Quercetin and Zinc: An Immune Boosting “Dynamic Duo”

If you go back to the article “Immune Support: How Vitamins D and C and The Essential Mineral, Zinc, Can Help”, I describe the basics of the immune system—to briefly bring it back, there are two main forms of immunity:

• Innate immunity. This is usually what people seem to be referring to when they say“natural immunity”. This is the immune system you are born with. It is non-specific, relatively fast-acting, and involves a different set of cells and cellular chemical messengers (cytokines) as compared to the second form, acquired immunity. It is the first responder in the immune system and generally does a pretty good job for the most part. The non-specific aspect of innate immunity is core to why evolution determined it was simply not enough for the survival of the species—non-specific means the innate immune system is NOT precise or exact, and in order to protect against most infectious diseases, it very often “slops over” and damages nearby tissues and organs.
  • To use a bulldozer analogy, imagine that you have a garden in your yard, and you have decided to make a new flower bed. Your neighbor has a bulldozer and volunteers to help you out. Well, that neighbor comes in with their bulldozer, crashes into a pear and apple tree and rolls over a set of blueberry bushes and your existing flower bed, and then digs out a hole that is too wide and too deep! You might have been better off with a smaller, more precise piece of equipment—say a smaller rototiller! Then you would still have your pear and apple tree, your blueberry bushes, and the flower bed you have tended for the last 5 years! The hole is dug for your new bed, that is true, but now you have to backfill and repair the damage to the area surrounding that new bed. That is roughly what happens with the innate immune system—the invading pathogen is gone, but there may be some significant damage to surrounding body parts.
• Acquired immunity. The acquired immune response involves specific antibodies, memory cells,and a very specific cellular immune response against viral, bacterial, fungal, and parasitic agents. There is much more control and regulation of the response because the immune system has learned (in the original response) exactly how to only attack the infectious agent with minimal damage to surrounding tissues and organs. It is the smaller rototiller that digs out precisely the amount of dirt needed to build your perfect flower bed! It takes roughly two weeks to gear up but is a precision instrument as compared to the innate immune response. Both are wonderful, both are needed, and both can do the job, but along with its precision functions, acquired immunity also confers much longer-lasting immunity than innate immunity does. Acquired immunity is the form of immunity induced by vaccinations—and that response, though it is induced by a shot—is STILL a natural response!

So, what is the answer to the question? Acquired immunity developed because over the many millennia of evolution, nature found that innate immunity was simply not enough of a defense in a microbe-filled world.