses on the sleigh, maybe even get a puppy for Christmas. Their immune health may be the better for it.

The bad is that lingering stress can knock immune function out of balance, clearing the way for seasonal health issues like colds, flu, or allergies to take hold.

The ugly is that chronic stress…long-term stress triggered by financial hardship, marital problems, radical change in diet (alcohol, high fat and sugar at every meal), or other life changes can set the stage for serious disease.

As we move into the holiday season–always a season ripe for stress–keep this in mind. Proactively doing things to reduce stress can make a difference in health, and make the season merrier.  This story might add some new thinking that may help as well.

Obviously, this school bus was a bit “old school.” It did not have any modern emission control equipment. And it certainly was not a hybrid school bus, which is now on the market. Then, of course, that starts me to thinking about all of the emissions hitting our air supply. I know it varies from region to region. The tailpipe emissions in LA, just by the city’s size, will be much higher than in Des Moines.

However, huge progress has been made, and it’s worth taking note.  The US Dept. of Transportation estimates that annual carbon emissions from motor vehicles, the biggest source of carbon emissions in the country (compared to factories, power plants, etc.) has decreased from 163 million tons in 1970 to 36 million tons in 2010. Our air is getting cleaner. Still, in areas where air quality may be poorer, health should be a concern, especially among children. Air quality can impact long-term immune function in youngsters.

And what about adults? While carbon emissions may be improving , half of the U.S. population live in areas where particulate (soot, dust, etc.) and ozone content in the air can contribute to health problems. And long-term health issues, at the immune cellular level, can result.

Lesson: immune health support is more than just avoiding seasonal illness. It’s about long-term immune function that can be impacted by environmental factors. Stay healthy.

We live in the Midwest, where combines seem  to be working 24/7 taking in vast fields of corn and soybeans. Though we live in a suburb, we are not far from farm fields. A dry autumn has left us with beautiful tree leaves…and a lot of dust whipped up as the crops are taken in. In years past, my wife and I would be sneezing our heads off by now. An immense amount of dust and pollen can be disbursed into the atmosphere during harvest.

In fact, when driving on the highway, you can see harvests taking place miles away simply by the dust clouds rising from the ground in the distance. The debris mixture in those clouds can travel a half mile away during windy days. Today, I’m breezing through this fall with no problems. My wife, who along with me takes EpiCor, has a few sneezes now and then, but nothing like the nonstop misery she was feeling years ago, when she took Zyrtec by the truckload. Immune balance seems to still be working well for us.

Knoxville, TN

Knoxville–are among the top 2o U.S. cities with the worst fall allergy conditions, recently listed by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.  The first on that list of allergy “hot spots” is Knoxville, TN.

Maybe it’s because Tennessee is home to the vast stretch of Smoky Mountains, covered with trees. Or maybe all that country music in Nashville and blues in Memphis involve a lot of beer, whiskey and cigarettes, which, in large quantities, can greatly alter immune function.

Whatever the case, if you live in any of these cities, some enhanced immune support might come in handy for making it through the fall.

When we talk about immune system balance, we’re talking about immune cell response being aggressive when conditions warrant, flooding an area with killer cells to wipe out an intruder.  This is my analogy for flooding the money system with stimulus cash when consumer spending and business lending has dried up because of an intruder to the system: bad mortgages.

We’re also talking about immune cells suppressing an aggressive response when presented with a “false alarm,” such as a pollen grain or another benign foreign substance that enters the body. This is analogous to investors not pulling all of their money out of the market or out of the banks when markets undergo a major correction.

And, helping drive this balanced response is an amazing system of cell communication, where certain cells can tell other cells to charge or back off.  Of course, investors and fund managers and exchanges and currency traders all communicate with each other, especially in this instant information age. The problem is accuracy and integrity of the information. Bad or deceptive information can spell doom. Hopefully, cells haven’t got quite that crafty…yet.

And cells remember from experience as well. A certain virus that entered your body years ago (e.g. chicken pox) is remembered by your immune system and vanquished quickly if it enters your body years later.  Seems like many U.S. and foreign policy makers don’t have much of an institutional memory for what worked and did not work decades ago in our political economy.

