Vegetarian Diets and Immunity

Vegetarian Diets and Immunity - How Foods Fight Cancer

Vegetarian diets are typically rich in vitamins. In addition, they are generally
low in fat, and vegetarians who also avoid dairy products and eggs
(vegans) have no cholesterol in their diets at all. Vegetarian diets also help
people lose excess weight; overweight people switching to a vegetarian diet
typically lose about 10 percent of their body weight. So, theoretically, vegetarian
diets ought to boost immunity.

That theory was put to the test at the German Cancer Research Center.
Researchers drew blood samples from a group of vegetarians and compared
them to healthy nonvegetarians working at the research center. They
separated out a particular type of white blood cell called a natural killer
cell. As its name implies, this type of cell really does shoot first and ask
questions later. Natural killer (or NK) cells engulf and destroy cancer cells.

By mixing the volunteers’ NK cells with standardized samples of cancer
cells, the researchers found that the vegetarians had approximately double
the natural killer cell activity compared to the nonvegetarians.24