Tag Archives: health

Boost Immunity with Foods

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Elderberry juice boosts immunity

You may have heard that this is a particularly tough flu season. Simple actions like choosing healthy foods can boost the immunity of yourself and your family to give all of you the best chance of fighting off flu and colds.


Your Immune System

Your immune system defends your body against disease by ridding your body of foreign invaders. Your immune system is not a constant, though. Your actions can boost or inhibit your immunity. If your body is already struggling because you are tired, for example, you will have more difficulty fighting off a cold.

The simplest way to boost your immunity this winter is to understand which foods provide your body with the nutrients it needs to function well.


Basic Immunity-building Pantry

Foods help your immune system through the vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients that help the system function. The most important immunity building vitamins are: Beta carotene (increases number of cells fighting infection), Vitamin C (increases white blood cells and antibodies), and Vitamin E (increases B-cells that destroy bacteria). Immunity building minerals are zinc (helps white blood cells reproduce quickly) and selenium (increases fighting cells). Don’t run out and buy a supplement pill, though. You can get all of these vitamins and minerals in food.

Stock your pantry with colorful fruits and vegetables. Carrots and sweet potatoes have beta carotene. Citrus has vitamin C. Blueberries, cranberries, pomegranate seeds, cherries, and other dark blue, purple, and red fruits are high in antioxidants, which reduce inflammation. Elderberries are particularly good for helping you fight colds and flu as an antiviral an antioxidant. Mushrooms have selenium and many other minerals an vitamins. Garlic is a great flu fighter with antioxidants and other immune-building properties.

Choose a variety of proteins. Beans, nuts, fish, and lean meats can all contribute toward your immune-boosting diet. Almonds provide vitamin E. Salmon is rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Sunflower seeds have selenium, as do many nuts, whole grains, and seeds.

Add herbs and spices to your foods. Medicinal herbs, like echinacea, goldenseal, and astragalus, are all immune boosters that fight viruses or increase the efficiency of white blood cells. You don’t want to add these to your foods, though. Culinary spices, like cayenne, oregano, and ginger, are also bacteria fighters. Use them fresh if you can, but use them in any form. Even black pepper can give you a little immune boost.


Every Day Foods

The range of immunity building foods is broad. It wouldn’t make any sense for me to tell you that only 5 or 10 or 50 of them are best for you because there is enough variety for you to choose your favorites. Still, I am going to suggest a few foods that will help you build immunity every day.

Smoothies. Start your morning with smoothies. Add dark fruits and vegetables, almond milk or yoghurt as a base, a few ice cubes to make it cool and reduce the intensity. That’s it! Just choose a colorful collection every morning.

Soup. With lunch, have a cup of soup every day. Chicken or vegetable broth both make a good base, but make sure you add garlic, perhaps ginger, lots of herbs and spices, and a few colorful vegetables.

Salad. With dinner every night, have leafy greens. Spinach and romaine lettuce are both very nutritious. Choose your dressing carefully. Better yet, make your own from olive oil, vinegar, and herbs. Each of these gives you a little boost. Maybe sometimes you have cooked kale with cider vinegar instead, but make sure you eat leafy greens every day.

Whole Grains. If you are going to eat cereal or bread, make them rich and nutty. The variety of grains, nuts, and seeds will help you over time.

Doesn’t that seem simple? It is. Boosting your immunity really isn’t difficult to understand or to do. These choices are easy to make every day, and the benefits build over time.


Keep in Mind

Avoid processed ingredients like white sugar and bleached wheat flour. Just avoiding those two will help you avoid many processed foods that have been drained of most nutritional value.

Get enough sleep. Yes, that isn’t a food, but rest is important enough to the healthy functioning of your immune system that you can undermine all of the good work you do with nutritious food by not getting enough sleep. Sleep for your health.

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What the Mind-Body Connection Means for Your Health

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Mother teaching baby yoga

When looking at the whole picture of your health, what you think and how you feel does matter. You already know that nutrition, physical activity, and sleep are important factors. Also consider that stress can suppress immune function.


Mind-Body Science

What scientists call the biopsychosocial model (BPS) of health is the scientific way to refer to what is popularly known as the mind-body connection. That the physical, psychological, and social factors all contribute to health is clear. Some think this idea doesn’t go far enough, that interconnections of mind and body can’t sensibly be separated. Others quibble about whether it fits the definition of a scientific model. In the meantime, studies accumulate to give us evidence of how the connection works.

