Dr Jenna Macciochi

The nervous system and the immune system are completely integrated.

So if we're stressed every day, your immune system is primed for inflammation, which is then causing more wear and tear on our bodies and ultimately is feeding into chronic diseases.

But if we start to consider how the immune system plays a role in driving these conditions, then we can start to get ahead of what is probably the biggest health crisis that we have.

Yeah, I think this is going to be my life's work to try and rebrand the immune system as much more than just infection protection.

In fact, I like to think of it as the wellness system and it's kind of our arbiter of our health across the life course.

So we only think about it when we get sick.

We're like, oh, I've got that fever.

I've got a flu.

I've got that seasonal allergy that's going around.

And I think we have to think about it a bit differently now.

And that's kind of where my idea came for the book.

I think quite possibly.

I think we're not quite there yet in being able to do that as a consumer test, let's say.

But we do have ways to measure what we call immune resilience.

And this is a sort of research-based marker that would allow us to determine if somebody's immune system was functioning well.

And so I don't say...

you know, something like boosted because that's not quite the right word.

We have all these different components of the immune system need to be balanced.

And it's kind of like a rubber band, like it can respond when it needs to, but come back to baseline effectively and not kind of get triggered unnecessarily or in an unwanted fashion, like an autoimmune disease or an allergy.

And you mentioned a few diseases that people might not expect to have an immune system component like cancer, heart disease.