Improve your Immune System - How to Build Resilience in Times of Challenge

Our entire body functions by adapting to stress. This adaptation happens by strengthening.
This can be easily related to when we think of our muscles. We challenge them with weights or certain exercises and they strengthen as a result. Most people have heard that weight bearing stress on our bones encourages increase of bones strength.This same principle applies to all other tissues in the body, including our fascia, nervous system and of course our immune system.

In these current times the main health advice we are given is centred around avoidance.
As a yoga practitioner and naturopath I know that passively sitting back, letting someone else do the work, is insufficient.
I would like to share with you in this and the coming posts five simple factors that help you build a healthier and more resilient immune system and increase our well-being.

We know:
- There are no medical therapeutics to help with COVID-19 [1]
- The COVID-19 and Flu virus are similar [2]
- Our immune system responds to the COVID-19 virus the same way it would to a flu virus [3]
- Inflammation worsens the body’s response to an infection [4]

"Even though COVID-19 is caused by a new virus, in an otherwise healthy person, a robust immune response across different cell types was associated with clinical recovery, similar to what we see in influenza.” [3]

^{The team around Dr Irani Thevarajan, Infectious Diseases Physician at the Doherty Institute of Royal Melbourne Hospital, and University of Melbourne Professor Katherine Kedzierska, a laboratory head at the Doherty Institute and a world-leading influenza immunology researcher.}

70% of our immune system resides within our gastro-intestinal  tract. Healthy gut immunity relates to low systemic inflammatory situation. Having a healthy gut microbiome (bacterial colonization) is a key component of a robust immune system.

Often less can be more. When it comes to immunity, for many of us we can take less of certain foods and substances to improve our immune system.

- Avoid added sugar

- Avoid processed foods

- Avoid alcohol

- Avoid processed fats and fried food

- Avoid unnecessary antibiotics

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-similarities-and-differences-covid-19-and-influenza    Mar 17.2020
[2] https://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15760:similarities-and-differences-covid-19-and-influenza&catid=740&lang=en&Itemid=1926
[3]  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0819-2
[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41418-020-0530-3