Recap: Tips for a healthy immune system | Jenna Macciochi

Hello, and welcome to Zoe recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're diving into our immune health. You can think of your immune system as your body's personal physician, diligently working around the clock to monitor, detect, and repair anything that might disrupt your health. However, because this system is often seamless and silent, we can take it for granted. So how can we better support our internal MD? Immunologist Jenna Machoke joins me to explore how simple everyday actions, from what we eat to how we breathe, can profoundly enhance our immune health. If I asked you to say, like, where is your digestive system, you could probably point to the location on your body. If I ask you to point to where your immune system is, you might not know where I'm I'm literally like, I don't Yeah. But that's because it's everywhere. Okay. From your brain to your big toe, it's absolutely everywhere. And that's because, essentially, it's helping keep pure body safe, so it has to be everywhere. It's really enriched at the barriers to our body, so, you know, under your skin, because that's exposed to the environment, the lining of your nose, the lining of your mouth, all the way down your digestive tract, you have huge numbers of immune cells that are fortifying those barriers because those barriers are very delicate. So the the airway lining and the digestive tract lining, they're very delicate and that serves a function that helps us exchange oxygen when we breathe. It helps us digest our food and absorb nutrients, but we need to have that extra fortification because that's vulnerable. You know? We can inhale germs or swallow germs, and that could make us sick. So you will find immune cells everywhere. They're also swimming around in our blood, so they're performing a kind of surveillance function. And then you have immune organs where they'll, like, congregate and do a certain function. So we have lymph nodes, which are all over our body, and they're all connected with the lymphatic system. That's kind of like your blood circulatory system, except it doesn't rely on the heart to pump it around, so it relies on your muscles moving. And the lymphatic system is going to squeeze those immune cells around, allowing allowing them to circulate all over your body, and they pass in and out the lymph nodes, and that's a place where they can meet and talk and do various functions. It's a beautiful picture. I'm starting to think about all that's around me. You've mentioned the word immune cells Yeah. Quite a lot when I've asked what is the immune system. Is the immune system like a set of immune cells? Yeah. Immune organs, lymph nodes, spleen, bone marrow, and the molecules that they're producing to communicate with each other. So you've got cells, molecules, and then organs. What …