An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives

by Matt Richtel

Fully 20 percent of the American population, or 50 million Americans, develops an autoimmune disorder. By some estimates, 75 percent are women, with conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Crohn’s disease, and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)—each terrible, frustrating, debilitating, hard to diagnose. Together, autoimmunity is the third most common disease category in the United States (after cardiovascular disorders and cancer).

What we can see clearly now is that arthritis sufferers, people with celiac disease or lupus, even people who suffer seemingly mysterious bouts of fatigue, fever, and pain, all share an often-invisible threat: an elegant defense that is out of balance, an immune system that has overcompensated, been triggered to act without proper constraint.

Lemon thinks one great way to keep your immune system in balance is to . . . eat the food you drop on the floor. Her philosophy, as she puts it, is that people need to stop oversanitizing their world so that their immune systems are introduced to lots of bacteria, parasites, and other pathogens and can react to them as millions of years of evolution have refined them to do.

the immune system is as dangerous to us as it can be to invaders.

“Crying is beneficial,” she says. It’s an acknowledgement of who and where you are, an embrace of self at a given time and, as such, it helps the immune system by sparing it from having to deal with the repressed anxiety.

The best examples are those over which we have complete control: sleep, exercise, meditation, and nutrition.

Avoid air travel, have lots of sex, keep breathing, and most appropriately, enjoy your work, whatever it is, or don’t do it.