Dr Jenna Macciochi

I'm always really compassionate when people ask me.

It's usually like a friend or maybe someone on my Instagram or a journalist.

And I'm like, I know what you mean.

But if you quote me as saying boosted, everyone's going to come after me and be like...

you can't boost your immune system.

But I'm like, I know what you mean.

You wanna, you know, we're going into winter.

You wanna avoid colds.

You wanna, you know, be resilient to whatever's going around.

But you know, when you turn the immune system on, that means you're usually turning on one of the different flavors of inflammation to remove something.

So that's good in the short term.

You might have a virus, get through the virus.

You might have an injury and you want to heal and repair that tissue.

But then you need to turn it off again when that process is finished.

And if you don't turn it off in a timely fashion, then it's going to linger and you get problems because inflammation, as I said, is inherently damaging.

It's just meant to be a short term.

It's like the stress response.

You know, I want to run to safety and my heartbeat is racing and like blood sugar is filling my veins as well.

motivating me to safety.

But then, oh, now I'm at the other side of the road or wherever.