You had me at, “What is an autoimmune disease explained in 5 minutes.” If you have 5 minutes, it’s worth absorbing Gabriel Arruda’s easy to understand explanation – because an understanding of how our natural immunity works is needed before plunging into the deep waters of autoimmunity.
Yes, I thoroughly covered how inflammatory foods and lifestyles can lead to autoimmunity in my first book, Toolkit for Wellness, but I wanted a fresh take.
A little animation helped, and I agreed with his basic approach, but not necessarily with his entire online program. Mr. Arruda presents one of the many ways autoimmunity can occur – I’ll share another one.
He took me back to my teaching days, using Pac Man as a symbol for white blood cells munching up the bad hombres floating around our bodies.
Otherwise, you can lean into Wikipedia’s explanation HERE: Autoimmunity – Wikipedia
Or another explanation HERE: Autoimmune Diseases: Types, Symptoms, Causes & More (healthline.com)
Autoimmunity is when your body’s natural defenses somehow get scrambled and are no longer able to correctly identify foreign threats; instead the attack on invaders is misdirected onto self. Thus auto/self-immunity.
As mentioned last week, I an offering this discussion because we are in the middle of an explosion of people suffering with autoimmune diseases.
One might ask, “What’s happening to cause this? Spontaneous worldwide meltdown of our internal defenses?”
Well, you be the judge.
Clearly, an appropriate immune response is an intricate cascade of events that enlists organs and organ systems throughout the body. What we’re throwing at our bodies in terms of stress and chemicals has changed considerably in the last 40-50 years. What hasn’t changed is our genetic make up to handle these new factors.
I’ve read more than I want about the autoimmune crisis and there are at least 10 tabs open on the computer right now. That said, this article revealed so much new information that I’d like to summarize some key points for you:
-Favorite direct quote: “As such, autoimmune diseases could be the product of our own success as an industrialized species. This vexes researchers, because autoimmunity is not only one of the most prevalent disease categories but also fiendishly complex, a tangle of factors that scientists have yet to fully understand.”
-Doctors cannot agree on what constitutes an autoimmune disease. Right now, there are about 100.
-Unlike diseases such as cancer, there is no national data base for autoimmune diseases and, thus, no shared research, no coordinated data – it’s pretty much each disease subset is on its own.
-The rate of autoimmune disease uptick is far outpacing our DNA/gene’s ability to change and be the cause for such a shift.
-The diversity of our gut’s microbiome is a key element to our overall health and appropriate immune response. It’s been discovered that under-developed countries have an exceptionally low incidence of autoimmune disease along with a well-diversified gut microbiome. Whereas developed countries have less diversified microbiomes and have a high incidence of autoimmune disease.
-Studies of adults in 2003 and in fetal cord blood in 2005 revealed the presence of man-made chemicals including industrial compounds, pollutants, insecticides, dioxins, and mercury. The fetal cord blood study showed 287 different chemicals that were transmitted to those babies prior to birth.
-Americans report ever greater levels of personal stress. Who hasn’t taken a stress hit this past year? One last quote for the day: “The stressed-out individuals were more likely to be diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, more likely to develop multiple autoimmune diseases, and tended to develop autoimmune diseases earlier in life.”
Whew! That’s just the sprinkles on top of the cake, dear readers.
What started out as a simple assignment – “get the bad guys” – has been muddled by so many factors that have made identifying, what is foreign and what is self, almost impossible.
Next week, we’ll look at another common factor that can stimulate another cause of autoimmunity: leaky gut.
Don’t know about you, but I’m headed outdoors to harvest some organic veggies, sit under an umbrella, and soak up the sounds of nature.
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In health,
Deidre