Sugar and Stress Reduce Immunity

Keep sugar to a minimum as the higher your intake of sugar the lower your immune function. This is very important!!!! This also includes store bought fruit juices. 

A mere 100gms of sugar can inhibit your white blood cells ability to engulf foreign bacteria by 50%! This immune suppression is immediate and acts like this for around 2 hours but continues for 5 hours after ingestion.


Think that sounds like a lot? It’s not really....

• A can of coke contains 39 grams of sugar – that is nearly 10 teaspoons of sugar 
• A glass of Just Juice Apple and Orange contains 26gms of sugar – 6.5 teaspoons of sugar. 

One of the reasons that sugar supresses immune function is that it closely resembles the vitamin C molecule and can competitively inhibit vitamin C for entry into the white blood cell. That means the more sugar you eat, the more vitamin C you need. (See below for more information on Vitamin C.

Stress and Immunity

Stress is particularly detrimental to our immune systems. Not so much short term stress, but the ongoing day to day stress that we never get a break from.

This has the ability to create havoc in so many ways, but is directly attributable to lowering your immunity in several ways.

The release of all the stress hormones like adrenaline, have a huge impact on your body. Long term they actually suppress the production and activity of many of our white blood cells.

It reduces levels of good gut bacteria, which are essential for good immunity, it leads to hormonal imbalances which impact inflammation. It can make allergies get worse or appear when you've never had them before.

Try to recognise if you are under constant stress and put some measures into place to reduce it, or include things in your life that will help you deal with it better. Walking is ideal, yoga, meditation - these are not just new age hippy things any more. If you can incorporate them into your life you will find your immune system will be so much stronger.

Vitamin C for Winter Immunity

Vitamin C is a well known and very important nutrient for immune function. The body’s disease fighting white blood cells depend on Vitamin C for normal functioning. It also acts as an anti-histamine and will reduce sneezing (it’s a great nutrient for those with allergies).

• Dosage: During winter take 2000mg a day as a preventative and increase the dose if you have a cold to about 6000mg per day. 

• You can get Vitamin C as a chewable or tablet or powder. All will do the trick although watch the sugars in some chewable ones.

• Ascorbic acid is the real name for Vitamin C. Or you can find it as Calcium or sodium ascorbate. This just means the vitamin c has been buffered by a calcium or sodium molecule to reduce it’s acidity. I like Blackmores Bio C as they also include Rosehip and Acerola fruit which contain natural vitamin C, and also rutin and hesperidin flavonoids which help the absorption of vitamin C. 

Tip: Vitamin C is best taken split through out the day, since it is a water soluble nutrient and large quantities at once may not be absorbed. 


You may experience mild diarrhoea initially when increasing the dose – just reduce the dose and then slowly increase it until your tolerance is increased.

Echinacea - your winter MUST HAVE!

Certain herbs have been well researched for their benefit on the immune system and Echinacea is the best known of them - and for good reason!

This amazing herb works specifically to boost the immune system and prevent secondary bacterial infections. You can take a lower dose for prevention (500-1000mg daily) and up the dose to 3000mg daily at the very first signs of a cold and it shouldn’t go any further.

You will often read in magazines or in the paper that there is not enough research on Echinacea to prove it works. This is simply and utterly not true. This seems to stem from two poorly designed clinical trials that seemed to get a lot of publicity. It is not unusual for studies on herbs to use the wrong dose, wrong part of the plant, and even sometimes the wrong species!!!! 

Pharmacologial studies have shown that it isn't just one active constituent in Echinacea that works but many of them working together.  This is usually the way with herbs and what makes them hard to study isolated components.  However it has been found that the alkalymides are one of the key actives, and this is what is found in the blood of research subjects.

It is the alkalymides that give echinacea it's distinctive tingle on the tongue. (If you've ever had liquid echinacea you'll know what I mean!)

Echinacea works by increasing the number and activity of various white blood cells (immune cells) in your bloodstream

Dosage

This is the key to getting Echinacea to work for you!  

You need to start taking Echinacea at the first sign of any symptoms, a tickle in the throat, watery eyes, sneezing.  If you take the echinacea in the higher dose at this stage, you can often stop anything going further.

The biggest mistake people make is not taking a high enough dose!

Tablets: Acute dosing 1000mg 3-4x daily!  

Liquid: Acute dosing 2-5mls 3-4x daily

Prevention - a third of the above dose.

If you miss those first symptoms and are already sick, that's ok, start taking it as it will reduce the duration you are sick, and prevent secondary infections.

Research and Echinacea
A meta-analysis was carried out a few years ago on 14 different clinical trials which evaluated Echinacea containing products in the treatment and/or prevention of the common cold.(1) Phytonews, issue 28, Nov 07, Favourable meta-analysis for Echinacea. 

The overall results showed that Echinacea:-

• Decreased the odds of a patient contracting a cold by 58%
• Reduced the duration of a cold by 1.4 days.

Zinc is an essential winter nutrient

Zinc also has a crucial role to play in maintaining our immune systems. We are low in our soils in NZ and unless you are eating a lot of oysters you could well be deficient. It is vital to normal immune functioning and if you are low you will need 30-40mgs of zinc per day to build up your levels again. You can't get zinc in NZ in a tablet higher than 15mg - so you will need to take 2-3 tabs a day to get this level.

Research and zinc
A recent Cochrane review has reminded us of zinc’s importance when it comes to ensuring the efficiency of our immune defences against viral infections. The review incorporated data from 15 trials and revealed that oral zinc supplementation taken at the onset of cold symptoms reduces the severity and length of illness.

Another interesting finding was that children who took zinc for at least 5 months caught fewer colds and were shown to have reduced use of antibiotics and less days off school.

Zinc’s role in disease prevention and treatment is not fully understood, however studies show that even a mild deficiency can contribute to defective functioning of immune cells such as natural killer (NK) cells.

Additionally, zinc is able to interfere with viral replication, halting the development of infections caused by rhinovirus (the common cold) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV; a major cause of severe lower respiratory tract infections in children).

Supplementing with Zinc
My favourite zinc supplement is Blackmores Bio Zinc. This has zinc in an amino acid chelate – which means it is easier to absorb. It also has other cofactors in it – and by this I mean other nutrients that help in some way the absorption or action of zinc in the body. I am not a great fan of giving single nutrients to people as many of them work together – you get better results if you take them together.

Blackmores Bio Zinc, you will find 14.9mg of zinc, together with vitamin A (which is also required for healthy immune function and the maintenance of healthy skin), manganese (which works with zinc to support the body’s antioxidant defences), and magnesium and vitamin B6 (both of which are involved in zinc metabolism).

I recommend 2 tablets a day for a month, then drop back to one a day. Take with food!

You can also find liquid zinc supplements - sometimes these are easier to absorb for those with lowered digestive function.

For children you are best to get them to take zinc as part of an immunity formulation, something like Blackmores Immunoshield.

Foods that contain high zinc: sesame seeds (tahini, hummus), oysters, beef and lamb, pumpkin seeds, dark chocolate, beans and legumes.