How Fat Weakens Your Immune System
Obesity weakens the immune system but why and how?
These are the highlights from Dr. Berg’s video How Fat Weakens Your Immune System https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-bgyDgWOHM
There are two main types of fat:
- You have the superficial fat around your body which is the stuff right beneath your skin and then
- You have visceral fat in your midsection. It is spilling off from your liver because there’s no place to go. The fat goes around the organs and sometimes inside the organs.
Please see the image of the two types of fat.
With superficial fat you have more accumulation of B cells, which make antibodies and T cells. These are two different immune cells.
But with the visceral fat you have more natural killer cells and killer T cells. That means you’re going to have a lot of cytokines, which cause a lot of inflammation. People that have visceral fat have more inflammation because they have an overly active immune system.
The buffer for this over-reactive immune system is called T regulatory cells. Those are going to be deficient when you have too much visceral fat. What’s making the inflammation is your actual immune system.
Also when you have too much visceral fat the antibodies that you create against viruses and even bacteria tend to lose their memory a lot quicker and they don’t remember the infection so you have less fighting force when you have more visceral fat.
This really applies to the COVID-19 situation, as one of the big predisposing factors is being overweight.
The conditions that go with being overweight are:
Metabolic syndrome, which is a clustering of at least three of the five following – abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high serum triglycerides, and low serum high-density lipoprotein (HDL).
Other conditions are hypertension, cancer, PCOS, heart disease, dementia, fatty liver, insulin resistance, lipid problems, and type-2 diabetes, etc.
As a result, we have very specific types of immune cells that are being generated by having visceral fat around your midsection. We have deficiency of the cells that are supposed to suppress the inflammation so thereby increasing inflammation. Inflammation itself weakens the immune system.
Being overweight weakens the immune system and also the cascade of inflammation that’s generated from these cytokines immune cells can create insulin resistance. Also, consuming sugar and refined carbs increase insulin resistance, and consuming frequent meals increase insulin resistance.
Please see the image of insulin resistance cycle.
Inflammation causes insulin resistance. If someone’s a pre-diabetic, this inflammation could be enough to push them over the edge into diabetes because the difference between a pre-diabetic situation and diabetes is that insulin resistance suddenly fails to compensate for insulin and then the shift takes place.
The pancreas sends the insulin hormone to the cell but the insulin receptor won’t allow the connection and let it into the cell. Because we don’t get a connection we don’t get the feedback loop to turn off this insulin so it pumps more and more and moreto the point where you have five to seven times the amount of insulin then you should. All that excess insulin is camouflaging the problem because it’s pushing the blood sugars down because usually the person is consuming a lot of carbs.
Inflammation can almost act like a carbohydrate and push us to the extent where your cells and the pancreas gets so exhausted that they can’t pump out any more insulin. So the insulin starts going down, down, down. Now you have a situation the pancreas cells are burnt out plus you have cell receptor blocking the insulin at the same time. There’s nothing there to push the blood sugars down. So then we go from pre-diabetes to diabetes.
So what do you have to do?
Get on the Ketogenic diet, do intermittent fasting and as this visceral fat goes away the inflammation is going to go away, insulin resistance is going to improve over time to reverse insulin resistance.
It’s not just the carbs and the frequency of eating, it’s the fat and the inflammation that can cause the immune deficiency as well. Inflammation could also come from other sources as well as injuries, and infections like virus chronic infections.
If you have a weakened immune system, what happens when you are infected by COVID-19? Dr. Berg explains what happens in the video
It’s Not The Virus that Kills You, It’s Your Immune System https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NooTKyjlo6s
The virus is not even alive, how can something not alive actually kill you?
Please see the image of a virus.
The virus is an inactive shell with some DNA material in there with very specific instructions to replicate. COVID-19 connects to the ACE 2 receptor of your cells to get into the cell. Their goal is to get into the cell and hijack your metabolism to replicate. But that is not what kills you.
What kills you is your immune system. There two parts of your immune system. The innate which is the system that doesn’t need to be trained it’s the first line of defence and then we have the adapted part of the immune system. In the worst-case scenario you’re in intensive care, inflammation in your lungs is creating massive destruction where you eventually just stop breathing.
You may think this as an overreacting immune system but it’s not because innate part of the immune system is only overreacting because part of the adaptive system is not working. In the adaptive immune system there are T suppressor cells regulate the over reaction, they prevent too much inflammation.
What is killing us is the severe imbalance where we lose the adaptive immune system and then we have too much of the innate immune system.
The virus is a trigger but it only kills people with a weak immune system. There is usually a metabolic conditions that are causing a weakness.
Not having enough vitamin D can create a weak adaptive immune system.
If your immune system is strong this virus does not play a big threat especially if you understand how to strengthen it. In this post Dr. Berg told us how to strengthen your immune system.
How To Bulletproof Your Immune System?https://2healthyhabits.wordpress.com/2020/04/17/how-to-bulletproof-your-immune-system/
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