Stay Healthy and Strong: Essential Immunity Tips for Back to School

For year-round immune health, your body needs to keep your defenses strong, without letting inflammation get out of control. How can you protect your immunity? A trained and balanced immune system is the key to protecting your health and immunity.

Here are simple tips for balancing and protecting your immunity this back-to-school season, followed by two foundational supplements for everyday support. 

You may have heard the term “boosting immunity,” but this is not necessarily a good thing for protecting against viruses and other pathogens like the common cold. You have probably seen many supplements that claim to “boost” the immune system; however, “boosting” your immune activity can have unintended consequences, like sending your immune system into overdrive and causing an immune overreaction.

Rather than boosting immunity, focus on optimizing, training, and balancing your immune system, so it has the right responses to threats. Balancing your immune system improves your immune cell function, while supporting healthy inflammation responses, allowing your immune system to launch an appropriate attack that can defend your body against invaders, without unleashing an inflammatory cytokine storm that can end up damaging vital organs and harming your long-term health. 

Healthy stress relief is another essential for immune balance. Stress can fuel inflammation and send an immune response into overdrive, leading to uncontrolled inflammation and inflammatory responses, affecting your gut health, and a life-threatening cytokine storm. Healthy stress relief practices like meditation, yoga, and breathwork improve immune function and reduce the body’s inflammatory reactions supporting your immune system and overall health.

A good resource for stress relief is Headspace, a popular meditation app that includes a fun, interactive section called Headspace for Kids. You’ll find a variety of kid-friendly meditations and exercises for everything from improving focus to starting the day off right.

Staying hydrated is one of the easiest ways to protect and defend your body’s essential functions, while detoxing and removing harmful toxins and threats to your immune system that can cause infection. Drinking plenty of water can help you stay clear of illness and give your body the nourishment it needs to support healthy total-body functions.  

When it comes to diet, an anti-inflammatory meal plan is best for supporting your immunity and gut health. The typical Western diet is full of inflammatory foods like refined sugars and grains, trans fats, carbohydrates, and processed ingredients that are shown to fuel autoimmune disease and other immune issues. By eating foods that are unprocessed and rich in phytonutrients, like non-starchy vegetables, whole grains, healthy fats and lean protein, you can support your and your family's immune health and improve your defenses, naturally.  

For healthy snack inspiration, check out The Natural Nurturer, a blog where you can find dozens of creative snack ideas, such as Homemade fruit leather, Smoothie popsicles (with added veggies!) and Paleo Meatballs. 

Here's a recipe we think is easy and fun for kids to make with you. 

Functional mushrooms are a natural, potent ingredient that balances, trains, and improves your immune system, supporting overall health naturally. Many species of functional mushrooms work to modulate and educate the immune system for healthy response to invaders, unhealthy cells, and other immune challenges to protect you and your family’s immunity. 

Stress, poor food choices, inadequate sleep, chronic infections, prescription drugs, and other factors deeply affect the state of your immune system — and therefore, your overall health. The healing compounds in mushrooms, including beta-glucans and potent antioxidants, help nourish and balance the immune system. They also help calm an overactive immune system to help combat inflammatory immune flare-ups and support the ability of immune cells to defend against occasional colds and flus.

Mushrooms are among the best food sources of antioxidant-rich selenium, a trace mineral key to overall immune health. Getting your daily dose of this nutrient is important for robust immunity. Additionally, mushrooms contain ergothioneine, an antioxidant shown to protect the body’s cells.

Since mushrooms are essentially food, they can (and should) be used daily.

Sources

Zielinski MR, Systrom DM, Rose NR. Fatigue, Sleep, and Autoimmune and Related Disorders. Front Immunol. 2019;10:1827. 

Black DS, Slavich GM. Mindfulness meditation and the immune system: a systematic review of randomized controlled trials. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2016;1373(1):13-24. 

Manzel A, Muller DN, Hafler DA, Erdman SE, Linker RA, Kleinewietfeld M. Role of "Western diet" in inflammatory autoimmune diseases. Curr Allergy Asthma Rep. 2014;14(1):404.   

For functional mushroom research, click here. 

Dong L. Gut Microbiota and Immune Responses. Adv Exp Med Biol. 2020;1238:165-193. 

de Oliveira GLV, Leite AZ, Higuchi BS, Gonzaga MI, Mariano VS. Intestinal dysbiosis and probiotic applications in autoimmune diseases. Immunology. 2017;152(1):1-12.  

Lazar V, Ditu LM, Pircalabioru GG, et al. Aspects of Gut Microbiota and Immune System Interactions in Infectious Diseases, Immunopathology, and Cancer. Front Immunol. 2018;9:1830.