Super Immunity (5 page)

Once we understand this major mindset-shift and begin to build our diet around fruits, vegetables, beans, seeds, and nuts,
then
we can add foods that are not in this category to the diet.

DR. FUHRMAN'S FOOD PYRAMID

In a food pyramid, the foods that are consumed in the highest quantity are placed at the base. However, the traditional American food pyramid—the source of most Americans' first understanding of health and nutrition—doesn't put nutrient-rich foods at its base; it gives that place of honor to the bread, cereal, rice, and pasta group. This is one reason why so many Americans are confused about nutrition and plagued by obesity and preventable diseases. Don't you think it makes logical sense to put the healthiest, most micronutrient-rich foods at the base of our food pyramid? Shouldn't we eat more healthy food and less unhealthy food?

My food pyramid is designed to achieve a healthy population. If adopted broadly, it would save millions of people's lives each year and end our costly and tragic health care crisis. There's no way around it: for superior health, we must eat more nutrient-rich foods and fewer calorie-rich foods. Therefore, the top of the pyramid, the foods that should be consumed rarely, contains the foods lowest in nutrients—processed foods like chips and cookies—while the bottom gives a foundation of micronutrient-rich foods. When the nutritional landscape of America is reshaped by nutrient density as represented in the pyramid above, we will radically extend our healthy life expectancy.

Simply put, this means we need to eat lots of high-nutrient, natural plant foods: vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and seeds. In conjunction, we need to eat much less from the animal products category and eat far fewer (or no) foods that are completely empty of nutrients or indeed are toxic for the body—foods such as sugar, other sweeteners, white flour, processed foods, refined oils, and fast foods.

Your Remarkable Immune System

It's time to think differently about what we eat and begin to trust the amazing healing and protective power of the body.

It's time for all of us to reconsider the notion that viruses are the sole or even the primary cause of serious viral-associated illnesses. Most often the exposure to and presence of a virus, and its association with the disease and its complications, is
not
the only cause and not even the
main
cause that initiates an illness. Certainly, exposure to the virus and its multiplication within our body is at the core of viral infections. However, though it is not generally recognized, the virus adapts itself to the host (our body) and becomes dangerous and multiplies
as a result of the host's disease-promoting environment,
created by nutritional inadequacy. In most cases, a virus, when exposed to a healthy, well-nourished body, would remain harmless. Our vulnerability to the initial virus and our inability to fight off the virus once we have become exposed is directly affected by the quality of our diet prior to being exposed. This means that poor nutrition not only makes us more susceptible to viruses but significantly impacts the length and severity of an illness.

Poor nutrition is so ubiquitous that we can consider 98 percent of Americans to be at significant disease risk. This, coupled with the enhanced resistance of bacteria from the use and overuse of antibiotics, has created a new era in modern health science with dangerous antibiotic-resistant diseases exploding. Deaths from infectious diseases increased by 58 percent between 1980 and 1992 in the United States, and the figure has continued to increase since then. According to Hiroshi Nakajima, director-general of the World Health Organization in the decade 1988–1998, “We are standing on the brink of a global crisis in infectious diseases.”
⁷

Traditionally, the etiology (or cause) of infections, both bacterial and viral, has the following elements. These are the primary factors that determine whether you get sick or not; and when you do get sick, how sick you get.

1.
The size of the inoculum.
In other words, how much of the virus or bacterium was present in the exposure?

2.
The virulence of the exposure.
How powerful a disease-causing agent was that microbe?

3.
The immune-response of the host.
Was there an opportunity for the host's immune memory to that microbe (or a similar microbe) to facilitate a rapid and potentially protective immune response; could the immune system quickly remove the virus before it replicated itself in large numbers?

4.
The nutritional status and health of the host.
Was the host's immune-competency compromised, or could the immune system react to its full potential in inhibiting and eventually subduing the viral invasion of normal cells?

For the most part we don't have the opportunity to modify these risk factors substantially, though with handwashing and other proper hygienic measures, such as not touching our own face without washing first, we can diminish some of the exposure risks. However, there is one major factor well within our control that can alter the equation. That is, we can maintain comprehensive nutritional adequacy (CNA). Comprehensive nutritional adequacy means that a sufficient amount and variety of all known and unknown micronutrients are present. Very few of us currently have CNA because our present dietary model contains too many processed foods that are micronutrient-barren. For most of us to achieve CNA, we need to change our diet and begin to eat all of the immune-supporting nutrients available to us.

Think about what I'm saying: a viral exposure that would cause a serious or even life-threatening infection in a person eating the conventional diet would not even result in symptoms of illness in a nutritionally competent person. Let's stop here for a moment and revisit the implications of this. We now have scientific evidence that clearly demonstrates the dangers of nutritional incompetency. And yet far too many of us still aren't aware of the essential nutritional factors that support and sustain our everyday health. Together, we can change this.

