The pandemic that is by no means over has been having deep personal and professional impacts on my entire life. I have lost four loved ones. Makes you think. Apart from all the outside regulations that we all embrace with varying degrees of enthusiam, there is also a new need for me personally to rethink my own, personal set of regualtions. Improving the immune system has been my focus lately. Of course I have decent multivitamins but is that enough?
I am not a big eater at all, I prefer veggies and fruit to meat, I prefer fish and seafood to meat. But I do like meat once in a while. I do not love cooking for its messy and time intensive nature but under the given circumstances I have started to prepare my own meals…. and I am interested in gettingt the best nutricional value out of my time…
There is a myriad of factors that boost your immunity, it seems.
For me it is best to keep recording what I am doing hence the junk journal. I like to use pretty papers for even the most mundane notes.
I also have a little freebie for you that you can dl at the end of the post.
How Does Your Immune System Protect You?
Many people are aware of what your immune system does, because it’s essentially in the name. It provides the rest of your body with immunity to things like diseases and illnesses.
However, a crucial part of understanding things is not just knowing what they do, but also how they do it. Many people don’t have a clear idea of how exactly their immune systems are helping you stave off viruses, but it’s an important part of understanding your own reactions to illness and what your body needs to keep protecting itself. One of the most common things that you’ll find your immune system doing to protect you is giving you a fever. While most people associate fevers with being a bad thing, minor fevers can actually help you. Your body will raise its temperature in order to kill off the virus in your body, which can’t survive well under higher temperatures. Higher fevers can be quite dangerous still, so keep track of your temperature in case it gets too high.
Another response your body has to foreign bodies is the use of white blood cells. White blood cells are sort of the enforcers of your body, taking out any kinds of harmful microorganisms that it finds. When you get sick, some white blood cells will attach themselves to the organisms to weaken them, while others will attack them directly to try to kill them off. These cells will then learn about the type of organisms they fought off, and that’s how you build up an immunity in the future.
You might find that one uncomfortable symptom of getting sick is that you might have certain parts of your body get inflamed. Inflammation is uncomfortable and annoying, and might be a sign of an infection, but it’s also a part of your body’s immune system. When bacteria enters your body, it will travel through your blood vessels in order to spread. By inflaming portions of your body, you’re able to constrict the blood vessels in that area, making it more difficult for the infection to spread.
Additionally, the inflammation alerts your white blood cells that there is an infection, making the response much quicker to try to get rid of it. While many of your body’s reactions to illnesses might be annoying, uncomfortable, and gross, it can certainly benefit you in the long run. It’s important to keep your immune system well maintained so that it can continue to keep up these functions to prevent a serious illness.
Boosting Your Immune System With Multivitamins?
Vitamins are a big part of keeping your immune system working properly. From vitamin C to B6, they all play some kind of role in keeping your body disease free. Lots of people get these vitamins from food, but others opt to get them from pills and gummies. Instead of taking a bunch of individual pills for the various vitamins you need, many have chosen to take one multivitamin pill, which contains all kinds of different vitamins in just one tablet. Many researchers say that as long as you have a fairly healthy diet, you should be getting enough of most of your vitamins anyway. If you have a poor diet, it’s probably best to actually just fix that instead of trying to supplement it with multivitamins. Fixing your diet will help to lose weight and have a healthier heart, something that multivitamins will not do. While vitamins do certainly have their role, supplemented vitamins may not truly boost your immune system as well as natural methods, like getting them from fruit.
These researchers claim that you should be practicing a variety of other immune system hygiene in order to keep the viruses away in the first place. Overall, the consensus seems to be that multivitamins certainly won’t hurt you, but you can’t exactly expect to take them and have your immune system be impenetrable. If you do take them and you have some sort of vitamin deficiency, then they will help keep your immune system operating well, but you should also be combining them with other methods of keeping yourself healthy, like proper hygiene and an improved nutritional plan.
This entire concept still requires more research to be done on the matter, as many scientists are still unsure of how exactly everything interacts with one another on such a microscopic scale. They may be more effective than we currently know, so taking them is not a bad idea. You just can’t expect them to make you impervious to diseases. Strike a balance between good habits and supplementing whatever your body is lacking. You can find out what’s lacking by getting a blood panel drawn. If you’re low in certain vitamins, then you can either start taking multivitamins or supplement that one individual element instead. Ask your doctor for the most effective multi vitamin for you, depending on your gender and age, as well as your specific needs for supplementation in a certain area.
