A healthy lifestyle offers many benefits, which include preventing chronic illnesses and strengthening your body’s immunity. The immune system is your body’s way of protecting itself from diseases and infections. That’s why vaccines are used to prevent specific illnesses from affecting you.
You must change your lifestyle and maintain healthy routines to strengthen your immunity. While boosting your immunity is enticing, it has proven elusive to most of us. Your immune system is not a single entity but an entire system, and for it to function well, it requires harmony and balance.
There is still a lot of research on the connectedness of lifestyle to the immune system. Diet, exercise, psychological stress, age, and other factors can affect humans’ and animals’ immunity.
What are ways to boost your immune system?
Choosing a healthy lifestyle should be at the top of your priorities to strengthen your immune system. Here are ten ways to boost your immune system.
Don’t smoke
On average, people who smoke suffer from more health problems than others and die a decade earlier than nonsmokers. Smoking makes the immune system less successful at fighting diseases since the immune system works to fight everything from colds and flu to more aggressive infections like viruses and cancer.
Smoking harms the immune system by compromising the balance or equilibrium of the body’s immune system, increasing the risk for various immune and autoimmune disorders. There is also new evidence that suggests smoking increases the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis {1}.
Consume a diet rich in vegetables and fruits.
Every time a doctor recommends you eat healthy, they usually emphasise you incorporating more fruits and vegetables into your diet. You should also include whole grains and proteins in your diet.
Even though a healthy diet means something different for everyone, you also need to limit saturated fats, salt, cholesterol, and added sugars. Eating well means satiating your body with foods that make you feel good while providing the minerals and vitamins with your body needs.
Exercise regularly
Physical activity does a lot for your body. If you want to boost your immunity, consider sticking to moderate-intensity exercises as they’re proven to help more {2}. Sticking to a workout routine of 60 minutes or less helps boost your metabolism and immune system.
However, indulging in prolonged high-intensity training without rest between sessions can suppress your immune system. Exercise stimulates cellular immunity, which helps your body better prepare for possible future infections by detecting them earlier.
Exercise also helps increase your body’s temperature during workouts and even soon after. This helps address infections by preventing the growth of bacteria. Physical activities also help you sleep better. It also decreases the risks of developing diabetes, heart disease, and other diseases.
Exercise also decreases stress and depression. Exercise decreases the release of stress hormones and affects your brain’s neurotransmitters affecting your mood and behaviour. It also reduces inflammation in the body.
Keep a healthy weight.
When you maintain a healthy weight, you’re also supporting your immune system. However, the deficiency of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals can weaken your immune system. When you have a healthy weight, it helps boost your body’s immunity.
For your immune system to function correctly, your cells must exist in a proper balance. However, too little or too much weight can affect this balance, thus forming harmful cells instead of healthy cells.
If you exercise daily and maintain a healthy diet but are still obese, your immune system is still at risk of failing you. Obesity can also lead to other major health problems in your body.
Avoid too much alcohol.
We all know that alcohol can cause diseases like cognitive impairments and liver disease. Besides that, alcohol can also weaken your immune system. A weak immune system puts you at a higher risk of illnesses.
Your immune system has various types of cells, each with a different job to help keep you healthy. Consuming alcohol gets in the way of these cells doing their jobs. Alcohol impacts your immune system in two ways, one is through the gastrointestinal tract, and the other is through antibodies.
The gastrointestinal tract is where alcohol first impacts your immune system since it contains good bacteria to allow you to function correctly. Alcohol can change the number of these bacteria in your gut, making only a few available to work for your immune system.
Alcohol damages the outer layer of your gastrointestinal tract, which results in it leaking into your bloodstream, making you sick. Also, the bacteria that escape your GI tract can change the liver’s immune system.
T cells protect your body from infection by destroying the cells in your body that viruses have taken over. However, if you drink too much alcohol, it can lead to fewer T cells, which means you’ll have fewer antibodies to defend you.
Get enough sleep
Sleep does affect your immunity. According to various studies, lack of sufficient or quality sleep can likely cause you to get sick after exposure to a virus or bacteria. Insufficient sleep can affect how easily you recover after an illness.
Your immune system releases cytokines that help promote sleep when you’re asleep. Some types of cytokines need to increase when you have inflammation, infection, or are under stress. Fewer cytokines are produced when you don’t sleep enough, so your body won’t fight diseases sufficiently.
Long-term lack of sufficient sleep also increases the risk of suffering from illnesses such as diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular diseases. Adults need around 7-8 hours of sleep to boost the system, while teenagers require approximately 10 hours. However, you shouldn’t sleep longer because adults sleeping for over 9 or 10 hours results in poor quality sleep.
Avoid infections
Infections are caused by microscopic pathogens and, upon entering the body, multiply and interfere with the body’s normal functioning. To prevent getting sick all the time, you can take precautions involving good hygiene to ensure you’re in the clear.
Usual ways to avoid infections include washing your hands well frequently, covering your mouth when coughing, not picking at healing wounds or pimples, not sharing utensils, and avoiding direct contact with other people’s items like napkins and handkerchiefs.
Also, to prevent infections, you need to practice good food safety techniques to prevent yourself from falling ill. Rinse all meats and vegetables under running water before cooking them.
Clean your hands with soap and water before and after handling meat. Cook meat thoroughly to avoid transmission of any infections. Also, defrost foods in the microwave or refrigerator. If you need certain vaccinations, you should take them, especially when travelling.
Minimize stress to your best ability.
Stress increases your cortisol levels in the body, and if they remain high for a long, it weakens your immune system. Stress can also result in damage to the cells in your body.
It can also trigger your immune system by elevating inflammation, making you more susceptible to infections and viruses. When stress is prolonged in the body, it decreases the white blood cells in the blood, which often help fight infections.
The best way to control or reduce stress levels is by exercising, eating healthy meals, and getting enough sleep and touch. Sleep promotes the production of cytokines, and physical contact increases dopamine and serotonin and decreases cortisol. Healthy food and exercise also help boost your body’s ability to produce more happy hormones and reduce stress.
Our Allergy & Intolerance Test
Final thoughts on boosting your immune system
Boosting your immune system is essential to keeping healthy and preventing yourself from falling ill ever so often. Besides the abovementioned ways of boosting your immune system, you can also prevent yourself from getting sick by taking an Allergy and Intolerance Test, which will help you figure out things that affect your body’s immunity.
When you’re aware of your allergies and intolerances, you can take care of yourself by avoiding contact with these substances that affect your body’s health and take better care of yourself. Without knowing your allergies, you can’t avoid triggering your immune system ever so frequently.
References
- Smoking and Overall Health. CDC. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/sgr/50th-anniversary/pdfs/fs_smoking_overall_health_508.pdf
- Zheng, Q., Cui, G., Chen, J., Gao, H., Wei, Y., Uede, T., … & Diao, H. (2015). Regular exercise enhances the immune response against microbial antigens through up-regulation of toll-like receptor signalling pathways. Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry, 37(2), 735-746.
