Immune boosters

Vegetarian Times, March, 2002 by Maria Rabat

First there was garlic and vitamin C, then came echinacea, ginseng and a melange of medicinal mushrooms. Now scientists are discovering two new immune boosters, and they're dramatically different from their brethren. In fact, we spend a good deal of our lives avoiding one and masking the other: they are, believe it or not, stress and sweat.

According to researchers at Ohio State University, there are two types of stress: active and passive. We're "actively" stressed when we're busy with demands and deadlines, and we experience passive stress when watching a suspenseful movie. Researchers exposed 30 male volunteers to two different stressful situations. To simulate active stress, volunteers were asked to memorize information and take a test. For the passive stressful situation, volunteers watched a video of gory surgical procedures. Researchers took saliva samples after both events to measure the amount of proteins secreted by the body, which guard against the invasion of bacteria and viruses. Results showed that the protein level increased during active stress and actually decreased during the passive stressful episode, prompting researchers to conclude that active stress boosts the immune system and increases our ability to stave off illness and infection.

German researchers could say the same thing about sweat. Their study, published in Nature Immunology (December 2001), suggests that sweat contains a powerful germ-fighting agent that fights off infections. Scientists at Eberhard-Karls University in Tubingen, Germany, isolated the gene responsible for the compound, which they call dermicidin. Manufactured in the sweat glands, dermicidin is carried to the surface of the skin by perspiration and serves as the first line of defense against topical infectious agents.

Both studies should please thrill-seekers, adrenaline junkies and others who live on the edge and work up a good sweat--it does a body good.