Beyond Supplements: The Real Immune-Boosters!
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The Real Immune-Boosters
What comes to your mind when we say “immune support”? Vitamin C and maybe zinc? Those have their place, but there are things we can do that are a lot more important!
It’s just, these things are not talked about as much, because stores can’t sell them to you
Sleep
One of the biggest difference-makers. Get good sleep! Getting at least 7 hours decent sleep (not lying in bed, not counting interruptions to sleep as part of the sleep duration) can improve your immune system by three or four times.
Put another way, people are 3–4 times more likely to get sick if they get less sleep than that on average.
Check it out: Behaviorally Assessed Sleep and Susceptibility to the Common Cold
Eat an anti-inflammatory diet
In short, for most of us this means lots of whole plant foods (lots of fiber), and limited sugar, flour, alcohol.
For more details, you can see our main feature on this: Keep Inflammation At Bay!
You may wonder why eating to reduce inflammation (inflammation is a form of immune response) will help improve immune response. Put it this way:
If your town’s fire service is called out eleventy-two times per day to deal with things that are not, in fact, fires, then when there is a fire, they will be already exhausted, and will not do their job so well.
Look after your gut microbiota
Additionally, healthy gut microbiota (fostered by the same diet we just described) help keep your body pathogen-free, by avoiding “leaky gut syndrome” that occurs when, for example, C. albicans (you do not want this in your gut, and it thrives on the things we just told you to avoid) puts its roots through your intestinal walls, making holes in them. And through those holes? You definitely do not want bacteria from your intestines going into the rest of your body.
See also: Gut Health 101
Actually get that moderate exercise
There’s definitely a sweet-spot here, because too much exercise will also exhaust you and deplete your body’s resources. However, the famous “150 minutes per week” (so, a little over 20 minutes per day, or 25 minutes per day with one day off) will make a big difference.
See: Exercise and the Regulation of Immune Functions
Manage your stress levels (good and bad!)
This one swings both ways:
- Acute stress (like a cold shower) is good for immune response. Think of it like a fire drill for your body.
- Chronic stress (“the general everything” persistently stressful in life) is bad for immune response. This is the fire drill that never ends. Your body’s going to know what to do really well, but it’s going to be exhausted already by the time an actual threat hits.
Read more: Effects of Stress on Immune Function: the Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
Supplement, yes.
These are far less critical than the above things, but are also helpful. Good things to take include:
Enjoy, and stay well!
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Parsnips vs Potatoes – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing parsnips to potatoes, we picked the parsnips.
Why?
To be more specific, we’re looking at russet potatoes, and in both cases we’re looking at cooked without fat or salt, skin on. In other words, the basic nutritional values of these plants in edible form, without adding anything. With this in mind, once we get to the root of things, there’s a clear winner:
Looking at the macros first, potatoes have more carbs while parsnips have more fiber. Potatoes do have more protein too, but given the small numbers involved when it comes to protein we don’t think this is enough of a plus to outweigh the extra fiber in the parsnips.
In the category of vitamins, again a champion emerges: parsnips have more of vitamins B1, B2, B5, B9, C, E, and K, while potatoes have more of vitamins B3, B6, and choline. So, a 7:3 win for parsnips.
When it comes to minerals, parsnips have more calcium copper, manganese, selenium, and zinc, while potatoes have more iron and potassium. Potatoes do also have more sodium, but for most people most of the time, this is not a plus, healthwise. Disregarding the sodium, this category sees a 5:2 win for parsnips.
In short: as with most starchy vegetables, enjoy both in moderation if you feel so inclined, but if you’re picking one, then parsnips are the nutritionally best choice here.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Why You’re Probably Not Getting Enough Fiber (And How To Fix It)
- Should You Go Light Or Heavy On Carbs?
Take care!
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You May Have More Air Pollution In Your Home Than In The Street
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Certainly, gas stoves and heaters can cause indoor air pollution, with carbon monoxide (CO) being the main risk. Even if you have a CO alarm, the level at which it will go off is usually the “this will kill you tonight if you don’t do something about it soon” level, rather than the “this will slowly kill your brain cells but you’ll keep functioning otherwise, until one day you don’t” levels of CO.
