Boost Your Immune System

Don’t Get Sick, Boost Your Immune System

Mostly I don’t think very much about my immune system… it chugs along keeping me protected and repaired without bringing any attention to itself.

That is, until I start to get sick. Then I’m really paying attention to my immune system!

Will I get really sick, or will my immune system win and I’ll be better by tomorrow? I feel like I’m in the last minutes of the big game, the invaders are ahead by 3 points and I’m on my feet screaming for the home team to pull off that big win. Come, ON immune system! Kill those guys! Win WIN WIN!!

What I have for you is a secret weapon to boost and energize your immune system (so it can WIN more often). It won’t cost you anything, you don’t have to swallow pills and it works phenomenally well.

But: You must understand how to work it, or you’ll mess up and still get sick.

How to Work It

Your body has a very efficient system for protecting itself from invaders such as viruses, bacteria, funguses, etc. A very important part of this system is the body’s ability to identify and destroy any invaders that get inside.

In the 1970’s Dr. Linus Pauling (one of the greatest researchers in the field of microbiology and only scientist to ever win TWO Nobel Prizes) made a critical discovery about the immune system that you can use to stay well. The fact that you likely haven’t heard of this research demonstrates how our society ignores what it doesn’t want to agree with.

Here’s how it works:

Your immune system disposes of invaders (like bacteria and viruses) by literally swallowing them with a special type of cell called a phagocyte. This is a cell (example: a white blood cell) that engulfs and absorbs waste material, harmful microorganisms or other foreign bodies in the bloodstream and tissues.

Dr. Pauling discovered that white blood cells use vitamin C to dissolve and absorb the invaders once they’ve been engulfed.  A white blood cell needs a 50 X concentration of vitamin C (compared to the amount of C in the blood) to be as efficient as possible in dissolving toxins and invaders. To maintain this concentration of C, the cell pulls in vitamin C as needed from the bloodstream around it.

Glucose (sugar in its simplest form, as found in the blood stream) and vitamin C have a similar chemical structure. So similar, in fact, that when a white blood cell tries to pull in more vitamin C from the blood around it, glucose can get substituted by mistake. If the concentration of glucose in the blood goes beyond a certain concentration (in other words, if your blood sugar level gets too high), the white blood cell’s 50 X vitamin C concentration can start to drop because of the large amount of glucose it’s pulling in as a substitute for vitamin C.

In fact, the blood sugar level created by eating some candy, cookies, drinking a sweet drink or juice can reduce the white blood cell’s vitamin C concentration from 50X to about 13X. This cuts your immune system’s ability to absorb and destroy toxins and invaders by 75%. Worse, it can take four to six hours for the vitamin C concentration in the white blood cells to reach that optimum 50 X concentration again and return your immune system to normal efficiency.

The Secret Immune Weapon:

To boost your immune system, don’t raise your blood sugar level!

Here’s how to avoid this:

  1. Don’t eat refined sugar (cake, candy, cookies, soda, wine, beer). Refined sugar is processed to make it absorb more rapidly into your bloodstream (which is why we love it SO MUCH… it’s the sugar high). Also, most foods containing refined sugar contain a LOT of it (cake, candy, cookies, etc.). This combination of a lot of sugar that absorbs rapidly is the nuclear option: you WILL raise your blood sugar, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
  2. Fruit contains a lot of sugar. Sugar is sugar. Your white blood cells can’t tell if the sugar they’re pulling in instead of the vitamin C comes from bananas or lollypops. Some guidelines about eating fruit: Don’t eat more than 3 servings a day, and not at the same time. Don’t drink fruit juice of any kind (it’s refined sugar). Eat protein (meat, eggs, nuts) WITH the fruit to buffer it. The protein slows down the sugar being absorbed in your stomach so that it doesn’t raise the blood sugar nearly as much.
  3. When buying food with a label: Check that the sugar per serving is 5 grams or less.

Summary: Don’t eat any kind of sugar if you’re sick, including the much-recommended orange juice (which may contain vitamin C, but this won’t help if the white blood cells can’t get past the sugar to use it!).

The Long-term (Chronic) Illness Connection

If you’re trying to recover from a chronic illness (arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, hormone problems, depression, anxiety, digestive problems, etc., etc.) you must know that your body is damaged because your immune system has been unable to keep up with the repair work.

Bodies rebuild and repair themselves every minute of every day. In the time you read this sentence, your body has replaced about 50 million cells. If you wish to recover your health, you’d want to help your body in any way you can to rebuild cells more rapidly. If your body could catch up, it might repair much of the damage from your illness and you could be dramatically better.

Here’s the Problem:

As your body replaces cells during the healing process, much of the material from the old, replaced cells becomes toxins that must be gotten out of your body. The faster your body heals, the more toxins from dead cells it must deal with. If you are already very toxic (this is true for almost anyone with a chronic health problem), your body can rapidly “hit the ceiling” of toxicity, because it’s trying to replace too many cells too quickly.

In this case, your body has no choice but to stop or slow the healing process to bring the toxic level into a manageable range.