Stress is inevitable. Everyone will face stress. Our bodies respond through hormones. Ideally, we process the stress and return to our state of normal. When the stress is chronic, however, our bodies suffer and can’t repair as easily or quickly. Stress can lead to and other digestive issues, headaches, high blood pressure, and even stroke. Stress can prolong healing, delay immune response, and impair learning. Simply, stress aggravates disease. Chronic stress has multiple negative effects on your health.

Particularly interesting is scientific investigation of how stress effects the immune system. We produce cortisol in response to stress, which is good for the short term fight-or-flight response. When the stress continues and the cortisol continues, it interferes with a cell’s production of the protein telomerase, which slows down the cell’s ticking clock. You cells wear down more quickly under stress.


The Key to Health Is in Your Response

The life of a parent is stressful. So, what do you do to keep stress under control and keep yourself and your family members healthy?

Build resilience. Resilience isn’t necessarily inborn. You can learn to be resilient. You can learn to meet stress and work through it. You can develop habits of stress release. Your habits might be as simple as relaxation and massage. You could schedule a class for yoga or tai chi and not let other obligations interfere with that schedule. After a traumatic event, sometimes we need clinical help to build that resilience. Therapy or support groups can help us. Art, dance, and music therapy can also help. Try a range of activities and adopt whatever mind-body exercises help you manage the stress in your life.

I’ve been doing yoga since the beginning of the year, and I do notice the effect. My favorite part of the yoga sessions is the relaxation with focus on the breath. For me, conscious breathing and stretching helps me to lower my stress levels and increase my alertness.

Remember, too, that children feel stress, and the reasons might not be obvious to you. Talk to your children about how they feel to help them learn to articulate what is going on with them. Help them develop tools to deal with their inevitable stress. Yoga, for example, can reduce the stress children face and increase their focus. My children also like guided imagery relaxation. They have learned to use this imagery for themselves if they can’t sleep or if they just need some time alone. The tools might seem very simple, but that is probably all most children will need.

Whatever method you use to meet and get through stress is not so important as recognizing and acting when you need to use your tools to return mind and body to your norm. Nutrition, sleep, activity, and calm all contribute to your family’s health. Health has a web of factors, including the mind-body connection.

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Sleep for Health

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Family in bed

If you knew that there was one thing you could do for your health that would improve your memory, suppress your appetite, keep you alert, leave you happier, reduce your likelihood of hypertension and stress, and improve your immune function, wouldn’t you do it? Of course you would. So, get a full night’s sleep. Your body and mind need that time for renewal. The strong connection between sleep and health has become more clear as more studies look at specific links between sleep duration and disease.

It’s hard. Parents have a difficult time getting enough sleep, especially parents of very young babies. Hard though it may be, you need to take care of yourself and teach your children to take care of themselves. Chronic sleep loss has a clear, negative effect on your short-term function and medium-term health as well as on your longevity. The consequences are too great not to give yourself this one


Sleep Helps

  • Learning and memory – We retain information (memories and learned tasks) better when we experience memory consolidation as we dream.
  • Metabolism and weight – Sleep loss changes the way our bodies process carbohydrates and alters appetite through hormone levels. Lack of sleep leaves you hungry.
  • Safety – Tired people make mistakes. The results can be as bad as or worse than intoxication.
  • Mood - Lack of sleep leaves us stressed and irritable. Lower serotonin levels can also leave us at risk for depression.
  • Heart Health – In the extreme, sleep issues can lead to hypertension and irregular heartbeat.
  • Disease – Lack of sleep can weaken your immune system. Increased stress leads to inflammation, which leaves you at greater risk for disease and causes deterioration. Sleep is time for your cells to repair damage of the day.

“Lack of sleep disrupts every physiologic function in the body,” said Eve Van Cauter of the University of Chicago. “We have nothing in our biology that allows us to adapt to this behavior.” “Scientists Finding Out What Losing Sleep Does to a Body,” Washington Post, October 9, 2005.


How Much Sleep Do You Need?

Fifty-eight percent of Canadians say they are often tired, but 18% of Canadians sleep less than 5 hours a day, which is leaving them chronically tired. Twenty-five percent of adults in the U.S. don’t sleep enough half of the time. Sure, a few people are getting enough sleep, but many of us are not—and the problem doesn’t stop with adults.

A new study on naps for toddlers shows that young children who don’t get enough sleep are not only more easily frustrated, which you undoubtedly already knew, but their lack of sleep “may shape their developing emotional brains and put them at risk for lifelong, mood-related problems.” If that doesn’t scare you, consider what happens as your children grow older. Drowsy young drivers are involved in tens of thousands of traffic accidents every year.

Help your whole family get enough sleep.

