Vitamin A and Your Immune System

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now I’ve done quite a few videos on the immune system relating to zinc vitamin C vitamin D but I haven’t done one on vitamin A and vitamin a is essential for your immune system having a vitamin A deficiency will increase your susceptibility to getting more infections especially in the respiratory system both lower lungs as well as sinus and throat you need vitamin A for all of your mucous membranes and I’m talking about the sinuses the mouth the lungs and even the gut without vitamin A you’re not going to be able to produce the mucous membranes that you need the mucous membranes are an important barrier to microbes the microbes have a difficult time of penetrating this mucus layer and they get stuck in there and they can’t move too well you have a lot of your immune cells sitting there waiting for some type of invasion so they can actually attack and also signal the rest of the team as they hold down the fort the internal skin of your body the epithelial layer of your sinuses your throat and your lungs which basically is just beneath the mucus is highly influenced by vitamin a without vitamin A you’re not gonna have a normal cell layer also vitamin A keeps these cells together so they don’t leak her open up and allow microbes or pathogens to invade in your colon you have the mucous membrane and then you have a layer of colon cells and then you have a layer of the Olympic system just below that and that’s where a lot of immune reactions take place if you haven’t seen my video on lymph nodes I put a link down below so vitamin A is needed to make something called mucin which is a part of the mucous membrane it’s like a gel that is involved in your immune system without vitamin a you’re gonna have a difficult time having normal amounts of macrophages these are the cells that are very large and they eat microbes for dinner they also clean up debris and garbage they act as a first line of defense to hold down the fort while they send the message to the rest of the troops depending on the magnitude of the battle if it’s a small thing they’ll pretty much take care of it by themselves but if there’s a large attack they will call in the troops your thymus gland right about the heart and it helps train your immune cells specifically t-cells which stand for finest and the thymus has the capacity to activate and synthesize vitamin A and the reason for that is because your immune system needs vitamin A now there’s another player involved called a dendritic cell and that cell basically takes a piece of a pathogen or a microbe and presents it to your immune system to let your immune system now if they happen to see something that resembles this go ahead and kill it so they actually work between the innate and adaptive part of the immune system the innate is kind of a general immune protection defense and then you have another part of the immune system which is more specific we have very specific cells that are designed to kill very specific cells well the dendritic cells work between these two systems to give them information to know who to kill and who not to kill also vitamin a is involved with enhancing the neutrophil traps now what does that mean when you have an infection you have like mucus and pus and inflammation about 70 percent of that infection is filled with neutrophils neutrophils are part of the innate immune system that do various things to kill off invaders and one strategy they use is they use these little traps if you can envision a Spider Man throwing a web over the enemy that’s what neutrophils do and what they have is certain chemicals that they can inject into that pathogen as it’s in this web contained to dissolve it if you’re deficient in vitamin A you your risk goes up for ulcerative colitis MS psoriasis and even lupus but the question is what food do you get vitamin A from beef liver would be at the top of the list then you have cod liver oil mackerel salmon goat’s cheese butter and of course I’m talking about grass-fed cream cheese eggs now by the manao is also in the kale broccoli the spinach but that would be in the pre vitamin A form carotenoids the active form called retinol is in all of these now it is true that your body can convert carotenoids into retinol because crop nones are like a pre vitamin A compound but only under certain conditions which I did a separate video on that you can watch that next however there are some great benefits of just carotenoids in general for vision as an anti-inflammatory as an antioxidant if you would like to see more information about vitamin A I put a link right here check it out