We often hear comments such as “The virus attacked his heart” or “She had a virally induced cancer,” and yet we rarely consider or address the issues that enabled the virulence of that virus. We aren't just targets waiting to be attacked; in fact, a healthy body is highly resistant to viral attack. It has already been demonstrated that when children eat more vegetables, they have fewer infections. A study on relatively malnourished children in Vietnam illustrated this. Young children (five months to two years old) were randomly selected and assigned based on local areas to one of two groups,
nutritional intervention
or
control
. The intervention group received more vegetables and other micronutrient-rich food, while the control group was left on the typical rice diet. During follow-up, children in the intervention communes had approximately half the respiratory illness experienced by those in comparison communes.
⁸
It is now accepted in scientific circles that micronutrient deficiencies contribute to the mortality and morbidity of infectious diseases, and that a more micronutrient-rich diet is needed for better human health.
⁹

The Dangers of Virus Mutation

The relationship between nutritional status and the immune system has been a topic of study for over fifty years, as we have seen. In the last twenty years a much greater understanding of the complexity of the immune response and its dependence on nutritional factors has evolved. Dramatic increases in our understanding of the immune system and the nutritional factors that regulate immune function have demonstrated a remarkable concordance between host nutritional status and immunity to almost all known infectious agents.
¹⁰

There are two main points here that we will explore further:

1. The nutritional status of the host is critical in permitting or preventing viral and bacterial infections.

2. Nutritional inadequacies in the host allow the modification of viruses into more virulent or dangerous forms.

The concept that powerful and competent host defenses are enabled by nutritional excellence is not just an opinion or observation; it is the reality of human physiology supported by hundreds of scientific studies. When the body is deprived of nutrients, viral infections can cause serious, even fatal diseases that don't occur when deficiency is not present.
¹¹
Immunity, when optimized, can ward off infection; and if infection does occur, it is much more likely to have a harmless outcome.

When discussing interactions of nutrition and infection, nutritionists have traditionally considered only the effects of diet on the host (us). It has been known for years that malnutrition interferes with various physical barriers or immune responses, making the body more vulnerable to attack from microbes, including viruses. Newer evidence is now showing that the level of nutrition of the host can also directly influence the genetic makeup of the virus, altering its virulence.
¹²
In other words, excellent nutrition can both indirectly and directly promote resistance to infectious disease.

The most effective artillery we have to protect ourselves against the potentially damaging effects of influenza and other infectious disease is nutritional excellence.
And that's in our own, individual control!

If you are deficient in virtually any known vitamin or mineral, research has shown that your defense functions can be negatively affected. Most notably, it has been demonstrated that when diets are low in consumption of green and yellow vegetables (rich in carotenoids), viral illnesses takes a more serious form. Multiple micronutrients, including lutein, lycopene, folate, bioflavonoids, riboflavin, zinc, selenium, and many others have immune-modulating functions.
¹³
We will learn much more about these later. But what it comes down to is this: their presence or absence strengthens or weakens the ability of the immune system, influencing our susceptibility to infectious diseases and the course and outcome of such diseases.

The ability of the nutritionally competent immune system to prevent viral genetic mutations that would allow the virus to evade the host's defenses has been recognized in varying investigations, even those studying HIV (human immunodeficiency virus).
¹⁴
Micronutrient deficiencies are prevalent in many HIV-infected populations, and numerous studies have reported that these deficiencies impair immune responses and are associated with accelerated HIV disease progression. For example, numerous studies have demonstrated that the transmission of the AIDS virus is significantly reduced (and even made improbable) when the host's nutrition is excellent. This means that eating a micronutrient-rich diet, with no notable deficiencies, may be the most critical factor in our ability, individually, to combat emerging infections; with the weapon of good nutrition, we enable our body to have control over viral replication inside us and prohibit the virus from transforming to evade capture.
¹⁵
Viral replication accompanied by changes in the virus as it replicates enables the virus to hide from our immune system surveillance and control. However, these dangerous structural modifications to the virus as it replicates occur only in a nutritionally incompetent host.

More recently, research has shown that the influenza virus also exhibits increased virulence in a nutritionally deficient host, allowing multiple changes in the viral genome. In other words, your everyday flu can mutate and become able to cause more serious damage to the lungs and other parts of the body. Although it has been known for many years that poor nutrition can affect host response to infection, the finding that host nutrition also affects the genetic sequence of a pathogen (a disease-causing microbe) is recent—an important finding for us now and as a field of future investigation.

A good example is a recent scientific study that investigated the nutritional status of patients who developed neuropathy (nerve damage) after a viral illness. Those people whose nervous system was damaged by the virus were found to be deficient in riboflavin, vitamin E, selenium, alpha-and beta-carotenes, and lycopene. When patients were supplemented with these nutrients, the disease began to subside, suggesting that the pathogenicity of a particular virus—that is, the ability of a pathogen to produce an infectious disease—is dependent on the nutritional status of the host.
¹⁶

As the data suggests, a nutritarian diet is an effective intervention for viral diseases such as HIV, mononucleosis, herpes, and influenza, because viral mutations will be suppressed, limiting disease-causing potential and virulence.