How to boost your immune system to avoid colds and coronavirus

[Northerner]

It’s been a long, wet winter. Everybody has got colds, and now we are braced for a coronavirus epidemic. Boosting our immune system has rarely felt more urgent, but, beyond eating more tangerines and hoping for the best, what else can we do?

Sheena Cruickshank, a professor of immunology at the University of Manchester, has a “shocking cold” when we speak at a safe distance, over the phone. To know how to take care of your immune system, she says, first you need to understand the weapons in your armoury – a cheeringly impressive collection, it turns out.

“When you come into contact with a germ you’ve never met before,” she says, “you’ve got various barriers to try to stop it getting into your body.” As well as skin, we have mucus – “snot is a really important barrier” – and a microbiome, the collective noun for the estimated 100tn microbes that live throughout our bodies, internally and externally. Some of these helpful bugs make antimicrobial chemicals and compete with pathogens for food and space.

How to boost your immune system to avoid colds and coronavirus

You’re washing your hands 10 times a day and have stopped touching your face. What else can you do to improve your health and avoid bugs?

www.theguardian.com

 

[Thebearcametoo]

Good to know that diet is better than probiotic supplements.

They don’t mention sleep. We all need to sleep well to help our immune systems (says me who is chronically knackered🙂)

 

[Northerner]

Good to know that diet is better than probiotic supplements.

They don’t mention sleep. We all need to sleep well to help our immune systems (says me who is chronically knackered🙂)

They do mention sleep 🙂

Exercising and eating well will have the likely knock-on effect of helping you sleep better, which is a bonus because a tired body is more susceptible to bugs. One study last year found that lack of sleep impaired the disease-fighting ability of a type of lymphocyte called T cells, and research is demonstrating the importance of our natural biorhythms overall.

Janet Lord, a professor at the University of Birmingham, recently showed that vaccinating people in the morning is more effective than doing so in the afternoon. “Your natural biorhythms are, to some extent, dictated by sleep,” says Akbar. “If you’ve got a regular sleep pattern, you have natural body rhythms and everything’s fine. If they go out of kilter, then you’ve got problems.”