Increase Your Ability to Fight Infection With Nutrition

The human body is an intricate and perfect mechanism designed to overcome infection itself. Nutrition is a key element to enabling the human body to achieve its potential and overcome physical adversity. A recent study investigates the role of Arginine, an amino acid and its role in communicating with the human body.

Arginine is an amino acid that can be generated by the human body but also needs to be consumed by a nutritional diet. Arginine can be found in dairy products, beef, pork, chicken, wild game and sea food and in many vegetable sources such as wheat, flour, granola, nuts etc...

The study was conducted by Richard Lamb and his post doctoral fellow Virginie Mieulet and can be found in full publication in the August 17 edition of journal Science Signaling.  Mieulet discovered that Arginine plays a vital role in fighting infection. The amino acid Arginine is needed to communicate to the body that there is an infection when one is present. On the other hand too much Arginine can make the body think that it's in a constant state of infection.

The study only briefly considers the importance of Arginine but it is presumed that a healthy nutritional diet helps sufficiently in fighting infection. In third world countries where people are constantly malnourished an infection could become deadly and an increased amount of Arginine could help communicate to the body that it's under attack and begin fighting infection immediately. But it's crucial to have a balanced diet to not exceed the healthy amount of Arginine to confuse the body and make it over act creating an increased amount of inflammation like in the case of chronic arthritis.