Your Immune System

Your body's immune system is essential to your very survival. The immune system is a complex network of specialized cells and organs that defends your body against attacks by foreign invaders. When functioning properly, the immune system seeks out, finds, and destroys pathogens and infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. When it malfunctions however, a number of diseases, from allergies to arthritis, cancer, MS, or AIDS can develop or the immune system could see its own cells as foreign and attack them. This is called autoimmune disease. 
An abnormal production of the chemical interleukin-6 by the body is associated with autoimmune disorders and inflammatory and allergic conditions. Plant sterols and sterolins block this abnormal production on interleukin-6 and thereby, help prevent autoimmune disorders, inflammation, and allergic conditions.

The immune system is composed of these three “layers” or mechanisms.

1. The first layer is the skin and mucous membranes, which acts as a physical barrier.
2. The second layer is the “innate immune system,” a broad-acting, short-term, non-specific immune response to pathogens such as bacteria or viruses. Microbes that evade the innate system encounter a third layer of protection;
3. A powerful mechanism called the adaptive immune response. Here populations of white blood cells known as lymphocytes – B cells and T cells – mount a powerful, highly specific attack on specific pathogens. “The adaptive immune responses to virus and bacterial infections, for example, are quite different.”

Your body is indeed "fearfully and wonderfully made"!