Ways To Boost The Immune System

Transcription

Hello everyone, it's Dr. Aaron Seaton with The Chiropractic Place. Today's video is about how to boost your immune system. This is definitely on a lot of people's minds these days, we wanted to do a video on just how you can go about little changes in your life to help boost that immune system and keep yourself healthy. First thing, we gotta talk about things in the diet. A lot of the times people are eating too many carbohydrates, they're eating a lot of processed foods, they're not getting the nutrition their body needs for their immune system to perform at its top level. So, just basic recommendations I always make with patients is try to bring your carbohydrates down, especially processed carbohydrates, chips, tortillas, all these things that are made with white flour, white sugar, you gotta do your best to get that out of the diet or at least minimize it, and then increase your vegetable intake, lots of fibre, a lot of minerals are found in vegetables, so this is a very important shift that you can make.

Another thing you could do is really focus on eating really healthy meats, like wild salmon, grass-fed beef, organic chicken. These things will help give you the protein that your body needs. Your immune cells are made with protein, they're made with fats, so you need to have adequate supplies of that around. So just doing a few shifts in that diet, usually it's best with people just start with one or two things that you can do. Maybe it's, "Hey, at night time, I'm not gonna have a lot of carbs with my dinner," that is a really good thing and will actually help down here with number four, sleep. But start with just some basic things, maybe it is that where, "Hey, at night, I'm not eating a lot of carbohydrates," that way I can just focus on the healthy meats, maybe a big salad and some veggies with my dinner and start making some changes that you can implement.

Remember, you don't have to do everything all at once, but that is just taking one or two things to start with, to make some shifts in your diet can really improve your immune function. Number two is exercise. And now exercise, we usually think of musculoskeletal, we think, I wanna build muscles, or I wanna lose body fat, but it also has an effect on circulating our immune cells. In conjunction with our circulatory system, we have our heart and all of our blood vessels, we also have what's called the lymphatic system. Most people have heard of lymph nodes and things like that, the lymphatic system is like a separate system that helps circulate the immune system throughout the body. The lymphatic system doesn't have... Doesn't rely on the heart to circulate, it relies primarily on movement to circulate our immune cells. So when you're thinking about doing some exercise, don't just think, "Hey, it's gonna really help my heart, it's gonna help my muscles," it's also gonna help your immune system by circulating it at a proper level.

Number three, hydration. And why do we need to hydrate? Well, these are some pretty good numbers. The body is about 70% water. Your blood is about 90% water. Let's just take the blood example, if your blood isn't properly hydrated, it means it'll thicken the blood, which makes it harder to get oxygen and nutrients to every single cell in your body. So that's a pretty good piece of information if you're thinking about why hydration is important for your immune system, is if your body is not properly hydrated, you can't circulate oxygen and nutrients, and that includes the circulation of your immune system as well. You're not gonna be able to get immune cells into areas that need them, if you're not properly hydrated, you're not gonna be able to get oxygen and nutrition into these cells, they are not going to heal so well. So, this is another thing to think about, very easy, it doesn't really cost us a thing to put some water in a cup and bring it with us, and make sure we're drinking that.

Usually, I just tell people if they're not used to drinking a lot of water, make that first goal about eight glasses a day, roughly 64 ounces, any improvement is better than no improvement, to be honest. But we'd love for you to over time even get it up above 64 ounces. But if you're used to drinking very little water, just say, "Hey, I need to... I'm used to drinking... " Maybe you only drink 20 ounces of water a day. Well, if you go to 32 ounces a day, that's a significant improvement based on where you're at, so just make again, like we were doing up here, one or two changes there, maybe a small goal that you know you're gonna be able to achieve, and then from there, you can kinda build on that. So, hydration, very important for immune health.

Number four is sleep. Sleep, this is when we run a lot of our repair with our immune system. Our immune system loves to work when we're asleep, because the immune system is actually very expensive to run, and what I mean by that is, think about the last time you were sick and you were kinda knocked down. A lot of the times you're exhausted is because your immune system is using all of your calories. When you have a full-blown immune response, you could be using up to 70% of the calories you take in, just to make more immune cells and to have your immune system be able to fight. So it's very expensive to run. So when you're sleeping at night, we have the immune system usually doing a lot of work on things in the body. So, getting adequate sleep is very important. And also, when we were talking up here, bringing carbohydrates down at night will actually help you sleep better.

People who tend to wake up in the middle of the night, they fall asleep okay, but then they wake up, it's usually because they're having a low blood sugar incident, because they had too many carbohydrates with their night meal. So if you bring your carbs down, it'll also impact here. So a very good thing for you to think about as well. And number five, getting your chiropractic care. Most people aren't aware of this, but chiropractic boosts your T-cell count. It helps boost the function of your immune system. Now, what controls the immune system? It's your nerve system. Your nerve system, your brain, your spinal cord, and all these nerves control your nerve... Control your immune system. And what chiropractors do is they remove the interference from your spine so that your nerve system can function at its very best, and that includes controlling and coordinating proper immune responses.

So I always tell my patients, it's very, very important to keep your regular chiropractic care, not just because you have back pain or neck pain, but because you want your body to function at its very best. Hopefully, this video helps you understand little ways that you can improve the function of your immune system. I'm Dr. Aaron Seaton with the Chiropractic Place.

Call our office today to schedule an appointment to kickstart your healthy life: 530-221-8443