Can You Boost Your Immune System?

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How can good you strengthen your immune system? Your immune system generally does a good job of protecting you from illness, but sometimes it fails. A germ invades your system successfully and makes you ill. It is to possible to boost your immune system? Can you change your diet, take the right vitamins, or make other changes to your lifestyle to strengthen your immune system and be ill even less often. 

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What can you do to boost your immune system?

The idea of boosting your immunity is attractive, but being able to do so can be difficult for several reasons. The immune system is a system, not a single entity. In order to function well, it needs balance and harmony. There is still a lot that researchers don’t know about the details of the immune response. There are no scientifically proven direct links between lifestyle and enhanced immune function at the moment. 

However, this doesn’t mean that the effects of lifestyle on your immune system aren’t intriguing. Researchers are studying the effects of diet, exercised, age, stress, and other factors on the immune system. Until we have definitive answers, healthy-living strategies are a good way to give your immune system a boost. 

Healthy ways to strengthen your immune system

Your first line of defense is a healthy lifestyle. Living by good-health guidelines is the best thing you can do to naturally keep your immune system strong. Your whole body, including your immune system, works better when supported by healthy-living strategies:

• Don’t smoke

• Eat a diet high in fruits and vegetables

• Exercise regularly

• Maintain a healthy weight

• Drink in moderation, if you drink alcohol

• Get enough sleep

• Take steps to avoid infection, like washing your hands

• Try to reduce stress

Increase immunity the healthy way

Many products on the market claim to boost or support the immune system. But the idea of boosting immunity actually doesn’t make much sense. Boosting the number of cells in your body is not always a good thing. For example, athletes who try ‘blood doping’, which is pumping blood into the system to boost their number of blood cells to enhance their performance, run the risk of strokes. 

Trying to boost the cells of your immune system is complicated because there are many kinds of cells in the immune system that responds to lots of different microbes in different ways. Which cells should you boost and to what number? Scientists don’t know the answer yet. What we do know is that the body is always generating immune cells. It produces more lymphocytes than it can use. Nobody knows how many cells or what the best mix of cells the immune system needs to function at it’s best. 

Does being cold give you a weaker immune system?

Your mother said it to you, and you’ve probably said it to your own children too: “Put a coat on, or you’ll catch your death of cold!” Is this right to say? In fact, it probably isn’t. Exposure to moderate cold temperature doesn’t increase your likelihood of getting ill. There are two reasons why winter is known as the cold and flu season. In the Winter, most of us spend more time indoors, in closer contact with others, who pass on their germs to us. The flu virus also stays airborne for longer when the air is cold and less humid. Learn more about easing some of the symptoms here. 

Researchers don’t think there’s any need to worry about moderate cold exposure, as it doesn’t appear to have a detrimental effect on the immune system of humans. Should you wrap up warm when it’s cold outside? Yes, you still should if you’re cold and uncomfortable, or if you’re going to be outdoors for a long time where you might be at risk of frostbite and hypothermia. But you don’t need to worry about your immune system. 

Is exercise good or bad for a healthy immune system?

Regular exercise is one of the main parts of living a healthy life. It will improve cardiovascular health, lower your blood pressure, control your body weight, and protect you against a variety of diseases. Exercise is good, but does it help to boost your immune system naturally and keep it healthy? Just like eating a healthy diet, exercise can contribute to good health and to a healthy immune system. It might contribute more directly by helping you to have good circulation, which lets the cells of the immune system move through the body freely and do their job properly.