how does it help the body’s immune system to drink fluids when you’re sick?
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You’d be surprised, but this advice isn’t actually backed up by the medical literature, and your average doctor won’t even be able to tell you exactly why they say it. They say it because drinking fluids certainly doesn’t harm anything, and they heard it from the doctors before them. So it persists, but it’s mostly a myth.
It probably started because there are some illnesses (e.g. dysentery) that can cause you become so dehydrated that you actually die. Even milder forms of illness which cause diarrhea, for example, can cause you to become rapidly dehydrated more than your natural thirst mechanism really has time to notice. Fluids are very useful in that case.
But if you are not actively dehydrated, there’s very little evidence that drinking more water will actually make your immune system itself function any better. For something like the common cold, if you don’t already feel thirsty, drinking fluids does not seem to have any measurable effect on the severity or duration of the cold.
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