How Improving Brain Health Boosts Your Immunity

From vaccinations at your doctor's office to that bottle of echinacea at the health food store, a lot of health care is centered on your immune system. But why exactly should you care about your immune health?

The immune system is the body's sophisticated defense against disease. It's what keeps you from getting a cold when everyone else in the office has one, and it's also what keeps cancer cells from spreading throughout your body. From colds to cancer, your immune health is essential to whether or not you thrive in life. With the epidemic rise of chronic and autoimmune diseases, your immune health is pretty important, wouldn't you say?

For ultimate immune health you need ultimate brain health. Your brain is one of the major players in your immune health, and not many people talk about the connection between the two. Instead of masking symptoms, functional medicine is concerned with the underlying mechanisms that give rise to health problems like a weak immune system.

Your brain-immune axis is an important connection for your ultimate health. I know many patients who started having severe immune dysfunctions and autoimmune conditions following a head injury in a car accident. But why? One study in the Journal of Neuroimmunology found that the cerebellum played a substantial role in modulating helpful immune cells.

I've written in the past about how the communication between your microbiome and brain (gut-brain axis) is a pivotal system to understanding your overall health. Your gut is even referred to as your second brain, and physically they even resemble each other! Around 80% of your immune system is found in the gut, and 95% of your serotonin, the feel-good neurotransmitter, is made and stored in the intestines.

Methylation is sort of an antioxidant recycling process in your body. It's needed for optimal brain and immune health. Proper methylation produces your body's top disease-fighting antioxidant, glutathione. When your glutathione levels are low, so is your immune system.

I gauge methylation function in patients by running a lab called homocysteine. Homocysteine is supposed to be converted to glutathione via methylation. If homocysteine levels are high, methylation isn't functioning well. Everyone should have this test run.

The sunshine vitamin is crucial for brain and immune health. It's responsible for many different brain-immune pathways, and low levels are linked to autoimmune conditions and poor immune health.

Chronic inflammation is one of the major underlying culprits of chronic disease, but healthy inflammation levels fight off disease!

To support healthy inflammatory levels it is essential to support your brain's neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. Healthy acetylcholine activity has been shown to produce optimal nitric oxide balance.

For a healthy immune system, you need to have a healthy microbiome. You don't have to have gastrointestinal symptoms to have an underlying gut problem. Underlying conditions like "leaky gut syndrome" can have a major impact on your immune system.