Still, do by all means have a CO alarm if you have anything in your house that can release CO!
Fun fact about those stoves:
❝Just 1 kilogram of cooking fuel emits 10 quadrillion particles smaller than 3 nanometers, which matches or exceeds what’s emitted from cars with internal combustion engines.
At that rate, you might be inhaling 10-100 times more of these sub-3 nanometer particles from cooking on a gas stove indoors than you would from car exhaust while standing on a busy street.❞
But today, we’re not here about that
Rather, we are looking at some more innocent-seeming things, such as scented cleaning products and air fresheners. Notably, the biggest problem is often not even the cleaning chemicals themselves. Of course: please don’t breathe bleach fumes, etc.
But that’s an obvious risk, and today we’re about the less obvious risks.
So… What is the less obvious risk here?
It’s the fragrances. The terpenes used to hold them react with ozone in the air, to create new nanoparticles. And, just like the nanoparticles from the stove, these can reach very high concentrations indoors, and suffice it to say, if you can smell the fragrance then you have the pollutants inside you.
You can read about how badly different products score, here:
Rapid Nucleation and Growth of Indoor Atmospheric Nanocluster Aerosol during the Use of Scented Volatile Chemical Products in Residential Buildings ← you’ll need to scroll down to the table with different cleaning products and air fresheners
Further, the seemingly-harmless scented candle is, as it turns out, quite a menace too:
❝Full-scale emission experiments were conducted in the Purdue zEDGE Test House using a variety of scented candles (n = 5) and wax warmers/melts (n = 14) under different outdoor air exchange rates (AERs). Terpene concentrations were measured in real-time using a proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer (PTR-TOF-MS). PTR-TOF-MS measurements revealed that scented candle and wax warmer/melt products emit a variety of monoterpenes (C10H16) and oxygen-containing monoterpenoids (C10H14O, C10H16O, C10H18O, C10H20O), with peak concentrations in the range of 10−1 to 102 ppb. Monoterpene EFs were much greater for scented wax warmers/melts (C10H16 EFs ∼ 102 mg per g wax consumed) compared to scented candles (C10H16 EFs ∼ 10−1 to 100 mg per g wax consumed). Significant emissions of reactive terpenes from both products, along with nitrogen oxides (NO, NO2) from candles, depleted indoor ozone (O3) concentrations. Terpene iFs were similar between the two products (iFs ∼ 103 ppm) and increased with decreasing outdoor AER. Terpene iFs during concentration decay periods were similar to, or greater than, iFs during active emission periods for outdoor AERs ≤ 3.0 h−1.
Overall, scented wax warmers/melts were found to release greater quantities of monoterpenes compared to other fragranced consumer products used in the home, including botanical disinfectants, hair care products, air fresheners, and scented sprays.❞
Put in fewer words: scented candles are bad, and wax melts (the kind with no flame, that one might easily expect to thus produce fewer emissions) are at least as bad if not worse, and both are even worse than cleaning products.
Some of the same research team conducted further studies, because of this this, finding:
❝We performed field measurements in a residential test house to investigate atmospheric nanoparticle formation from scented wax melt use. We employed a high-resolution particle size magnifier-scanning mobility particle sizer (PSMPS) and a proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer (PTR-TOF-MS) for real-time monitoring of indoor atmospheric nanoparticle size distributions and terpene mixing ratios, respectively.
Our findings reveal that terpenes released from scented wax melts react with indoor atmospheric ozone (O3) to initiate new particle formation (NPF) events, resulting in significant indoor atmospheric nanoparticle concentrations (>106 cm–3) comparable to those emitted by combustion-based scented candles, gas stoves, diesel engines, and natural gas engines.
We show that scented wax melt-initiated NPF events can result in significant respiratory exposures, with nanoparticle respiratory tract deposited dose rates similar to those determined for combustion-based sources.
