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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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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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

• “Children and Sleep,” National Sleep Foundation.
• “Importance of Sleep,” Harvard Health, January 2006.
• “Sleep Tips: 7 Steps to Better Sleep,” Mayo Clinic.
• “Sleep Tips for Pregnant Women,” National Sleep Foundation.

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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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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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Keeping your children and your whole family healthy most often falls to you. Of course, we have the best of intentions as parents, but time gets tight and actions slip. Don’t let it happen. Always cover the basics. Your child’s developing body and mind depend on the accumulation of your family’s actions, and your child’s future depends on healthy habits you set in motion.

The basics of helping your family stay healthy are so simple that every one of us can start today. Cover these then you are ready to move on to the details.

Eat Right

The basic rules couldn’t be simpler. As Michael Pollan put it in his Eater’s Manifesto, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Food is fuel, but it is also important to culture and community. Respect the importance of eating well as the core of a healthy living.

Stay Active

Do more than just exercise. Choose the active options. Chase the kids, run the dogs, and take the stairs. It doesn’t take a lot of time or a lot of activity to keep yourself and your family in decent shape, but it makes all of the difference in your long-term ability to move well.

Sleep Well

Getting the right amount of sleep is as important to your health as eating well and staying active. Not enough sleep and your body won’t function as well. Your immune system, your weight, your blood pressure, and your basic ability to think straight depend on getting enough sleep. Too much sleep can lead to back pain, diabetes, heart disease, and depression. To make it more difficult, not everyone needs the same amount of sleep. Finding your way down that sweet center is yours to figure out.

Limit Toxic Exposure

Toxic exposures to avoid include those in your house, like lead and pesticides, as well as those larger environmental exposures due to air quality and water quality. Give your child’s developing brain and body the best possible chance.

Have Fun

In part, having fun is a way of managing the inevitable stress you face, but it’s so much more than that. By taking the time and creating the space to have fun together as a family, you strengthen those ties that hold you all together. That creates your larger safety net. Don’t let it slip. Schedule time together and try a variety of activities.

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Do you get too busy to really know how you feel? Do you give yourself a moment to check in and ask whether your busy-ness is helping you to be a happier, healthier person?

Several of my friends are so busy that they aren’t making space for that downtime check-in, and I worry about them. Then, I realize I do the same to myself. I’m looking forward to New Year because I know I will have some slow days when I can sit back and assess what I’ve been through in the past year and where I want to go in the year ahead.

Looking at the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW), I was surprised to see that the index isn’t just applicable on a national scale but on a community scale and even a personal scale. They give a few suggestions in the Other Ideas section of the CIW website.

Am I going to let someone else tell me what happiness is? Well, no. I have been talking with my children a lot about the balance each person, each family must find between order with firm, often external rules and chaos with a constant renegotiation of rules. All of us have to decide where on that continuum we find our greatest happiness.

The CIW has brought together experts from around the world to determine what quality of life means for all people. Granted, not everyone is going to meet happiness the same way, but perhaps they have determined some of the most likely commonalities for all of us. The list is general and easy to personalize.

To give yourself the gift of a personal index of wellbeing, ask how you can improve your life in each of the CIW domains of wellbeing.

Democratic Engagement for you might be voting, responding to elected officials about national issues, writing a letter to the editor about your opinion on a Canadian government stance on an international issue, or attending a town council meeting.

Community Vitality could mean for you volunteering at a local charity, attending a family reunion, walking alone after dark, or taking a meal to a sick neighbor.

Education on a national level mostly addresses basic literacy, but you could expand it in your life to learn a new skill or share a skill that you have spent some time developing.

Environment on a personal level isn’t always about individual choices. You could become involved in an environmental organization working to improve environmental policy or encourage stores you shop at to make an accounting of full costs of goods (including those social and environmental costs often externalized) as well as shopping at the farmers market and repairing old appliances or clothes.

Healthy Populations for you might be as simple as not smoking and losing weight or it might mean improving nutrition for your whole family to avoid diabetes or debilitating allergies. Health also includes mental health, so you might reassess your lifestyle to ask whether you are making space for your own basic happiness.

Leisure and Culture should start with whether you allow yourself time not dominated by necessary activity. Do you give yourself leisure time? If you do, are you spending it how you want to? You might plan a vacation to a national park, get a family pass to a museum, or just go to a game every once in a while.

Living Standards is probably a more difficult domain to address personally, but you might reassess your career choice in the context of your changing life circumstances, get more training or education to give yourself a better chance of promotion, or adjust your overall spending to bring it in line with your income.

Time Use differs between how you spend your time and how you experience your time. If you start with an objective log of what you do, that might help you evaluate whether you want to change how you spend time.

If you use the end of the year as a time to assess your own and your family’s wellbeing, perhaps setting New Year’s Goals, maybe the Canadian Index of Wellbeing domains could help give you some structure to start, so you don’t have to reinvent the grand measures of human happiness. If you are feeling really ambitious, set up your personal index of wellbeing and schedule regular times to check in with yourself.

The first step is becoming conscious of your own desire to assess and adjust your life to reach greater wellbeing. Best of luck and good fortune to you.

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Research shows that breastfeeding is the right choice because it makes babies smarter, keeps mothers and babies healthier, and saves families and society money by avoiding higher future healthcare costs.