Newborn babies need 16 or more hours a day.
Preschoolers need about 12 hours a day.
Teens need about 9 hours a day.
Adults need 8 hours a day.
Pregnant women may need several more hours than usual.


How to Stay Asleep

For the good of yourself and your family, create a sleep-friendly household.

  • Follow a bedtime ritual.
  • Don’t drink so much before bed that you have to use the toilet during the night.
  • Stay active during the day.
  • Dump the stress.

It isn’t just nice to get enough sleep. Your life expectancy depends on it. Go to bed!


Resources

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Get Active to Stay Healthy

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Child learning to ice skate

Staying active is essential to your health for growth and development, disease prevention, strength, energy, and decreasing stress.

Whether we’re talking about healthy eating, staying active, getting sleep, or just doing things that make you happy, you are starting lifetime habits for your children. Set a great example, and your children won’t realize that there is any other way possible. And, of course, there shouldn’t be any other way. So, start now!

An adult needs to get at 2.5 hours a week of moderate aerobic activity or 1.25 hours of vigorous activity in increments of at least 10 minutes each. Plus, we should all do muscle-strengthening exercises at least twice a week. That’s 30 minutes a day. We would do even better to double that to 60 minutes per day or 5 hours per week.

Sixty minutes of moderate activity is roughly the health equivalent of 30 minutes of vigorous activity. Mix and match to reach the optimum level of activity.

Moderate means you break a sweat but you probably can’t sing your favorite song while you walk, dance, golf, play Frisbee, garden, do housework, ride a stationary bike, do yoga, take the stairs, actively play with your children, or go ice skating.

Vigorous activity means you are breathing hard and you can’t talk without pausing. This includes running, swimming laps, jumping rope, playing tennis, cross-country skiing, shoveling heavy snow, or taking an aerobics class.

Muscle-building doesn’t just mean lifting weights or going to the gym. You can do a lot of muscle building with resistance bands and homemade weights, such as handled jugs filled with rice or beans. I spent a lot of time lifting encyclopedias before I finally invested in weights.

Is your family already active? If so, you are in the minority, since only 10% of Canadian children already reach the suggested level of physical activity. Canada’s Physical Activity Guidelines suggest that children need at least 90 minutes per day of activity.

But, don’t just watch them. Join in.

My working out is a source of entertainment for my older children, who are very active on their own at home and in organized classes, but when they were younger I found it easy to create a spontaneous dance party or frenzied 15-minute housecleaning sing-along. Just get them in the habit of moving, and you will be helping them create those healthy habits.


Resources

  • Where Do I Start? from the American Heart Association. It’s simple. You invest no more than the cost of a decent pair of shoes, and you reduce your health risk. “Walking is the single most effective form of exercise to achieve hearth health.”
  • Start Walking Now. Tools for making a plan and tracking your activity, but don’t spend too much time planning. Get up! Just grab your kids and go walk for 30 minutes.
  • Physical Activity from the Public Health Agency of Canada
  • Tips for Children (5-11 years old) from the Public Health Agency of Canada
  • Tips for Youth (12-17 years old) from the Public Health Agency of Canada

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A Toast to Staying Healthy

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Glass of red wine and grapes

You’ve probably heard that having a glass of wine a day is good for your health. Some of our customers mentioned that drinking wine among the ways they stay healthy.


What Does That Glass of Wine Do for You?

  • Slow aging
  • Reduce blood clots
  • Reduce cholesterol
  • Maintain blood pressure

Does that sound good? The realities of health benefits, or the developing realities as studies accumulate, aren’t always so clear as the boosters claim. Yes, there are health benefits to moderate alcohol consumption, particularly red wine, but there are cautions as well.

If a little is good, a lot is better, right? Wrong. You raise your risk of heart disease if you drink beyond moderation. Moderation is no more than 1-2 glasses per day for a man and 1 glass a day for a woman.

So, the news is all good on wine? Not necessarily. There was a very large study a few years ago showing an increased risk of some cancers, including breast cancer, for those who drink in moderation—yes, that’s moderation. Others say the risks of toxic compounds in wine and other alcohols outweigh the benefits. The scientific evidence in favor of wine for health is not overwhelming.

The anti-aging effects of resveratrol in dark red wines have seemed to melt away as more studies control for the factors thought to convey the benefits.

What about heart health? Those the benefits of moderate alcohol use hold up in studies, the American Heart Association has a whole different set of suggestions to prevent heart disease, and they don’t include alcohol. Focus on blood pressure, cholesterol, exercise, no smoking, and normal weight.

Do you have to drink wine to get these benefits? Not necessarily. Antioxidants in dark grape juice and whole red and purple grapes can give you many of the same benefits.

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