In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, you may be considering ways you can help support your body’s natural immunity. The truth is, while you can’t completely change out the immune system with which you are blessed, there are a lot of different things that you can do to keep your immune system strong and healthy so you can have your best defense against any virus or infection.
Here are Dr. Wallace Vigo Nelson’s eight expert techniques to naturally support the healthy function of your immune system:
Try Your Best to 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. When your body is overtaxed with toxins, it can result in inflammation and impaired immune function. This includes if you are eating a lot of processed foods and coming into frequent contact with modern-day plastics and petroleum-based chemicals. Each of those can actually suppress the healthy activity of your immune system. Try your best to reduce your overall toxin exposure and help your body rid itself of toxic build-up by undergoing a high-quality cleanse program like the S4 Detoxification Kit or S4 7 Day Cleanse Kit.
2. Refined Sugar
If you consume just over 10 grams of sugar, it can suppress your immune system for up to 3 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. By eating candy or processed foods that contain refined sugars on a daily basis, you may unknowingly be weakening your body’s ability to ward off disease. So if your goal is to focus on strengthening your immune system, it’s important to avoid those refined sugars as much as possible.
The NIH (National Institutes of Health) recommendation on refined sugars is no more than 25 grams a day, but that’s truly 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, they don’t offer 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 a virus.
3. Excess Alcohol
Avoiding the consumption of alcohol to excess is important for 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, but drinking excessively will absolutely 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 Daily
After cutting the immune suppressors out and helping your body detoxify, let’s talk about some effective techniques you can use to support the healthy function of your immune system.
1. Quality Sleep
Your immune system requires quality sleep to reset itself and operate at its maximum potential. If you struggle with falling asleep or getting 7-7 ½ hours of uninterrupted sleep each night, read this blog post for some simple sleep hacks that you can practice today, to help you get restorative rest back into your life.
2. Don’t Forget Nutrition
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 on 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.
If you suspect that your diet isn’t providing you with all of your nutritional needs, supplement with something like the S4 Multivitamin/Multimineral or the S4 Nutritional Shake to make sure that you are filling in any nutritional gaps that may exist. 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 Immune-Supporting 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 single most important 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.
In a new coronavirus study, researchers looked at over 200 hospitalized COVID-19 patients and revealed that over 80% were found to have a vitamin D deficiency. Furthermore, these patients had an extended stay in the hospital while experiencing higher levels of inflammatory markers, which have been associated with worse outcomes in COVID-19 patients.
While the vitamin D and coronavirus connection is still an important research question to analyze, it doesn’t change one well-known scientific fact: Vitamin D deficiency is a global health issue, and unlike the pandemic, the solution is not a mystery that needs to be solved. Supplementation is an inexpensive and science-based answer to help fix it.
Since vitamin D is so popular, you’ll find many low-quality supplements produced with questionable standards. You can, however, feel confident with our S4 Vitamin D supplement. Like all of our products, it’s formulated with only 100% organic, perfectly potent ingredients and has surpassed vigorous third-party testing to confirm they meet our high standards, and the feedback we’ve received is incredible!
2. Antioxidants & Phytonutrients
Antioxidants and phytonutrients act as fuel for your immune system and your ability to fight off infectious agents. Have you 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 S4 Daily Antioxidants Essentials and S4 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.