Our results challenge the perception of scented wax melts as a safer alternative to combustion-based aromatherapy❞
Read in full: Flame-Free Candles Are Not Pollution-Free: Scented Wax Melts as a Significant Source of Atmospheric Nanoparticles
In short: you might want to ditch the fragranced products!
Want to do more?
Give your household hair a makeover with this multi-vector approach to deal with different risks:
What’s Lurking In Your Household Air?
For that matter, the air is a very important factor for the health of your lungs (and thus, for the health of everything that’s fed oxygen by your lungs), and there are more things we can do in that regard as well:
Seven Things To Do For Good Lung Health!
Take care!
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When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
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When knowing what to do isn’t the problem
Often, we know what we need to do. Sometimes, knowing isn’t the problem!
The topic today is going to be a technique used by therapeutic service providers to help people to enact positive changes in their lives.
While this is a necessarily dialectic practice (i.e., it involves a back-and-forth dialogue), it’s still perfectly possible to do it alone, and that’s what we’ll be focussing on in this main feature.
What is Motivational Interviewing?
❝Motivational interviewing (MI) is a technique that has been specifically developed to help motivate ambivalent patients to change their behavior.❞
Read in full: Motivational Interviewing: An Evidence-Based Approach for Use in Medical Practice
It’s mostly used for such things as helping people reduce or eliminate substance abuse, or manage their weight, or exercise more, things like that.
However, it can be employed for any endeavour that requires motivation and sustained willpower to carry it through.
Three Phases
Motivational Interviewing traditionally has three phases:
- Exploring and understanding the issue at hand
- Guiding and deciding importance and goals
- Choosing and setting an action plan
In self-practice, maybe you can already know and understand what it is that you want/need to change.
If not, consider asking yourself such questions as:
- What does a good day look like? What does a bad day look like?
- If things are not good now, when were they good? What changed?
- If everything were perfect now, what would that look like? How would you know?
Once you have a clear idea of where you want to be, the next thing to know is: how much do you want it? And how confident are you in attaining it?
This is a critical process:
- Give your answers numerically on a scale from 0 to 10
- Whatever your score, ask yourself why it’s not lower. For example, if you scored your motivation 4 and your confidence 2, what factors made your motivation not a lower number? What factors made your confidence not a lower number?
- In the unlikely event that you gave yourself a 0, ask whether you can really afford to scrap the goal. If you can’t, find something, anything, to bring it to at least a 1.
- After you’ve done that, then you can ask yourself the more obvious question of why your numbers aren’t higher. This will help you identify barriers to overcome.
Now you’re ready to choose what to focus on and how to do it. Don’t bite off more than you can chew; it’s fine to start low and work up. You should revisit this regularly, just like you would if you had a counsellor helping you.
Some things to ask yourself at this stage of the motivational self-interviewing:
- What’s a good SMART goal to get you started?
- What could stop you from achieving your goal?
- How could you overcome that challenge?
- What is your backup plan, if you have to scale back your goal for some reason?
A conceptual example: if your goal is to stick to a whole foods Mediterranean diet, but you are attending a wedding next week, then now is the time to decide in advance 1) what personal lines-in-the-sand you will or will not draw 2) what secondary, backup plan you will make to not go too far off track.
The same example in practice: wedding menus often offer meat/fish/vegetarian options, so you might choose the fish or vegetarian, and as for sugar and alcohol, you might limit yourself to “a small slice of wedding cake only; coffee/cheese option instead of dessert”, and “alcohol only for toasts”.
Giving yourself the permission well in advance for small (clearly defined and boundaried!) diversions from the plan, will stop you from falling into the trap of “well, since today’s a cheat-day now…”
Secret fourth stage
The secret here is to keep going back and reassessing at regular intervals. Set your own calendar; you might want to start out weekly and then move to monthly when you’re more strongly on-track.
For this reason, it’s good to keep a journal with your notes from your self-interview sessions, the scores you gave yourself, the goals and plans you set, etc.
When conducting your regular review, be sure to examine what worked for you, and what didn’t (and why). That way, you can practice trial-and-improvement as you go.
