Study Day 3 and Vaccines for Dummies
Happy Friday the 13th everyone! So far I havn’t succumbed to the bad luck of being in Room 13 while in an influenze medical study on Friday the 13th HAHA. My immune system is solid as a rock! Thats one of the most important benefits of being fit and eating properly, a juggernaught of an immune system! So for all those of you out there who think you have to do juice or master cleanses, workout twice a day 7 days a week or eat paleo, low carb, atkins, whole 30 or any other commercialized diet to be healthy and in shape, I’ve got news for you….YOU DONT. Its a simple equation: Live an active lifestyle + 3-4 days of challenging exercise + a properly balanced diet + stress management = A great, healthy, strong, lean body!
Ok, so you aren’t here to hear a fitness lesson so I’ll get to it. Day 3 was pretty unremarkable…woke up around 7am, waited around for the normal battery of morning tests and just counted down the minutes till breakfast at 10:30am. Forget the flu, which i still dont have a single symptom for, the constant feeling of being hungry SUCKS! Im so used to having a large, lean, protein-packed breakfast early in the morning to keep me satisfied till lunch (which also has a good amount of protein) around noon followed my a small mid afternoon meal and then dinner around 8pm. But instead I get a small, sugary carb packed breakfast at 10:30am, a carb packed small lunch fit for an 8 year old and then a small dinner with a little protein and a lot of carbs and sauces (probably covering up the lack of flavor in the food). Here are a couple pics of my meals from yesterday:
Breakfast Lunch Dinner
Breakfast: Breakfast Burrito (mostly tortilla and potatos, a little egg), natures valley peanut butter bar (lots of sugar and fat), cup of melon and cranberry juice cocktail
Lunch: Microvaved hamburger (patty was the thinnest thing ive ever seen) small salad with ranch and a piece of cake
Dinner: Rice pilaf with small piece of tilapia covered in some sort of white sauce, 1/2 a pretzel bun with butter, salad with raspberry dressing and melon
So in short, food isn’t great here and im constantly hungry because of the tiny portions and carb filled meals.
Today, I’d like to go into some basic information and misinformation about vaccines in general and relate it back to this study. I know some of you out there are anti-vaxxers and/or dont understand what vaccines are and how they work. So here is my attempt at a short explanation:
Getting Sick & what a Vaccine is:
When antigens(viruses, bacteria and other germs) enter the body, the body sees them as foreign invaders and releases specific types of proteins called antibodies that fight off the invaders and the diseases they cause. What a vaccine is, is a way to introduce a specific virus to your system to trigger an immune response without actually giving you the disease or illness associated with it i.e. a safer way to gain immunity without getting the disease first.
How does a vaccine do this:
A vaccine usually includes dead, weakened or even just the protein part of the virus suspended in a solution of adjuvants (additives). Because the vaccine has dead or weakened parts of the virus and your body may not have a strong enough response to them to trigger antibody creation, a component of the adjuvants are compounds that trick the body into “putting up a fight” and producing a strong enough response to create antibodies. Since your body can “remember” diseases and the antibodies that kill them…once your body produces antibodies against a vaccine you will essentially have an immunity to that disease for years. Think of it like this: Your family tells you they want to come over to dinner (sorry I’m hungry right now so my thoughts are on food) and so you spend hours finding a recipe that will please everyone and going to the store to get what you need; but they all end up flaking, maybe they got sick HAHA, and now you spent all that time on a perfect meal but at least you didn’t actually have to cook or do the cleanup cause they never came. But a week later when everyone is feeling better they tell you last minute that they are coming over for that meal….you already have everything you need to whip that meal up for them, thus saving all that time and running around.
What Vaccines are not:
Vaccines are not 100% guaranteed cures! They dont treat disease and are not a medication but a preventative. They give your body a huge advantage though. They are only 99%-100% effective meaning there is still a chance that you could get it but you could also get hit by lightning twice in the same day but unlikely. They aren’t 100% safe, like pretty much anything in this world. Did you know drinking water (pure or otherwise) can kill you? Vaccines do have common, rare and extremely rare side effects such as allergic reactions to adjuvant components like egg, injection site redness/tenderness, mild fever and in exremely rare cases with a handful of specific disease vaccines, brain damage. This is not an exhaustive list. If you want more info on what the side effects are for specific diseases follow this link to the CDC vaccine side effect page https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/side-effects.htm.
So if vaccines aren’t perfect, and they carry some risks, why do we take them?
At the end of the day, as with anything, we must weigh the benefits vs the risks…and until 1998 society basically understood and beleived that the benefits grossly outweight the risks. Thats why death from diseases like Polio and Diphtheria have dropped 100% from pre-vaccine era to 2006 (cdc statistics) and deaths from other diseases like measles, rubella and tetanus have dropped by 99.9% in the same time frame. Are these disease cured? No…the CDC has a great analogy about the relationship of vaccines to diseases: “It’s much like bailing out a boat with a slow leak. When we started bailing, the boat was filled with water. But we have been bailing fast and hard, and now it is almost dry. We could say, “Good. The boat is dry now, so we can throw away the bucket and relax.” But the leak hasn’t stopped. Before long we’d notice a little water seeping in, and soon it might be back up to the same level as when we started.”
Ok, so there is a little knowledge drop for you on Vaccines as well as an update on the vaccine study im currently participating in. Since I want to leave you with wanting more, I’ll cut myself short at this point and leave Day 4 and some insight into the whole Anti-vaccination movement and why vaccines have recently become controversial to a small minority.
Till then enjoy not being inside a lab, unless of course you are one of my training clients who are at The LAB Fitness Studio, you better be working hard!
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