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NUTRIENTS THAT BUILD IMMUNOCOMPETENCE

Posted under Herbal by admin

For example, in a French study of 100 healthy people aged over sixty, doctors found that the higher the vitamin A content in the bloodstream, the greater was the body’s ability to produce helper T cells. Subjects with the highest vitamin A content in blood plasma had the highest immunocompetence. The same researchers confirmed that the higher a person’s concentration of vitamin E in the blood plasma, the fewer the number of infections that person had experienced in the preceding three years.

Several studies on lab animals have confirmed that in animals deprived of vitamin A, the immune system is suppressed while supplementation with vitamin A bolstered immunocompetence in the test animals.

Other studies have demonstrated that a subtle zinc deficiency underlies a variety of impaired immunbresnonse functions, and that fewer than fifty per cent of Americans have an adequate intake of dietary zinc.

Part of the controversy concerning claims that vitamin C will subdue cold symptoms arises from the difficulty in using lab animals for vitamin C testing. Unlike humans, most lab animals synthesize copious amounts of vitamin C in their bodies, making it impossible to measure the results of supplementation.

It is because humans are believed to have lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C due to a mutation during evolution that the need for vitamin C supplementation has become apparent.

In support of this concept, numerous tests on humans have confirmed that people who maintain higher levels of vitamin C in their bodies experience fewer respiratory infections; and if they do catch a cold, symptoms tend to be twenty to thirty percent less severe.

For example, a study made by the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, and reported in the journal of Applied Nutrition tested the plasma vitamin C levels of twenty-eight men on a submarine during a sixty-eight-day patrol. Among those with the lowest vitamin C levels, twice as many experienced common cold symptoms as among those with the highest vitamin C levels.

Another study made in Australia, and reported in the Medical journal of Australia revealed that when cold sufferers were given one gram of vitamin C per day, the duration of their infection was reduced by 19 percent.

Even more convincing results were obtained in a large, carefully-controlled study made by Dr. Terence W. Anderson of the University of Toronto School of Hygiene in 1971-1972. After observing results of over 4,000 subjects in a series of three tests, each employing varying amounts of vitamin C, the overall conclusion was that regardless of the amount of vitamin C taken, the cold symptoms of those taking the vitamin were reduced by 30 percent.