Want to learn more?
We only have so much room here, but there are lots of resources out there.
Here’s a high-quality page that:
- explains motivational interviewing in more depth than we have room for here
- offers a lot of free downloadable resource packs and the like
Check it out: Motivational Interviewing Theory & Resources
Enjoy!
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Physical Sunscreen or Chemical Sunscreen – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing physical sunscreens to chemical sunscreens, we picked the physical sunscreens.
Why?
It’s easy to vote against chemical sunscreens, because it has “chemical” in the name, which tends to be offputting PR-wise no matter how healthy something is.
But in this case, there’s actual science here too!
Physical sunscreens physically block the UV rays.
- On the simplest of levels, mud is a physical sunscreen, as you can see widely used by elephants, hippos, pigs, and other animals.
- On a more sophisticated level, modern physical sunscreens often use tiny zinc particles (or similar) to block the UV rays in a way that isn’t so obvious to the naked eye—so we can still see our skin, and it looks just like we applied an oil or other moisturizer.
Chemical sunscreens interact with the UV rays in a way that absorbs them.
- Specifically, they usually convert it into relatively harmless thermal energy (heat)
- However, this can cause problems if there’s too much heat!
- Additionally, chemical sunscreens can get “used up” in a way that physical sunscreens can’t* becoming effectively deactivated once the chemical reaction has run its course and there is no more reagent left unreacted.
- Worse, some of the reagents, when broken down by the UV rays, can potentially cause harm when absorbed by the skin.
*That said, physical sunscreens will still need “topping up” because we are a living organism and our body can’t resist redistributing and using stuff—plus, depending on the climate and our activities, we can lose some externally too.
Further reading
We wrote about sunscreens (of various kinds) here:
And you can also read specifically about today’s topic in more detail, here:
What’s The Difference Between Physical And Chemical Sunscreens?
Take care!
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What Doctors Feel – by Dr. Danielle Ofri
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This book discusses how feelings such as shame, fear, anger, empathy, and even love influence patient care. Dr. Ofri notes early on:
❝One might reasonably say, I don’t give a damn how my doctor feels as long as she gets me better. In straightforward medical cases, this line of thinking is probably valid. Doctors who are angry, nervous, jealous, burned out, terrified, or ashamed can usually still treat bronchitis or ankle sprains competently.
The problems arise when clinical situations are convoluted, unyielding, or overlaid with unexpected complications, medical errors, or psychological components. This is where factors other than clinical competency come into play.❞
~ Dr. Danielle Ofri
What then follows is very much a no-holds-barred account of the emotional side of medicine.
Not portraying doctors as heroes or martyrs, just as people. Indeed, she even talks about an early, abject failure of hers as a medical student, literally hiding from a patient who badly needed attention and to whom she had been assigned.
We learn not just about the mistakes of doctors, but also the mistakes of patients that lead to mistakes by doctors. For example, emphasizing the severity of your symptom(s) can sometimes be useful to ensure they get attention, but if your regular doctor has heard you rating every symptom always as a 10 every appointment for the past many years, then the end result is that they don’t have information to work from, and will—at best—become frustrated, which will not work out well for you.
Mostly, though, it’s about what goes on behind that calm collected professional exterior that most doctors show most of the time.
The style is a fascinating blend of well-researched science (there’s an extensive bibliography) and very human tales of suffering, compassion, hope, loss, isolation, connection, and more.
Bottom line: if you want to understand your doctor(s), then you want to read this book.
Click here to check out What Doctors Feel, and learn how emotions affect the practice of medicine!
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Children with traumatic experiences have a higher risk of obesity – but this can be turned around
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Children with traumatic experiences in their early lives have a higher risk of obesity. But as our new research shows, this risk can be reduced through positive experiences.
Childhood traumatic experiences are alarmingly common. Our analysis of data from nearly 5,000 children in the Growing Up in New Zealand study revealed almost nine out of ten (87%) faced at least one significant source of trauma by the time they were eight years old. Multiple adverse experiences were also prevalent, with one in three children (32%) experiencing at least three traumatic events.
