Jeffrey Bland, PhD, gives a spoken overview of how the immune system defends the body from infections (acute and chronic), emphasizing the concept of immune reserve or resilience which determines whether exposures cause illness or remain controlled. He illustrates chronic reactivation with Epstein–Barr virus and acute exposure variability with a classroom flu example. Bland frames Big Bold Health's strategy as assessing individual 'immuno-identity' and using immunorejuvenation (rejuvenating, not merely boosting) to restore immune balance and increase resistance to infection.
Chapters
Immunity plus infectious diseases. Now, is there a more topical thing than that today? Well, yes, it is very important and very topical. But it really addresses a broader issue of how the immune system defends us not just against infectious organisms, but also defends us in general with hostile exposures that we may have that threaten our ability to be healthy. But let me focus for this discussion specifically on infection. So what is infection? Infection is where some organism might find this warm, glucose rich, moist environment that we call our human body a friendly place to live at our expense. Right? That's infection. So we have different kinds of infection. We've got acute infections and we have chronic infections. What do I mean by chronic infections? Well, people have sinusitis, people have chronic skin problems. People have chronic digestive difficulties. Those may all be reflective of certain kinds of chronic infections of foreigners that are trying to get a foothold in our body and our body's immune system is keeping them at bay. But not entirely. It can't totally win the war. It only kind of just keeps things at bay. Let me use an example that you're probably familiar with is a virus, and that's Epstein Barr virus, ebv. So Epson Barr virus, you know, is a virus that's related to the virus that produces herpes and shingles. And so we say those viruses in that family the immune system can recognize and try to control. But if you get under stress or you're not sleeping right, or your diet is lousy, what happens? That comes back as an infection, right? It wasn't that you got reinfected. It was that infection you had, which was kept kind of below the level of serious problems, now rises up. Because why your immune system now is no longer functioning as well as it should, because it's under stress and it's taken away some of your immune resilience. Now what point do you start getting those things to come back? It can differ from person to person. Can it? Because if you have a lot of reserve in your immune system, then maybe a few sleepless nights or a couple of bad meals or some stress in your life, your body has enough reserve that it can manage that and you don't get a problem. But let's say your reserve is very compromised, you're running on the edge, then even a modest thing that might happen in your life, some altercation in the parking lot of the grocery store might suddenly then so put a demand on your immune system that it doesn't have the reserve to tolerate it. And now, boom, here it goes. That virus has been laying Dormant now starts to be active. So that is what we call chronic infection. That's directly related to the functional integrity of your immune system. Now, that model that I've just described can also be extrapolated over into acute infection. Because if you get exposed to acute infection, I'm always reminded of, say, a classroom of kids and you have the flu, and they're all sitting in the same classroom, and the next day, after one of the children has been infected and they infect their other children in the classroom, 50% of the kids, the parents call and saying, my child is going to be excused absence because they're sick. So we worry about the infection of those 50% of the kids in that class. But what about the 50% of the kids that were exposed that didn't get ill? There's something about their immune system and their reserve that allowed them to be defended. So if we take this concept that I'm describing about infection and immune system, what we clearly want to do is have a reserve, a resilience within our immune system that allows us to both recognize and defend against infectious organisms. They could be viruses, they could be bacteria, they could be fungal organisms, mold. They could be any number of things that might want to live in our body if we don't have the proper response and defense against it. And we at Big Bold Health are really focused on understanding what is that person's immuno identity, what is the status of their immune system, and how can we bring that immune system back into balance so. So that we can increase the reserve, increase their capacity then to be more resilient to what is inevitably going to happen to all of us. Sometime we're going to be exposed to something that would prefer to live in us, and we'd like them not to. And so that concept of how we use immunorejuvenation to rejuvenate and renew our immune system is a very powerful part of our approach in Big bolt health. Not just boosting an immune system that's already damaged or already suboptimal. That's not going to give you the best opportunity for improving your resilience. It's rather rejuvenating that immune system. And that's the magic and the approach that we're developing within Big Bold Health that would be focused and targeted specifically to individuals own unique immuno identity. So be part of our tribe, be part of our community. Let's move ahead. We're going to find ways to both personalize and to optimize the resistance with which is the best tool that we have. It's better than any drug that you'll ever see. Developed is the ability for your body to do its work, to recognize a foreigner, to tag down a foreigner, and to manage it before it ever becomes a hostile invader in our body. That's immune resilience. That's what the resistance to infection is all about.