If our economic system could behave like a well-balanced immune system, we’d experience much of what people experience while taking EpiCor…a balanced, proportional response to antigens entering the system, reducing symptom severity and shortening symptom duration.

Here’s another measure, especially if you are an employer that provides group health insurance to your employees: reduction in the number of doctor office visits by employees. Specifically visits for cold, flu and upper respiratory tract infections (URTI). That decline in employee doctor visits was the overriding result of a 6-month project undertaken by the City of Ankeny in Iowa.

Ankeny is one of the fastest growing suburban cities in the country and the fastest growing city in Iowa. It’s city administration embraces new approaches and strategies to city management, including employee wellness and health. Last October, the city partnered with Embria Health Sciences, headquartered in Ankeny, to initiate an informal trial of Embria’s EpiCor immune balancing nutritional supplement.  Eighty employees and 18 of their family members volunteered to take a 500-mg daily EpiCor supplement for 6 months.  During that time, the employees were asked to keep records of the any illness symptoms they encountered, and to log any doctor’s office visits for cold, flu or URTI type symptoms.

The results: doctor’s office visits declined by 28 percent over the prior year.

This, of course, is not a clinical trial or even a controlled pilot study. It was simply designed as an observational project to take a broad look at employee health and wellness experiences while taking EpiCor. The results, however, do closely align with results of other more structured, human clinical trials involving EpiCor, using  placebo control and gaining publication in peer-reviewed journals.

You can read more about this Ankeny employee health project here.

Now where is that pathogen? I thought it was here somewhere.

because the network location…and even password…are stored in the cache from the first time you accessed that wireless network.

Immune cells work the same way. They can “remember” viral and bacterial strains from earlier encounters, and be ready to pounce on them fast if those pathogens enter the body again. That immune cell memory can last for years.

This week comes a research finding that scientists say helps them better understand how that immune cell memory is actually implemented.  ”Hopefully, we can use this information to design vaccines that generate larger numbers of memory cells and can therefore provide better protective immunity,” says one of the study’s researchers.

Here’s my only intrepid question (and coming from a layman like me, it’s really, really intrepid): If scientists could isolate that memory function, replicate it and distribute it in a concentrated manner among existing and new immune cells, would they risk unleashing an intended consequence? Could the body’s immune system, equipped with new super-powered memory, go Rambo and be so relentless in its response to pathogens it remembers, that it produces overkill and actually does harm? That is what many health problems, especially allergies, are all about. Over-reactive immune responses that don’t end once the targeted pathogen has been neutralized. Where would the balancing or control factor be that “calls off the dogs” once the mission is accomplished?

Maybe such a development, if incorporated into vaccines as the news report suggests may happen, would be reserved only for the elderly who have low immune function and are more susceptible to illness because of that.

I’m sure the immunologists, who are far smarter than me on this stuff, will account for these potentialities as the research and testing move forward.

• The London Daily Mail Online has a story about research showing the immune health benefits of going on vacation (or holiday, as they say in Europe) wane two weeks after returning to work. That’s kind of a bummer. I was thinking vacation refreshes you for months, maybe even until your next vacation. The story also mentions the propensity to actually get sick when you go on vacation. “… in some cases, the immune system may be left out of kilter when the stress of the working day is suddenly taken away.”
• A new health community called Care2 (actually it’s not that new…I just stumbled upon it) has many groups formed around various health conditions and interests, such as stress. It also features some informative articles, such as a recent piece on antibiotic resistant bacteria, and the need to maintain a naturally healthy immune function, include pre- and probiotic food intake, to lower risk of bacteria-driven problems in the gut resulting from good/bad bacterial imbalance.
• A dental journal article goes into some detail on how immune health can influence periodontal disease formation and vice versa. I’ve written here about the “healthy mouth, healthy body” concept, that poor dental health can lead to other health problems, and all are connected by healthy immune function.
• A PR piece appearing in the  San Francisco Chronicle online talks about new acupuncture methods that may help alleviate seasonal allergy symptoms.  Allergies, of course, are an over-reaction of the immune system. “Acupuncture offers a relaxing, natural alternative that refreshes us, without the side effects of pills,” says a source in the story. Hmmmm. The same might be said of EpiCor, only without the needles.