How To Strengthen Your Immune System
There’s another reason to celebrate the gut microbiome—a healthy gut might actually be able to save lives. According to scientists at the Lawson Health Research Institute, all it takes to strengthen your immune system is to improve your gut health, a process that we know is as easy as increasing your ingestion of probiotics and dietary fiber. How’s that for functional food?
These Lawson Health Research Institute scientists are implementing a preliminary study that would discover whether a fecal transplant of a healthy microbiome can help patients with melanoma become more receptive to immunotherapy treatments. During immunotherapy treatments, patients take certain drugs to stimulate their immune systems in order to attack tumors in their bodies. A fecal transplant, according to these researchers, would make their immune systems more receptive to the drugs and, in turn, could help more people successfully fight their cancer.
“We know that some people’s immune systems don’t respond well, and it seems to be associated with the microbes within your gut,” Michael Silverman, M.D., a Lawson associate scientist, said in a video filmed by the research institute. “The goal is to give people healthy microbes to replenish the microbes in their gut so that their immune system responds optimally, and they’re able to control the tumor.”