The Best Way to Train Your Immune System

Your immune system is unique. Everyone has a slightly different immune system, stronger against some enemies and weaker against others, which makes evolutionary sense because it protects our species from being wiped out by a single infection. In general, the human immune system is a spectrum:most people respond well to infection, a few are super-responders, and a few respond poorly and die. Some people survive the Black Death and are more resistant to HIV or coronavirus, or even to Ebola. Others die easily from the flu or are highly susceptible to certain bacterial infections. Where you fall in this range is unpredictable. You also react differently to each possible infection. That's why young people who seem perfectly healthy die from Covid19, while for some older people it's more like a mild flu.

The idea that if you never get a cold, you'll be able to fight off every kind of illness is wrong. You never know what your immune system is good at until it is tested. Getting sick is like betting on your health in the casino of life. It's always like that. But there are things you can do:Invade one of the best functions of your immune system.

When you survive a disease, you usually have better defenses - you get memory cells, which are very good at killing the particular enemy you're fighting that day. So you either won't get the disease again, or your next infection will be much milder. You can take advantage of the amazing achievement of human ingenuity by using this mechanism to prevent damage from disease and train your immune system:vaccines.

A vaccine basically pretends to be a disease and trains your defenses to be ready when it does appear. The goal is to create memory cells that are identical to those that survive infection.