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Deep in Winter’s clutch, comes the cold and flu season. We’ve all seen it come home from school, experienced it, or even had whole families go down with illness at once. Now while the media loves to promote various pills and whatnot to keep you healthy, let’s talk about what is actually proven to help ‘boost’ your immune system and keep the sickness to a minimum. It’s completely normal to get sick a few times a year, but more than that and you might need some extra support from a practitioner. I give you my top five lifestyle and top five diet tips to surviving this season.
So what can you do lifestyle wise to keep health up:
Sleep your optimal 7.5 hours
Maintain regular exercise
Drink 2-3L of water on the daily
Manage your stress levels - for real, use meditation if you like
Get 15 minutes of sunlight each day (or 2-3 each week)
What can you do food wise? A lot. I’m sure you can guess vitamin C foods will be high on this list, but let’s go through them anyway
Vitamin C - as in most fruits and veggies in higher amounts. This doesn’t stop you getting sick, but it can significantly improve symptom severity and reduce the length of the illness. The bonus of eating foods at a source of vitamin C over a tablet, is that it’s more bioavailable and works in synergy with other nutrients found in those foods. I do stress whole fruits and vegetables, not juice.
Garlic - especially raw garlic, contains high levels of allicin. Not only is this allicin super antimicrobial, but can support your immune cells. If you can’t stop ½ clove of raw garlic, just aim to include it in your cooking often.
Prebiotic foods - gladly including garlic here too, but also artichokes, green banana, starchy root vegetables or brown rice (cooked and cooled) and asparagus. All the lovely prebiotic fibre contained in these foods go towards feeding your good gut bugs which are absolutely vital for immune health. Your gut is 70-90% of your immune function.
Antioxidants - with stress comes increased oxidative damage, this is not helpful for immune support as it takes essential nutrients from building more white blood cells. All the colours in fruits and vegetables, the phytonutrients that provide those colours, also act as antioxidants among many other great actions. Think purple, blue, orange, red, yellow and green colours!
Quality protein - vegan or omnivore, and all the in betweens, you cannot fault the biological and physiological need for protein (amino acids) to repair, create new DNA, new cells and signalling molecules. These amino acids, plus a few other things, are required to create new white blood cells - your immune cells. Obviously these will be vital to your immune resilience and how well you fair with cold and flu season.
That’s my top five lifestyle and diet tips to maintain great immune health over the Winter season. I’d love to know, did you learn something?