How to help your immune system by not burdening it with additional tasks
Important: this post is not about changing your lifestyle or eating habits – those are the matters of your own free choice. But when the life circumstances are challenging, you might need to know something that will help you getting through the difficulties. This is relatively simple idea but not everyone knows about it.
Most people are aware that it’s our Immune System that helps us to avoid getting sick and lets us recover from illness. And everyone knows that it’s useful to strengthen their immune system, especially during the seasonal influxes of illnesses like cold and flu.
But hardly anyone is thinking about the importance of letting their immune system do its work without loading it with additional tasks. In the situation of crisis wouldn’t be reasonable to give the “worker” only the most important task and not to bother them with extra work?
The same principle applies to the work of our immune system – if you want your immune system to focus all the resources on the primary job of fighting the virus/infection, then avoid loading it with additional chores. And this is where the gap in knowledge exists: mostly people have no idea what organs belong to the immune system and how to let them work at their peak performance without disturbance.
It might be quite surprising for some of you to know that besides the digestive function, our gut plays a vital role as an immune system’s organ. Multiple studies demonstrate direct link between the type of food that human gut has to deal with and the overall health of the whole body.
Since foodstuff can be considered as “foreign matter” entering the body, it would be logical to assume that digestive organs have a function of analysing this incoming matter for possible dangers and for neutralizing the threats to health. Scientific studies prove validity of this hypothesis by measuring the level of white blood cells that sharply increases when certain foods get in contact with digestive organs. It’s called digestive leucocytosis. This is almost the same type of body’s reaction when it’s fighting an infection.
When dealing with infection or with certain food, this process takes energy, that’s why we feel sleepy or tired after a big meal. No wonder that seriously ill people usually don’t have an appetite or they may be vomiting at the beginning of their illness. What happens is that their body’s trying to conserve the energy for fighting the illness and not to spend it on dealing with other tasks.
The amazing health benefits of fasting are widely known – you are welcome to make your own research about this topic. But in this post I’m not writing about the fasting – some people are not able to do it because of different reasons. And also, if we are talking about prolong period of time when you need your immune system to be at its best and to fight a serious virus or an infection, fasting is not the best option for inexperienced people.
There is a method of helping your immune system that anyone can use for any length of time without making dramatic changes in their lifestyle or risking dying of starvation.
Our immune system gets triggered by foreign proteins that can cause different kinds of reactions, mostly going unnoticed on the bigger scale, but sometimes appearing on the physical level as allergies and autoimmune diseases.
Animal protein is one of the main intruders that body has to deal with. I’m not going to discuss the correlation between animal products consumption and different kind of diseases – this information is not new anymore and is available from different sources including a lot of scientific research.
What I’m trying to say here in this post is that you can significantly alleviate the work of your immune system during the time when it needs all of its resources, by simply not giving it additional chores to do – to deal with animal protein. It can be one day, one week, one month – it’s up to you how much time you need to feel safe and not vulnerable in the contagious environment or while your body is fighting an infection.
Modern research shows that avoiding animal products will free up “additional” resources of your immune system. And quite logically these resources will be used for eliminating the main dangerous invader – virus or infection, instead of dealing with the foodstuff that contains animal DNA.
It seems that I can end this post right here, because the important piece of information is already there and there is no need to add something else. But I feel that some people may need to see the list of modern food products that contain animal protein, so that they don’t make a potentially costly mistake just because they are lacking this knowledge.
So, here are the foods that contain animal protein, and therefore, when consumed they are using resources of your immune system:
- All kinds of meat, fish, shellfish; processed meat and fish products etc.
- Milk and milk products (i.e. cream, cheese, sour cream, yogurt, kefir etc.)
- Packaged/processed food, some sauces and beverages – please read the labels, sometimes things like corn or potato chips have milk solids added to them.
- You may find something else that hides animal protein, I won’t be surprised.
Be well and stay healthy!
Author: Margarita AoteRa.com