Childhood trauma includes a range of experiences such as physical and emotional abuse, peer bullying and exposure to domestic violence. It also includes parental substance abuse, mental illness, incarceration, separation or divorce and ethnic discrimination.
We found children from financially disadvantaged households and Māori and Pasifika had the highest prevalence of nearly all types of adverse experiences, as well as higher overall numbers of adversities.
The consequences of these experiences were far-reaching. Children who experienced at least one adverse event were twice as likely to be obese by age eight. The risk increased with the number of traumatic experiences. Children with four or more adverse experiences were nearly three times more likely to be obese.
Notably, certain traumatic experiences (including physical abuse and parental domestic violence) related more strongly to obesity than others. This highlights the strong connection between early-life adversity and physical health outcomes.
PickPik, CC BY-SA Connecting trauma to obesity
One potential explanation could be that the accumulation of early stress in children’s family, school and social environments is associated with greater psychological distress. This in turn makes children more likely to adopt unhealthy weight-related behaviours.
This includes consuming excessive high-calorie “comfort” foods such as fast food and sugary drinks, inadequate intake of nutritious foods, poor sleep, excessive screen time and physical inactivity. In our research, children who experienced adverse events were more likely to adopt these unhealthy behaviours. These, in turn, were associated with a higher risk of obesity.
Despite these challenges, our research also explored a promising area: the protective and mitigating effects of positive experiences.
We defined positive experiences as:
- parents in a committed relationship
- mothers interacting well with their children
- mothers involved in social groups
- children engaged in enriching experiences and activities such as visiting libraries or museums and participating in sports and community events
- children living in households with routines and rules, including those regulating bedtime, screen time and mealtimes
- children attending effective early childhood education.
The findings were encouraging. Children with more positive experiences were significantly less likely to be obese by age eight.
For example, those with five or six positive experiences were 60% less likely to be overweight or obese compared to children with zero or one positive experience. Even two positive experiences reduced the likelihood by 25%.
Positive childhood experiences such as playing sports or visiting libraries can lower the risk of obesity. Getty Images How positive experiences counteract trauma
Positive experiences can help mitigate the negative effects of childhood trauma. But a minimum of four positive experiences was required to significantly counteract the impact of adverse events.
While nearly half (48%) of the study participants had at least four positive experiences, a concerning proportion (more than one in ten children) reported zero or only one positive experience.
The implications are clear. Traditional weight-loss programmes focused solely on changing behaviours are not enough to tackle childhood obesity. To create lasting change, we must also address the social environments, life experiences and emotional scars of early trauma shaping children’s lives.
Fostering positive experiences is a vital part of this holistic approach. These experiences not only help protect children from the harmful effects of adversity but also promote their overall physical and mental wellbeing. This isn’t just about preventing obesity – it’s about giving children the foundation to thrive and reach their full potential.
Creating supportive environments for vulnerable children
Policymakers, schools and families all have a role to play. Community-based programmes, such as after-school activities, healthy relationship initiatives and mental health services should be prioritised to support vulnerable families.
Trauma-informed care is crucial, particularly for children from disadvantaged households who face higher levels of adversity and fewer positive experiences. Trauma-informed approaches are especially crucial for addressing the effects of domestic violence and other adverse childhood experiences.
Comprehensive strategies should prioritise both safety and emotional healing by equipping families with tools to create safe, nurturing environments and providing access to mental health services and community support initiatives.
At the family level, parents can establish stable routines, participate in social networks and engage children in enriching activities. Schools and early-childhood education providers also play a key role in fostering supportive environments that help children build resilience and recover from trauma.
Policymakers should invest in resources that promote positive experiences across communities, addressing inequalities that leave some children more vulnerable than others. By creating nurturing environments, we can counterbalance the impacts of trauma and help children lead healthier, more fulfilling lives.
When positive experiences outweigh negative ones, children have a far greater chance of thriving – physically, emotionally and socially.
Ladan Hashemi, Senior Research Fellow in Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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