| If your immune system is heavily weighted toward one direction or another, that's a sign that something's amiss. To use one example, low white blood cell count—a primary response system to infections—can mean many things: Your immune system is lagging, as in HIV You have cancer inhibiting the production of white blood cells in the bone marrow You have a severe infection and you can't keep up with white blood cell production Meanwhile, high white blood cell count can also mean many things: Injury, infection, or general inflammation Stress Leukemia, which affects the bone marrow and triggers excessive production of white blood cells Rather than have "boosted white blood cells" or "low white blood cells," you want normal white blood cell count. In other words, you don't want to brute force your immune system in one direction or another (unless your medical situation requires it). Instead, you want to maintain immune agility—the ability to respond to immune insults as needed. One way to do so is to optimize glutathione production. You see, glutathione is the body's primary antioxidant. It's the compound we produce in order to deal with all sorts of immune and inflammatory insults.And almost every disease or instance of poor health is characterized by, or at least associated with, low glutathione status. Glutathione isn't a brute force immune implement. It does what the situation calls for. It's good to have it hanging around, balancing the see-saw of immunity. Luckily, glutathione production is fairly easy to stimulate. We need the amino acids cysteine, glycine, and glutamate, plus many other co-factors. A real quick and easy way to stimulate glutathione production is to take whey isolate—it's a powerful source of cysteine and has been shown to boost glutathione in the body. This may work even better with some collagen in the diet, too (although we can make glycine, it helps to have some extra through dietary collagen). Anyway, I hope this helps you think about your immune system a little differently. To me, it's reassuring. What about you? | 