Question: How can we make our immune system stronger?

Barbara Shih answered on 17 Mar 2015:

As mentioned by Sophie, there isn’t really a definitive answer to this question. General healthy life style is the best way forward for a healthy immune system (exercise, adequate sleep, balanced diet, no smoking/drinking..etc).

It’s an interesting question/concept that you mentioned. We often consider that we can train up our body to become “stronger”. However, the immune system is more about a delicate balance between the amount that it react to things. We want an efficient immune response against diseases and illnesses, yet at the same time we don’t want our immune system to react to normal harmless things (e.g. nut allergy or hay fever). Some people have immune system that over-reacts and attack their own proteins or cells (known as “autoimmune disease”, examples include rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes and psoriasis). You can probably consider both allergy and autoimmune disease being “the immune system is too strong/over-reacting”.

We have observed increased number of people having allergies. Possible reasons that have been suggested include:

1) Children are not being exposed to enough bacteria when they were developing as an infant
2) We eat more processed food.
3) Increased pollution.
4) Not enough sun. Because I work on the field of UV (ultraviolet radiation from the sun), I have heard studies that reduced allergic responses by exposing mice to small amount of UV. Some autoimmune disease are also helped by UV (such as psoriasis).

So pretty much exactly what Sophie said, maybe go out in the sun a little bit every now and then, and don’t use anti-bacterial cleaner on everything.