The Importance of Nutrition and Lifestyle Mental Health and Wellbeing
With winter looming and a global pandemic still very much a part of our lives, now is the time to think about optimising our health and building a resilient immune system.
To ensure survival, our immune system is our body’s defence mechanism designed to seek and destroy unwanted organisms and damaging molecules in a constantly changing environment.
How to support a healthy immune system
To function optimally, our immune system requires key nutrients and a healthy lifestyle. During this global pandemic, we find ourselves facing unprecedented stress with new challenges to our mental health and well-being due to the lockdown and the anxiety of contracting the virus. This only adds to the increasing family and work pressures that are already commonplace in the modern-day world.
With insufficient vitamin D intake during the winter months in the UK, and Western diets being low in nutrients and high in refined, processed foods, our immune system’s resilience is inevitably facing a challenge when we need it the most. Personalised nutritional therapy can help you identify specific factors that could be affecting your resilience and immune health. These can include nutritional deficiencies, bacterial imbalances in the gut (80% of our immune system resides in our gut), impaired digestion and absorption of nutrients.
Lifestyle factors such as chronic stress and poor quality sleep can also impact our resilience. Certain environmental factors place a burden on our health and immune systems such as smoking, caffeine, alcohol, poor air quality and exposure to toxins. Other dietary factors which increase the burden on our immune system include allergenic, processed and sugary foods in our diet.
Nutrition
Eating well-balanced, healthy and regular meals containing good quality protein, healthy fats and a diverse array of brightly-coloured, plant-based foods will help to provide us with the key nutrients required to promote an anti-inflammatory and immune-supportive diet. Inflammatory foods such as refined, processed and sugary foods should be avoided. Eat ‘real food’ - anything that grows on the land, in the soil, grazes on the land or swims in the sea.
Key nutrients
There are key nutrients that we can use specifically to support our immune system by including them in our diet and/or through additional supplementation when it is felt that diet alone may not be sufficient. These include:
Vitamin A – supports the body’s ability to fight infection, particularly respiratory infections, and helps maintain gut integrity.
Vitamin C – is extremely effective against a broad range of viruses and essential to maintaining a healthy immune system.
Vitamin D – enhances the immune system response and modulates inflammation, particularly in upper respiratory tract infections.
Selenium – supports the body’s defence system and increases glutathione activity, a powerful antioxidant to enhance function.
Zinc – enhances immune cells and reduces the frequency, duration and severity of infections.
Beta-glucans – stimulate the immune response and increase the body’s first line of defence in the innate immune system.
Elderberry – and anti-viral is shown to increase the immune response to flu and reduce the ability of viruses to enter body cells and replicate.
Probiotics – contain healthy bacteria to support gut health and influence the function and regulation of the immune system-specific strains of bacteria that have been linked with decreased risk of upper respiratory tract infections.
Mental health and wellbeing
Stress management also plays a key role in building our immune resilience. Studies have shown that social isolation can contribute to reduced levels of oxytocin in our brains. Sometimes called the ‘love hormone or ‘cuddle chemical, oxytocin is a chemical messenger released into the blood when our neurons are activated through arousal or if we experience a loving bond (think puppy dog eyes!).
Oxytocin is important for human social behaviour and is linked to stress, anxiety and depression when in short supply.
Chronic stress can also impact BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) which is a protein that works synergistically with oxytocin in the brain to protect our brain cells from stress or damage. It helps with weight loss, and sleep and is protective against neurodegenerative disease, keeping us mentally alert, improving memory and delaying ageing of the brain.
In summary, by including key nutrients to support our immune system, maintaining a healthy weight, balancing our blood sugar levels and adopting good lifestyle practices, we can support optimal physical and mental health and well-being to ensure that our resilience is sound and our immune system defences are armed and ready for battle.
We can support our local businesses too in these difficult times by choosing locally-grown, organic produce, full of
essential vitamins and minerals.
If you would like to find out more about how to get yourself ‘winter-ready’ by optimising your immune system and strengthening your resilience, get in touch with Beverley Sinclair.
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