The Smart Choice

Developing infants use the fatty acids in their mothers’ milk for their brain development. Scientists have found that breastfed babies with particular genetic markers score three points higher than average on IQ tests.

“[A] person’s DNA is not really a blueprint, as it is commonly portrayed. ‘[Genes] are more like playbooks. . . . It’s not nature or nurture, but your genes operate frequently by making you more susceptible or less susceptible to certain environmental conditions.’ Hence, the withdrawal of breast milk from the diets of babies with a certain genetic predisposition resulted in a negative effect on intelligence.”

Nikhil Swaminathan,“Got Smarts? Mother’s Milk May Pump Up Baby’s IQ,” Scientific American, November 7, 2007.

The Healthy Choice

Breastfeeding is not only the perfectly balanced food for healthy babies, but the act of breastfeeding is the healthy choice for women. Breastfeeding helps break up fats the body builds up during pregnancy, keeps us blissed out on oxytocin, and helps us avoid many health risks later in life.

“[B]y not engaging in the process that the body prepares for during pregnancy, many crucial systems can go out of whack. And the effects can last for decades after children are weaned.”

Kathrine Harmon, “How Breastfeeding Benefits Mothers’ Health,” Scientific American, April 30, 2010.

The Frugal Choice

Breastfeeding saves a family money now, since it costs no more than some extra food or a few optional tools like a pump and bottle. Breastfeeding can also save money later as families and the larger society would save a significant amount of money in healthcare costs if all babies were exclusively breastfed for at least 6 months.

“If 90% of US families could comply with medical recommendations to breastfeed exclusively for 6 months, the United States would save $13 billion per year and prevent an excess 911 deaths, nearly all of which would be in infants ($10.5 billion and 741 deaths at 80% compliance).”

M. Bartick and A. Reinhold, “The burden of suboptimal breastfeeding in the United States: a pediatric cost analysis,” Pediatrics 2010 May:125(5):e1048-56. Epub 2010 Apr 5.

Your Breastfeeding Questions

Customers ask a lot of specific questions about breastfeeding. We’ve kept track of your questions, and we are looking to reliable sources to answer your questions each Wednesday this month. If you need answers now, breastfeeding support groups bring experienced mothers together with those who need help, and La Leche League always has reliable breastfeeding resources.

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Last week, my children had dental check ups. My son’s perfect teeth are the good news. My daughters mouth full of cavities is the bad news.

When the dentist sat down with me to ask about the differences between them, he asked interesting questions.

Did they grow up in different houses or cities for their first three years?
No, they both were born and lived in the same house until they were 5 and 8 years old.

Was our city water fluoridated?
It was, though we filtered our water. He said he could see in my son’s teeth that he had fluoride, but he couldn’t see it in my daughter’s. I kept in mind the case against fluoride throughout their regular visits with a dentist.

Do they have different eating, snacking, or brushing habits?
Not as far as I can tell. They eat the same thing every day, get the occasional candy at the same time, and both brush their teeth twice daily with the same toothpaste. (Though they have both been scared straight into brushing after every meal. Finally!)

We could come up with no significant differences in environment or actions, but their teeth are very different.

Maybe he has been brushing better or more often than she has. Maybe she’s just older and has been carrying her adult teeth just that much longer.

I kept thinking about differences as I drove my shiny smiling children home. I thought of two more differences. My daughter nursed 2.5 years longer. Also, during my second pregnancy with my son, I was very aware of trimester-by-trimester development and nutrition. I ate well during both pregnancies, eating no processed sugar either time. My husband and I prepared for both pregnancies by eating carefully nutritious diets and taking vitamins. But, I was hyper aware of nutrition during the second pregnancy.

During my second pregnancy I drank nutrient-dense green juice every day, and I ate many of my meals from the best cookbook I’ve ever owned, The Pregnancy Cookbook by Hope Ricciotti, M.D., and Vincent Connelly. They are a wife and husband team. She’s an obstetrician, and he’s a chef. Their explanations of why we should eat specific foods at specific times during pregnancy really struck me. I remember in particular reading about the development of teeth and bones in a fetus by about the 20th week. We need calcium during that period of time, and we need to make sure that we eat foods that are high in calcium (bok choy, kale, broccoli, blackstrap molasses, legumes, mangoes) together with foods that aid in calcium absorption (boron in fresh fruits) and that we don’t eat those foods that block calcium absorption (oxalic acid in spinach and swiss chard or phytic acid in outer layers of whole grains).

At the time, I was helping to teach a university anthropology course on native nutrition, teaching students about the work of Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist whose long-term research on teeth and bones reveals industrialized foods as one of the serious dietary culprits that result in bad teeth. Dr. Price had very strong opinions about dental health.

Seeing and reading Dr. Price’s clear evidence in favor of slow foods, traditional foods, and stone age diet encouraged me to be very careful about everything I ate as my son was developing and growing.

I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of the mysteries of my children’s teeth, but I do suspect my pregnancy nutrition as one of the reasons for the difference.

If you are pregnant or may soon become pregnant, consider your nutrition very carefully. I highly recommend The Pregnancy Cookbook. The recipes that are particularly delicious. These are not simplistic meals, but I didn’t have trouble finding the ingredients in my local store.

If your children need encouragement to care well for their teeth, you will find many resources to teeth children about good dental health from the Canadian Dental Association and the American Dental Association.

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