Defense Against Viral Infections

Understanding The Importance Of Our Immune System... Plus A Focus On Improving Your Health.

The immune system is your body’s first and best line of defense against illness and toxin exposures.

The immune system connects and interacts with every other system in the body. It’s integrated with the rest of you so your body functions as a whole.

The immune system is responsible for so many things including keeping us alive, as well as causing the critically important part of the healing process, inflammation.

80% of your immune system is in the GI tract, which is why gut health is so important to overall immune function.

Ways to improve your health, regardless of the current crisis…

Clean up your diet – eat whole foods as unprocessed as possible meaning…

• no added sugar (and overall low sugar),
• eliminate or severely reduce grains – these are the basis for most ultra-processed, blood sugar spiking foods that drive obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and every other chronic health condition, and
• eliminate highly processed ‘vegetable ‘ oils.

These 3 things are causing the most problems for people with their health.

Other foods may be causing problems for you specifically.

This is why you need a health care practitioner you see regularly that understands nutrition and lifestyle factors that may be driving chronic disease, pain, and inflammation in you.

Balance your gut and improve your gut’s bacteria/microbiome. This is a little more complicated, but in general it means…

• Keep your blood sugar on the low end of normal. Don’t keep spiking blood sugar as it will select for problem bacteria in your gut that drive inflammation (inflammation of course is from your immune system).
• Eliminate foods that are causing inflammation and bloating in your gut.

Other Factors Related to Gut Health…

Ideally you would avoid all the various medications that damage your gut (*NOTE: this is not specific medical advice for you. Some medications may be necessary for you). The following list is from a 2019 study referenced below.

Medications that can cause gut problems…

Proton pump inhibitors.

These are over the counter and prescription drugs that reduce stomach acid which can result in difficulty breaking down foods, cause a change in the microbiome because the higher pH (lower stomach acid) favors different bacteria, and can cause other serious side effects.

Read the medication insert, talk to your doctor, and your pharmacist to learn more.

*You should always read the entire medication insert so you can understand benefits and risks of each medicine as well as possible contraindications and drug cross reactions that may have been missed when the medication was prescribed often because your doctor might not have known about the other problems or medications that could be a contraindication. If there is a potential problem talk to both your doctor and your pharmacist.

Pain relievers.

NSAID pain relievers/anti-inflammatories (Motrin/ibuprofen, Aleve/naproxen, ketoprofen, lodine/etodolac, diclofenac, indomethacin, mobic/meloxicam, toradol, and celebrex among others.

These medications block the COX enzyme which does different things in our bodies. One is blocking the conversion of an omega 6 fat (arachodonic acid which primarily comes from vegetable oils) into chemicals of pain and inflammation.

Another important thing the COX enzyme does is to protect our gut. This is why NSAIDs can cause inflammation and damage to our gut which can then drive many serious health problems.

Antibiotics.

Of course, sometimes these are necessary for true bacterial infections and these drugs could save your life. The problem is that they’re taken for non-bacterial related problems.

These always alter the gut bacteria and will lead to changes that can have serious effects, even if the medication is very necessary for you.

Metformin.

Metformin can cause an increase in the population of a potentially harmful bacterium, Escherichia coli, which can cause different types of infection and health problems.

Some Of The Other Medications That Can Cause Gut Problems…

• Laxatives.
• SSRI Antidepressants.

MANY other medications are associated with stomach problems.

The first 5 above drive a huge amount of gut problems in people. Many others do too.

One large, well conducted study found that HALF of all medications they tested caused problems in the gut!

Reference: Vich Vila, A. et al., 2019. Impact of 41 commonly used drugs on the composition, metabolic function and resistome of the gut microbiome. Presented at UEG Week Barcelona October, 2019.

As previously mentioned, 80% of our immune system is in our gastrointestinal tract.

It should also be noted that our microbiome (all the trillions of organisms in our gut) help us stay healthy.

The microbiome is highly involved in our immune system. It also communicates with the biome in every other part of our bodies.

We have microbiomes everywhere… on our skin, in our lungs, our eyes, our mouths, our noses, ears, … If we alter these biome in bad ways, it damages our health and causes problems in our immune system.

Other important factors under your control for improving your health…

• Get Enough Sleep! This might be the most important thing you can do for your health. It requires a lot of discipline and effort to improve this. It also might require losing weight (to improve breathing), chiropractic care (to improve pain, improving sympathetic:parasympathetic balance, and improving ability to relax),
• Improving/Changing Diet (hypoglycemic episodes commonly wake people up and this requires a lot of consistent work over time to fix before you destroy your health), eliminating blue light before bed, correcting abnormal cortisol patterns (often this is from blood sugar issues), and more.
• Stay hydrated by drinking enough water and not over doing diuretics like caffeine, alcohol (many more reasons to avoid this than just dehydration).
• Reduce Stress! This is exceptionally important. Do some things you love doing, exercise, use laughter like Norman Cousins (Anatomy Of An Illness), take up yoga and/or meditation are all ways to help reduce stress… PLUS avoid all the high stress news and people (as much as possible).
• Get Regular Exercise and Get Regular Movement Incorporated Into Every Day.
• Take Care Of Your Oral Health (and Gut Health). The gut really begins in the mouth. If you have an abnormal mouth biome, you will create many problems that go much deeper than your mouth that cause many problems including the abnormal bacteria releasing toxins and by continually inoculating your throat and stomach with pathological bacteria. This is why certain mouth bacteria are associated with cardiovascular disease.