If you could help your body get rid of the dead cells more efficiently, it could increase the healing capacity enough to help you recover.

Guess what? The only way your body can get rid of dead cells is… white blood cells! So, if you follow the above guidelines for not raising your blood sugar level on a long-term basis, it can increase your body’s capacity to heal from chronic illness.

Talk to us about some great sugar substitutes you can use! And the next time you go to the drug store and notice that the cough syrup contains mostly sugar, you can wonder as we do what happened to Dr. Pauling’s valuable research that no one seems to remember.

Start Now! Get Healthy!

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information that shows how your body works and how to start recovering your health for the rest of your life).

Photo Credit: By Volker Brinkmann – (November 2005). “Neutrophil engulfing Bacillus anthracis”. PLoS Pathogens 1 (3): Cover page. DOI:10.1371. Retrieved on 2009-01-04., CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2107792

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Food Misconceptions

Reading this post will likely improve your health

“I eat what I like.”

That pretty much sums up the most common reason for food choices I’ve heard.

For 25 years I’ve been successfully helping people change their health by educating them about food. From this experience, I can say that if you read this post, you’ll likely make some change in your food choices that will positively impact your health.

Food Misconceptions

MISCONCEPTION: Food is fuel, like gas in your car. You can fill up on almost anything edible, it doesn’t matter.

TRUTH: Look in the mirror for a second. Pinch your cheek. How old is that tissue you’re pinching? Would you believe it’s less than three months old? Cells don’t live very long and are constantly being replaced. That face you’re looking at in the mirror is almost brand-new (if it has wrinkles and looks old, it’s because bodies are designed to change appearance and function as they age. But the tissue it’s made of is being continuously regenerated).

If all those millions of cells are being replaced every hour in your body, where does the raw material come from to make them? The parts that make up your cells are overwhelmingly made from the cellular material from the food you eat. Sure, the body uses food for energy as well, but what you’re seeing in that mirror is the food you’ve eaten in the last few months, transformed into YOU.

MISCONCEPTION: The definition of FOOD is “what you eat.”

TRUTH: Food is the living (fresh or preserved) tissue of plants and animals. Your body can’t make healthy cells from old, damaged or over-processed plant and animal tissue. It certainly can’t create cell parts from artificial flavors and sweeteners, preservatives and refined sugar.

Two simple rules you could follow to improve your health:

  1. Don’t eat things that aren’t food. (Didn’t your mom used to tell you this when you tried to eat mud pies?)
  2. Don’t eat things that CONTAIN things that aren’t food.

This is a simple test: Is diet soda food? Is (popular brand) pasta sauce food? (Read the label, what are all those unpronounceable chemicals at the end of the ingredient list? They sure aren’t food!)

But there’s a problem: This test is too simple. The truth of this is too obvious.

People freak out.

Patients call me from the grocery store in an actual panic, “There’s no food in here!” The problem is that they’re RIGHT. I tell them that I can don my pith helmet and take them on a safari through the grocery store jungle looking for the elusive FOOD. Lighten it up a bit. But it is grim.

Happily, with a bit of training and help I’ve never had a patient who couldn’t master how to shop. They’re able to eat almost everything they normally would, just with a bit of change here and there to shop for FOOD instead of, well, something else (what DO you call “non-food sold as food”?)

There’s Much More to Know About Food

At my clinic, I teach all my patients some specific dietary tweaks to dramatically improve their immune system. If you’re trying to recover from a health problem (or just need to recover from the flu) these diet tweaks can make all the difference.

A basic fact about food and diet: people don’t need to eat the same foods! For example, if you are having a very hard time being able to deal with stress, you likely have some issues with your adrenal glands and should be careful to eat regularly, as being hungry stresses the adrenals. If you have high cholesterol, you can probably dramatically lower it by reducing sugar and refined carbs from your diet.

At my clinic, I test patients to find out what organs and systems are under stress and help them to adjust their diets based on this testing. How logical is this? Yet, when was the last time you had your doctor tell you anything but “diet,” or “eat less fat.”

Here’s some help:

10 Super Veggies to Boost Your Health

Sugar and Your Immune System

For more helpful information about diet: Read my book, Your Hormones in Harmony: A Smart Woman’s Guide to a Lifetime of Energy, Focus and Vitality

I hope this has helped you to see the possibilities to a proactive approach to controlling your own health rather than hoping for the best.

As always, I’m available to help in any way I can. Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information that shows how your body works and how to bypass the hidden symptoms problem).

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ANXIETY, WORRY & DEPRESSION

Learn about the causes of anxiety and depression, what you can do to reduce your suffering RIGHT NOW and how you can eliminate these problems from your life.

Get Great Information about your Health

  • Weekly blog posts with vital tips and warnings
  • Interesting “pass it along” health facts
  • Cutting edge natural healing techniques and advice
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Anxiety and Depression

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 Anxiety, Worry & Depression

 

Learn about the causes of anxiety and depression, what you can do to reduce your suffering RIGHT NOW and how you can eliminate these problems from your life.

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