5 Ways to Boost your Immune System Naturally

It’s the season where, at some point in time, everyone will come home to having sniffles, sore throats and upset tummies.

Although we can’t avoid them altogether, you can strengthen and support your immune system to prevent those nasty toxins, viruses and bacteria from allowing you to weaken your immune system in the first place.

Here are 5 ways to boost your immune system naturally to help your body stay above the wellness line all year round.

Be Mindful of what you Eat

Eating foods that are highly refined, processed and packaged makes your body struggle to stay well.  Those added sugars and over processed ingredients make your body work extra hard to process them. The foods lack essential vitamins and nutrients that your body needs to eat. Refined foods full of sugar weaken your immune system, and over time, cause you to struggle with wellness. 

While consuming sugar doesn’t directly cause a cold, it does make you more susceptible to catching a cold and can prevent you from overcoming that cold as well.   In humans, glucose (sugar) competes with ascorbic acid (vitamin C) – so a diet that is high in sugar can lead to a weaker immune system. 

A high in sugar can lead to inflammation in the body.  When inflammation happens, your white blood cells (which would normally be fighting the cold) are too focused on fighting that inflammation, leaving wiggle room for that cold to sneak in. 

Instead of highly processed, sugar-laden foods, incorporate more whole foods, a rainbow of vegetables, and foods that are as close to raw as possible.

Balanced pH

An acidic body leads to illness and disease – therefore it’s important to keep your body was alkaline as possible to keep disease from creeping up. An abundance of grains, fish, meat, coffee, alcoholic drinks, sweetened yogurt, processed food, toxic cleaners, processed dairy & more can contribute to an acidic-forming body.  See a longer list here.

Not all dairy is bad – unlike processed dairy (which is largely acidic) raw dairy is very alkaline because it hasn’t been processed and is great for improving your pH balance.

There is a lot of information about the role of pH in your body HERE.  

Fermented Foods

When it comes to boosting your immunity, fermented foods are incredibly important. Fermented foods include tempeh, pickles, greek yogurt (not sweetened), miso, raw milk kefir & more.

Raw Milk kefir is an enzyme rich food full of microorganisms that help you balance your gut flora & strengthen your immunity.  Although you can pick up Kefir at many grocery stores, it’s highly processed and thickened with additives – it’s better to make your own from raw kefir grains.

See more: How Good Gut Health can Improve your Immunity

Essential Oils

Essential Oils are effective ways to support a healthy immune, respiratory and circulatory system.  

Creating and supporting a strong immune system requires you to strengthen your gut – your gut is the nucleus of your overall health, and is where over 70% of your immune system is located. A leaky gut is the cause for a weakened immune system, sensitivities to food, autoimmune disease and an overall imbalance.

While diet, fermented foods and an alkaline body can be natural ways to keep that immune system strong, it’s also important to understand that prescription antibiotic medications can destroy your gut flora and weaken your immune system leading to illness.

Prescriptions, although helpful at times, are programmed to carry certain actions in the body – whether or not the body can benefit from them. When the body changes, the prescriptions continue doing what they were designed to do – regardless of if it’s needed or not. Essential Oils, however, can adapt to bodily changes – they can attack only the harmful bacteria (instead of the good AND bad bacteria) allowing your body to replenish itself as needed.

See more: Essential oils for respiratory & immune support.

Move Around

Exercise can help you say healthy because it boosts your immune system by increasing the amount of white blood cells in your body that help fight off illness. Too much exercise can be a strain  – but a moderate amount of exercise can be great for boosting your immunity.

What steps do you take to boost your immunity?

The information on this site is not meant to be a substitute for seeking the advice of a qualified health care provider.