Vaccine Plus

Context: Nutrition is an important influencer of immunity. Vaccine efficacy needs a nutrition booster too.

Role of nutrition in improving vaccine efficacy

• Important influencer of immunity: both natural (innate immunity) and acquired (adaptive immunity).
  • Zinc, selenium and Vitamin E enhance the immune response to a vaccine.
  • Deficiencies of key nutrients may adversely affect the strength of the immune response: as proved in cases of several vaccines, ranging from polio and cholera to rotavirus.
• Improves cellular immunity: which is a durable component of the body’s immune response.
  • In 2006, Japanese researchers reported that mice fed with 5 % casein (milk protein) had lower T cell counts than mice fed 20 % milk protein. 
  • Helps in the prevention of infectious disease caused by Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) vaccination.
• Helps to check the adverse impact of the vaccine on elderly people: E.g.
  • Clinical trial in France revealed that elderly persons who take supplements developed more antibodies and fewer respiratory infections.

Way forward: Reconsider policies that influence agricultural priorities and shape food systems.

• Enable people to consume healthy diets: By supply of pulses, millets, fruit, vegetables, nuts and fish which can provide us with much-needed proteins, vitamins, minerals and fibre.
• Checking the impact of climate change: Global warming would result in 49.6 million new zinc-deficient persons, 38.2 million new protein-deficient persons; 1 million children and 396 million women who would be iron deficient. – (A study by Columbia University)
  • Diversify crop production: By replacing rice cultivation with millets and sorghum will enhance nutrition and climate resilience without reducing calorie production or requiring more land.
    • Reduces irrigation demand, energy use and greenhouse gas emission.
  • Promote plant-based nutritious diet: makes the diet both nutritionally appropriate and ecologically sustainable.
  • Discourage use of Ultra-processed foods: It should be regulated and taxed to decrease their production, promotion and consumption.

Conclusion: Our protection does not lie only at the tip of a needle that injects the vaccine but even more so in the policies that determine what fills our plate when we eat.