8 Tips to Boost Your Immune System
It’s been recently reported that 88% of Americans don’t pass the standards for healthy metabolic function. Not surprising, but also scary.
That means 88% of our population is at risk for (or already has) chronic disease, which is the major reason our healthcare industry is in the rough shape that it is — and this problem is only expected to increase with time.
That is, unless we do something about it.
Our metabolic health is the main player in determining if we will succumb to chronic disease, how long we can live, and the quality of life we can expect to have. (Of course, things like genes and environment play a role, but are both regardless intertwined with our metabolic status.)
What is metabolic health?
As a quick summary, your metabolic health includes:
Your nutrient status — how well you are harboring, dumping, absorbing, and/or utilizing the nutrients in your food, which can be determined in bloodwork and hair tissue mineral analysis.
Vitals signs — how well your blood pressure is managed, how well your blood transports oxygen etc.
Blood lipids — your cholesterol levels and ratios, including triglycerides (spoiler alert: cholesterol is not a bad thing, and is REQUIRED for health — you just want to ensure the ratios are trending in the right direction).
Hormone status — how balanced your hormones are not only singly, but in relation to each other.
Body fat percentage and amount of fat around your middle.
Fasting blood glucose.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.
Immune health is more important now than ever.
I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but there’s a widespread viral infection going around right now. I know, right? ‘Tis the 2020 season.
For the USA specifically, we’ve been struggling with immunity for a long time — in the form of rising chronic disease.
As I mentioned at the outset, only 12% of us are doing it right.
That’s not to shame anyone for where they are — because it’s really not on the individual. There were many events that unfolded over time to get our society to where we’re at today — mankind settling down and starting to cultivate land with agricultural practices, leading to hierarchical standings in society, the invention of machine work, and the development of big cities and technology. These things led to wars, the burning of fossil fuels, creation of chemicals, and more reliance on the conveniences of our first-world over our own physical bodies. We didn’t know what was happening to us until years after the fact — and even then, you can’t pinpoint one moment in time where things started to go wrong.
Well, I can think of a couple, lol — a rant for another time…
There are 3 major components to the immune system:
Your physical barriers to infection, such as your skin, your digestive tract, and bodily fluids like sweat.
Innate immune system — this is a generalized response, usually triggered first once you’re infected by something. It involved mass movement of white blood cells to the infection.
Adaptive immune system — this is a specific, targeted response, involving those infamous B and T cells, where specific antigens mount a production of antibodies to attack a specific invader. (This is what is stimulated with the injection of the pointy V-word — you know, the one that gets people banned on Google.)
So, besides the forbidden pointy V-word, how else can we support our immune systems? By being healthy from the inside out.
8 tips for boosting your immune system by improving where you stand metabolically:
1. Setting up and maintaining a balanced microbiome
70-80% of your immune cells are housed in and around your gut — the digestive tract and all its accessory organs. Why? Ingestion is a huge exposure for pathogens and other harmful substances that need eradicating before they reach your bloodstream. The immune cell presence here helps act as a physical barrier to entry for the bad stuff.
The gut lining is a major player in your innate immune response, too. If someone consumes too much processed, inflammatory food, the lining can get inflamed, leading to an innate reaction. Those inflammatory food compounds don’t get broken down well enough, and once they irritate the GI lining, they weaken it and get absorbed into your bloodstream and trigger the adaptive reaction.
Because these large food particles can often be mistaken for healthy, self-cells, sometimes the adaptive immune response can trigger an attack on the self, also known as autoimmunity. Not only is autoimmunity an overall immune system downer, but weakening the GI lining over and over with an unhealthy diet leaves the physical barrier defenses down.
In combination with a healthy diet, the good gut bugs help keep the lining functional and immune system strong by instructing the immune cells on what to target for destruction and removal, preventing the immune system from accidentally attacking the helpful flora. This process aids in the reduction of seasonal or other general allergies.
How to establish a good microbiome: taking a high-quality probiotic and also feeding it some prebiotics.
2. Get moving. Even better — get moving outdoors.
Keep workouts varied — only focusing on cardio actually increases inflammation and weakens your immune system. Incorporate lifting heavy objects, resistance training, or short bursts of high-intensity movement.
Don’t workout for too long — extended periods of difficult exercise also weaken the immune system, similar to the chronic cardio phenomenon. If the workout is gentle, longer periods are okay, just keep in mind that the more intense the exercise, the shorter it can be.
Shorter high-intensity sessions allow for your body to experience brief inflammation as hormesis, to make it stronger afterward.
Working from home? Set an alarm on your phone that goes off every 15-20 minutes and do something when it rings. At home, I run up and down my basement stairs 3 times, or do a set of 15 squats, or do some hip and shoulder mobility work.
