In the midst of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, you may be considering ways you can help support your body’s natural immunity. While you can’t completely change out the immune system with which you are blessed, you can do a lot of different things that allow you to put your own immunity in the best position to be successful against internal invaders.
Besides the oh-so-important handwashing we all know of and hopefully practice, here are Dr. Wallace Vigo Nelson’s eight expert techniques to boosting your immune system naturally:
Avoid Immune Suppressants
First of all, we want to really look at avoiding anything that might naturally suppress your immune system.
1. Systemic Toxicity
Systemic toxicity is one of the biggest suppressants to your immune system. This includes if you are eating a lot of processed foods and coming into contact with a lot of modern-day plastics and petroleum-based chemicals. Each of those can actually suppress the healthy activity of your immune system.
Both the M’lis Detoxification Kit and M’lis Total Body Cleanse Kit give your body the ability to remove toxins from every single organ and tissue where they reside to help enhance your immune system and re-establish healthy habits that you will want to continue long after you finish.
2. Refined Sugar
If you consume just over 10 grams of sugar, it can suppress your immune system for up to three hours. This means if you’re drinking a can of coke once every three hours, you essentially are dealing with an entirely suppressed immune system pretty much all the time. If you’re eating candy, if you’re eating processed foods that are including refined sugars, it actually is holding your immune system far below its potential pretty much all the time. So when you’re looking to boost your immunity, it’s important to avoid those refined sugars as much as possible.
The NIH (National Institutes of Health) recommendation on refined sugarsis no more than 25 grams a day, but really that’s a good number to push as low as you possibly can. There is no dietary requirement for refined sugars. You can live just fine for the rest of your life without ever eating refined sugars. Nutritionally speaking, refined sugars don’t really do anything beneficial for your health, so cutting back as much as you can is actually just a good overall health strategy but especially during a time where we’re more susceptible to catching viruses.
3. Excess Alcohol
Avoiding the consumption of alcohol to excess is important with your immune system. So this doesn’t mean you can’t have a glass of wine with dinner. At a very moderate level, there are a lot of studies that show a glass of wine with dinner is actually really beneficial to your health. They can do a lot of good things, but drinking to excess absolutely will suppress your immune system. It can disrupt your sleep patterns, negatively impact your digestion, impair the function of your natural antibodies called t-cells, and more. So drinking to excess ought to be avoided if you’re trying to make sure that you’re optimizing your immune system.
Practice Immune-Supporting Habits
After cutting the immune suppressors out and detoxing, let’s talk about some effective techniques you can use to boost the immune system.
1. Quality Sleep
Your immune system requires good healthy sleep to actually reset itself and operate at its maximum potential. If you struggle with catching those zzzZz’s at night, read this blog post for simple sleep hacks that you can practice today, to help you get quality, restorative rest back into your life.
2. Nutrient-Dense Diet
Since each nutrient that’s required by your body plays a role within the natural healthy function of your immune system, we advise you to build a diet based around nutrient-dense foods instead of empty calories. Make sure you’re building your diet around vegetables, fruits, healthy meats, fats, nuts/seeds, a small amount of quality healthy starchy carbs.
Supplement with something like the M’lis DailyMultivitamin/Multimineral or the M’lis M.R.P. Instant Meal Shake to make sure that you are filling-in any nutritional gaps that may exist in your diet. We always call that the healthier and cheapest form of health insurance — simply making sure that you’re not nutritionally-deficient in anything by eating a healthy diet and using smart supplementation to fill in any of those vitamins & mineral gaps you may have.
Supplement with Immune-Boosting Nutrients
Specific nutrients play specialized roles within your immune system. Supplementing with targeted nutrition during this time of year can help you ensure these key nutrients are at their optimal levels for the strongest immune response possible.
1. Vitamin D
This sunshine vitamin is the most important single nutrient for your immune system. It plays a factor in over 1,000 functions in your immune system just by itself, and if you are deficient in Vitamin D (which most of the population is), none of those thousand activities of your immune system are going to be happening correctly.
As you might imagine, these factors can leave you exposed to cold & flu and other numerous things that your immune system is protecting against. So we want to make sure you’re getting plenty of Vitamin D using a *high-quality, bio-available supplement like the M’lis Vitamin D.
2. Antioxidants & Phytonutrients
Antioxidants and phytonutrients act as fuel for your immune system and your ability to fight off infectious agents. So if you guys have ever seen a space movie where they use energy “blasters” for weapons. Making sure you have plenty of antioxidants and phytonutrients is like recharging your immune system’s blasters against any internal invaders.
You also want to make sure that you’ve got a wide mix of antioxidants by including lots of highly-dense superfood fruits and vegetables during this time of year. The M’lis Daily Antioxidants Essentials and M’lis Essential Greens have 24+ organic superfoods and phytonutrients necessary to charge those immune system blasters and give them the maximum ability to fight off invading pathogens.