Upon infection, what dictates if a host will remain healthy and survive or become sick and die? Traditionally, scientists have taken a disease-centric approach to understanding host-pathogen interactions. I suggest this is due to the traditional definition of health, “the absence of disease or injury”, which gives the impression that health is a passive process and simply removing the source of the disease necessarily restores health. However health is an active process where evolved mechanisms enable the plasticity of an organism’s physiology, facilitating adaption to perturbations to prevent disease from occurring. We are comfortable with this idea in the context of homeostasis, yet we typically do not apply this same perspective to host-pathogen interactions. Thus our primary methods for treating infections are to antagonize pathogenic responses or remove the pathogen, rather than inducing pathways that function to promote health. I propose infections are a state in which a host can adapt, to maintain health and survival, yielding an apparent cooperation between the host and the pathogen. I will discuss our new findings showing how host metabolic processes and dietary interventions can promote host-pathogen cooperation.