The truth about boosting your immune system

The Truth About Boosting Your Immune System

With the current global pandemic, for many of us, immune health may be top of mind more than ever before. Luckily, we are here to help, as were Dr Ronx Ikharia and their team with their latest BBC documentary. Here, I help summarise some of the contents of the programme:

1. Immune-boosting supplements explored

Herbal remedies were one of the first areas to be explored and, luckily for us, Echinacea came up trumps. Professor Michael Heinrich from the UCL School of Pharmacy explained that Echinacea, as is used in our Echinaforce remedy, has some of the best research behind it when it comes to supporting immune health with herbal remedies. He was quoted saying:

'Echinacea is one of the best-studied herbal medical products and the evidence is certainly reasonable. It makes therapeutic sense to help prevent, and in many cases also treat, symptoms of the common cold and mild flu [with echinacea].'

Impressively, research has suggested that Echinacea may help to reduce the duration (by up to a day and a half) and severity of the symptoms of the common cold.¹

The team also highlighted the importance of quality when it comes to selecting Echinacea products. This means opting for a brand that uses fresh, organic Echinacea extracts and opting for an end product that is 'THR' certified.

Luckily, there are no concerns there with Echinaforce. Echinaforce is actually 'PL' registered which means it's a 'licensed medicine'. This means it is a step up from the 'THR' (Traditional Herbal Registration) which most of our other licensed herbal remedies proudly boast.
The team then went on to explain how other nutrients, including zinc, vitamin C and vitamin D, may also have some immune-boosting powers.

As we already know, this may be especially useful if you are already deficient in any of these nutrients, so, there may not be much therapeutic benefit of stocking up on countless nutrients unnecessarily, but this is exactly why vitamin D may be of particular benefit

My Self-Care Tip Video: How to take Echinaforce tablets and drops

2. Diet is key for good immunity

Just as we always advise, the team from the BBC highlighted the importance of a good diet, and how simply stocking up on supplements is not going to cut it!

The team helped confirm that a diet high in fresh fruit and vegetables, fibre and lower in refined sugar and 'beige foods' could help to cleverly modulate our immune cells (allowing them to react reasonably but not too forcefully!) to potential invading pathogens.

The medical team visualised this nicely with the help of some examples from some 'hunter-gatherer' type population subsets (basically, groups of people eating a very unrefined, fresh food diet). They showed that this benefit was likely to come, at least partly, from the improvements in gut bacteria diversity that a healthy and varied fresh food diet can provide. Hurray for healthy guts!

3. Other useful lifestyle habits to support immune health

Throughout the duration of the documentary, the team also explored some other helpful lifestyle habits that could improve or, on the other hand, hinder your immune responses.

Many of these we discuss regularly, including excess alcohol being detrimental, prioritising sleep, doing enough exercise but not too much (as this becomes stressful on your system) and reducing stress.

One focus, interestingly, was on the potential benefits of massage. Whilst I've previously appreciated the positive effects of good circulation and relaxation for immune health, the actual act of getting a massage for this very purpose hadn't quite occurred to me before! So, if you need a nice excuse to get booked in for a massage (when the pandemics better controlled and these can occur again, of course) that could be just it

References

¹ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17597571/ 

Based on BBC 1's The Truth about Boosting Your Immune System.