Exercising outside increases your exposure to vitamin D, which is HUGE for immunity (and the pathogen in question this year).
You also get better air quality for all that huffing and puffing.
3. Get it on. For reals.
Having sex can boost an immune protein that helps keep infections from even entering your cells. Wild.
4. Change up the cookware you have at home.
Surprisingly, many folks I know still use Teflon or aluminum pans for cooking (and plastic containers for storage!) — and all have been implicated in health issues due to chemicals leaching and breaking off the container, directly into your food. The effects of these materials are clearly intense. It’s best just to replace them.
Obviously cookware can be expensive, so wait for Black Friday deals or browse your local store’s catalog every couple of weeks to see if they’re running any specials.
A couple great alternative options for pots and pans:
Cast iron — bonus being that this can introduce more iron into your diet, directly through cooking your food in it!
Stainless steel
Ceramic-coated
…and for storage containers:
5. Proper supplementation — and no, don’t just guess or buy the first thing you see on the shelf.
As a Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, I am trained and certified to perform the Functional Clinical Assessment. This is a hands-on supplement testing technique that helps pinpoint exactly what nutrients your body needs to be best supported.
The reason I mention this, is because I normally don’t make targeted supplement recommendations for clients without it.
However. 2020.
I can still suggest some overall ideas that you can take into consideration. You can run them by your healthcare team, a nutritionist, or Dr. Google. Whatever floats your boat.
A caveat to the following list: I will not be redundant in saying each should be “high-quality,” but they need to be. Each and every one. I cannot emphasize enough the need to seek out the highest supplement quality you can find and afford. The FDA does not regulate supplements, and therefore anyone can make their own, stuff it full of icky fillers, and call it effective. There are more LOW quality brands out there than good ones, and you’d be better off not taking any supplements at all than taking the crap stuff.
A couple ideas that are generally safe to recommend:
A pre- and probiotic as mentioned above.
A fish oil or omega fatty acid.
Curcumin or turmeric — bonus if it’s supported with black pepper.
Magnesium.
Vitamin D3 is also super important, however I recommend getting your blood levels tested prior to supplementation. If this has been done and it’s determined that you need supplementation, I recommend a D3/K2 blend to keep the balance of these two vitamins in check.
Need help? Reach out.
6. Assess chronic medication use — especially if you use NSAIDs a lot.
This is in NO way medical advice or a recommendation to stop taking your prescription medications. That’s 100% not my area and not at all what I’m saying.
What I AM saying — if you’re someone who pops an Excedrin the moment you feel a headache coming on, or you take ibuprofen before you workout or play sports (yes, this is a thing), then maybe you could take a look at these habits and decide for yourself if you really need to be doing them.
The reason I say this is because many medications can disrupt both the stomach AND intestinal lining, causing more inflammation than they reduce. They also can disrupt your gut microbiome balance, and if you’re taking probiotics, this is working against you.
Many medications also cause nutrient deficiencies simply due to the ways in which they work — such as preventing absorption, burning through nutrient stores to process the medication, faster excretion in general, or changing the way nutrients are metabolized within the body.
7. Mind your middle — particularly its size and the affect this could have on your metabolism.
PSA: This is not an ad for losing weight. There’s plenty of people who are overweight and have awesome metabolic health markers.
However, there are plenty who don’t, too. It’s good to be in-the-know about where you stand.
It’s intuitive to assume that as one gains weight, it’s due to an increase in fat cells. Actually, it’s the expansion in size of your already-existing fat cells. They take in more and more for storage and literally expand.
One of the problems with this is that fat cell expansion reaching capacity can cause fat accumulation on our internal organs, including the thymus, which is a huge player in the maturation of immune system cells. This organ needs to be functioning at its best to keep your immune cells in tip-top shape.
Being overweight is not inherently a problem, but becomes one when your metabolic health parameters get out of whack. Check in regularly with your healthcare team to keep an eye on it, or gather some tools for home to monitor it yourself — such as a blood glucose monitor (not-ironically called a glucometer) with test strips and a blood pressure cuff.
8. And, you know, all the other stuff us healthcare folk are always barking on about.
Quit smoking.
Even more importantly, quit vaping.
Prioritize at least seven hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Find stress management strategies that work for you.
Avoid overboozing.
Remove processed foods.
Speaking of foods, you might be wondering why this isn’t on the list — especially coming from a nutritionist. Stay tuned in the next week or so for an entire post about foods and their effect on metabolic health and the immune system… and it gets its own post because it’s that important.
That, and I didn’t want you to be sitting here forever reading. #Thoughtful
Is any of this information new to you? OR maybe there are items on this list that you’ve been implementing successfully? Tell me all your stories! Comment below.
Talk soon,
