Boosting Your Immune System: 7 Proven Steps to Improved Disease Immunity
Body
Medically reviewed by Munson Healthcare Family Medicine Physician, Taylor Schuch, DO
Whether it's cold and flu season or just another busy time of year, staying healthy often starts with supporting your immune system. Your body's defense network relies on a combination of healthy habits, including nutritious foods, regular exercise, quality sleep, and stress management. By making a few intentional choices each day, you can help your immune system perform at its best and better protect yourself from common illnesses.
Highlights
You can support your immune system through upgrading daily habits.
Foods like fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains are all immune-supporting foods rich in key nutrients.
Preventive health measures such as frequent handwashing and routine screening can also help protect and strengthen immunity.
How Does the Immune System Work?
The immune system is an interconnected system made up of different organs, cells, and proteins that work together to help prevent many foreign germs from invading your body.
A properly functioning immune system can quickly decipher between your body's own cells versus invasive germs that can cause infection and inflammation (like viruses and bacteria). But when your immune system fails to act quickly and protect you from these invading germs, health problems can develop.
Proven Ways to Boost Your Immune System
Nutrition
Just like a poor diet filled with processed foods, saturated fats, and sugar can cause inflammation and lead to chronic conditions like heart disease or Type 2 diabetes, a healthy diet can also influence your immune system.
Consuming whole, nutrient-dense foods like lean proteins, healthy grains, legumes (beans), seeds, and plenty of vegetables and fruit feeds your body the essential nutrients it needs to function optimally–and that includes your immune system.
In addition to fueling your body providing energy, many of these foods naturally contain immune-boosting vitamins and minerals like vitamin C, zinc, and vitamin D.
Vaccines
Our immune systems respond to foreign germs by producing antibodies that can help us fight off these invaders before they cause infection and other harmful side effects. Because vaccines introduce these germs in small doses of an inert (aka inactivated) form of the virus, you get the same immune response benefits without the risk infection and symptoms of disease. In addition, vaccines help diminish symptoms should you still become ill, keeping you out of the hospital.
“Even when we are healthy, our bodies can have difficulty fighting certain viruses and bacteria. Some infections can cause serious illness and, in severe cases, may even be life-threatening,” says Taylor Schuch, DO, family medicine physician at Munson Healthcare Elmwood Primary Care. “Vaccines play an important role in helping prepare and strengthen the immune system to protect against dangerous viruses and bacteria.”
Even better, once we reach herd immunity through vaccination (typically 70 percent of the population or more), dangerous viruses and bacteria have far less chance of spreading, even among those who are unable to receive vaccines.
Stress Reduction
Excess stress can cause your body to make more amounts of certain hormones, such as cortisol. While healthy levels of these stress hormones can actually boost your immune system, a surge in hormones like cortisol can have the opposite effect—decreasing your white blood cell count and promoting inflammation.
In turn, this can put your immune system into overdrive, putting you at higher risk for infection. Reducing stress through activities like meditation, mindfulness, yoga, participating in behavioral therapy, and building your long-term resilience can prevent this.
Fitting in regular exercise, like walking, riding your bike, yoga, or playing a sport, plays a significant role in keeping your immune system robust and standing guard. To boot, exercise can help fight the immune system's natural tendency to weaken as we age.
Aim for at least 150 minutes a week, or approximately 30 minutes per day, five days per week. Regular movement can also promote better sleep, another important immune-boosting measure.
Screenings and Routine Check-ups
Improve your immune system can be challenging if you suffer from chronic inflammation and other health conditions. Seeing your primary care provider on a routine basis and following through with recommended screenings can help identify potential health threats you may be unaware of that can worsen over time without expert medical intervention.
Knowing your current health status and working alongside your primary care provider and other specialists can help empower you to make the right health decisions that will naturally help boost and protect your immune system.
Scheduling Your Next Appointment
Don’t delay your care. Munson Healthcare primary care providers and specialists are here for you in Northern Michigan.
Contact your primary care provider to schedule your annual exam. If you don’t have a primary care provider, call the Munson Healthcare Ask-A-Nurse line at 231-935-0951 or search online for a provider near you.
If you have immediate questions about your specific symptoms, call Munson Healthcare Ask-a-Nurse at 231-935-0951. A team of registered nurses are answering questions 24 hours a day at no charge to you (no insurance is required).
