#70 Invincible Immunity with Teemu Arina

Teemu Arina (0:00)

The body doesn't do anything useless, so it's a very energy conserving system. Like exercise, you have to exercise your immune system. But just like with exercise, you can overexercise, and then you get into problems. Boosting the immune system is not necessarily gonna be a good thing. If it doesn't need the immune system, actively at an alert state and deal with intruders, it's not gonna prioritize those resources there.

Yeah, exactly.

Siim Land (0:31)

Body, mind, empowerment.

Teemu Arina (0:33)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (0:39)

Everything the body needs.

Teemu Arina (0:40)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:44)

So yeah, we're driving here in Finland, Sunday, Finland with Teemu Arina.

Teemu Arina (0:49)

Yeah.

Siim Land (0:51)

And we're gonna talk about boosting the immune system. So before we do that, maybe Teemu, can you give like a brief synopsis of what are you doing and what's your, let's say, vocation in terms of biohacking your health?

Teemu Arina (1:07)

Yeah, so I'm writing the Biohacker's Handbook and it's a book that dives deep into optimizing your biology with systems thinking, looking at how the human body works. And then we are going into all the different systemic interventions, that being exercise or optimizing your sleep or it might be about optimizing your diet and working with your gut bacteria and all that.

And also like ergonomics and biomechanics and all these things like that help you to be a more balanced human being. So, and we also organize the Biohacker Summit. So I'm the curator for this Biohacker Summit conference series.

Siim Land (1:53)

And definitely like a lot of, I think like the Biohacker Summit is doing a huge, like very good job at not looking at one thing specifically or not being so myopic about the human system and human organism and they're taking into account all the entire, all the other aspects.

And that the immune system is probably one of the most important ones. So maybe like, can you describe briefly like what is, what is the immune system and why is it so important for people to want to maintain its health?

Teemu Arina (2:22)

Yeah, so we wrote a little e-book.

It's called the Invincible Immunity. It's a Biohacker's Handbook, special kind of bonus chapter you can find from biohackingbook.com. But basically in that book, we describe like the functions of the immune system and things that are weakening the immune system and things that you can use to strengthen the immune system. And if you think of the immune system, you can split it into two. So I'm going to simplify greatly, like I'm not going to get into all the different T cells or macrophages or things like that. To keep it simple, so you have immune system function that you are born with, and then you have immune system function that you are learning by being exposed to bacteria and other things that are causing disease.

And the innate immune system that you are born with, it can react to external pathogens and so on very quickly, like within a day. And also the part of the immune system that you are learning through your exposure to different pathogens. Once you contract something like a virus, it takes a couple of weeks that your system learns how to kill that intruder. And next time when it faces the same intruder, it can activate itself within a day or two. It's very quick. So you might feel a little bit of like flu symptoms and then they go away because your immune system is already kind of aware how to deal with it.

Siim Land (4:15)

So it kind of builds up like tolerance to it after initial exposure.

Teemu Arina (4:19)

And the problem obviously with something like flu is that they keep on mutating. So your immune system doesn't recognize the new mutation anymore. So you have to have to build smart bacteria. Yeah, you have to build immunity to new things like on a constant basis. But anyway, so in health circles, there is a lot of discussion about that.

Or they are offering a lot of different supplements and so on that they promote that they will be immune system boosting, that they boost your immune system. That somehow like boosting the immune system is a good thing. But if you think about it, it's more about the balance because if you take things like autoimmune disease, that's a good example where your immune system is working on overdrive and it's attacking your own issues and organs. Healthy cells.

And the same goes for several viruses. They can actually boost your immune system in a way that it causes the symptoms. A good example is Ebola. And what Ebola is doing, it's boosting your immune system in a way that you eventually kill yourself. So people who have things like autoimmune disease and already their immune systems or allergies are running on overdrive on certain aspects, boosting the immune system is not necessarily going to be a good thing. But if it's not functioning in an optimal state, you might have T cells that are not waking up when there's intruders.