As the temperatures drop and we shift into fall, everyone starts to get hit with colds and flus. That's why it's so important to take a little bit of time to care for your body so you're more immune to everything out there.
Besides Vitamin D3 and Vitamin C, which we talked about in our last blog post, here are two more things to prioritize in your diet for a healthy immune system so your body can naturally take care of itself.
1. Zinc
Zinc is really good for your immune system because it helps the immune system fight off invading bacteria and viruses. It can reduce cold symptoms by three to four days and it also helps with wound healing and hair loss.
Zinc is great for reproductive health and for helping build our DNA. Especially when your body is repairing itself by building new cells, Zinc will help your body recover and regenerate even faster.
Zinc is found in a lot of different supplements in a multivitamin or a multimineral vitamin, or you can also take it by itself. If you do take it by itself, just make sure you find a more absorbable form.
Zinc Picolinate is a very common form you can find. You can also find it in lots of different foods like shellfish, meat, eggs, beans, nuts, and seeds, and especially in pumpkin seeds and cashews.
Especially when pumpkin season is here, try adding more pumpkin seeds to your life. If you cut open your pumpkins to make a little Jack O’Lantern, you can actually save your seeds, dry and wash them out, and then sprinkle them with a little bit of oil and put them in the oven until they start snap, crackling and popping. And then you have a really nice, little, delicious roasted pumpkin seed snack that you can enjoy during the holidays.
2. Protein
My last food to really optimize for your immune system is protein. I talk so much in my Herbal Apprentice Program about how optimizing protein helps with so many processes of the body.
One of the biggest things it does is help your body repair DNA and build up your immune system, specifically building your immune cells of your immune system.
If you're protein deficient, you're gonna feel it in so many ways. You're gonna be more stressed, exhausted, you're gonna have a harder time with wound healing and a harder time concentrating.
If you really want to optimize your focus and your energy levels, protein is a great, easy way for everyone to do it very gently.
This can be through animal sources or vegetarian sources. Just know vegetarians, you do have to work harder to optimize your protein because you have to combine proteins to make complete proteins. Animal proteins are in complete form. Vegetarian sources like grains and legumes have to be combined together to make a complete protein.
Even just by adding a little bit of protein in every day, adding an extra egg to your breakfast, a handful of chopped nuts here and there, having some extra protein bars and snack bars or protein powder throughout your day will really help boost your immune system a lot, getting ready for what's coming ahead.
So to take care of your body, just be really gentle. Start with a really small thing at a time. So it could be adding protein, adding Zinc, Vitamin C, or Vitamin D. All of these things help so much to boost your immune system and get you ready for the cold and flu season ahead.
If you want a few more tips on how to boost your immunity, click here to check out our free Fire Cider class that we have going on. It is a free class you can access where you learn five herbs that help boost your immune system and how to put them together into an immune tonic.
And otherwise, stay tuned. We'll have lots of other immune boosting tips going on all month long to take care of your bodies for an optimal immune season, or should I say, less cold and flu season ahead?