Over the past 25 years, I’ve developed a diet that effectively boosts the immune system quickly and speeds healing in most patients.

I wouldn’t call this is a “healthy diet,” however. A “healthy diet” would be how a healthy person would eat to stay healthy, right? This diet is how you’d want to eat if you were sick or if your body was having some long-term stress. In these cases, you’d wish to boost your immune system to the maximum.

Another point is that this isn’t a “diet.” It’s more a set of guidelines for tweaking your existing diet to improve your immune response. To do this, you probably won’t have to make major changes in how you eat. Changing your diet can be stressful and difficult, and the intention here is only to help you recover your health.

There are seven “checks” that you’ll do on your existing diet. If you are not violating the check, there’s nothing for you to do there. Move on!

The checks are in order of importance, so you know what to work on first to get the fastest result.

It’s imperative to realize that no diet is right for everyone. In your particular case, there could be valuable additions to these basic checks that you might need. As well, the “order of importance” might be slightly different in your specific situation.

But generally, this guideline will work wonders for most people.

Remember: These are in order of importance.

Check One: Don’t raise your blood sugar level

Blood sugar is the single most important dietary check you can do. Nothing else you can do for your immune system will be as effective as keeping your blood sugar from spiking.

To fully understand this fascinating connection, read BOOST YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM.

Here’s how to avoid raising your blood sugar:

• Don’t eat refined sugar (cake, candy, cookies, soda, wine, beer).
• Fruit contains a lot of sugar. Sugar is sugar: Don’t eat more than three 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.
• When buying food with a label: Check that the sugar per serving is 5 grams or less.

Check Two: Don’t eat dairy milk or cream

There are three things wrong with milk and cream, which makes these foods extreme immune stressors:

1. Milk is baby formula for cows, jammed with sugar. An 8 ounce cup of milk has 13 grams of sugar (4 teaspoons)—compare this to a soft drink with 16 grams of sugar. Drinking any amount of milk can raise your blood sugar.
2. Milk contains proteins that don’t digest properly in a human gut. Cows, if you recall, have four stomachs and can digest things we can’t. The proteins cause immune stress and mucous.
3. Regular milk is very nasty. It has added hormones, pesticides, herbicides, drugs for the cows; you name it. Buying organic pretty much handles this problem but still leaves items 1 and 2.

Cheese and yogurt come from milk processed by bacteria. The bacteria LOVE sugar (another reason not to raise your blood sugar) and eat all the milk sugar. In the process, they break down the proteins and make them more digestible. Butter is milk fat, without the sugar and proteins. So cheese, yogurt, and butter are great for most people (although you’d want to get organic). Note that yogurt must be plain; a cup of fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt has an astounding 36 grams of sugar (9 teaspoons of sugar!).

Check Three: Don’t eat fast foods

Fast food restaurants are price-driven. They must buy the cheapest food possible and keep it as long as necessary to get it sold and not thrown out.

Problem: Cheap food tastes terrible. Enter food chemistry, the art of photo-shopping food using chemicals. It’s possible to alter the taste, smell, texture, and color of foods this way, allowing cheap food to taste and look good.

Problem: This also makes food toxic.

Example: A Chick-fil-A sandwich has 55 ingredients, including MSG, artificial colors Yellow 5 and Blue 1, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Potassium Iodate, and Dimethylpolysiloxane. Here’s the full list.

Fast food usually contains preservatives to allow it to have a longer shelf life. We have a 15-year-old Happy Meal at the clinic to show patients; it looks like you could still eat it. Maybe those preservatives they use are closer to embalming agents?

Check Four: Eat at least three meals per day

Skipping meals causes your body to go into catabolism, which stresses your adrenal glands. In most cases of chronic disease, the adrenal glands are involved, as they handle physical and mental stress. The way to help them get well is to let them rest. To do this, you must take control of your blood sugar by eating a meal every four hours and snacks between if needed.

Check Five: Eat protein with every meal

Protein is required by your body to make cells and rebuild damaged tissue. There is a limit to how much protein your body can absorb for this purpose each meal. If you’re trying to heal, making sure your body is “tanked up” on protein is essential. Also:

• Protein digests more slowly than other foods like carbohydrates and will keep you feeling full longer.
• Protein can’t cause your blood sugar to spike like carbohydrates.
• Protein can boost your metabolism, which can give your body more energy to heal.

Check Six: Convert snacks into protein snacks

Snacks should have three parts:

1. Eat a small amount of carbohydrate or sugar (fruit) to raise your blood sugar (you’re usually snacking because you have lowered blood sugar and feel hungry).
2. Eat some protein to buffer the carb or fruit to prevent it from spiking your blood sugar. Also, protein eaten regularly will smooth out your blood sugar and reduce stress on your adrenal glands.
3. Eat some fat, which also buffers carbohydrates and lengthens the time until you’re hungry again.

Check Seven: Reduce the amount of refined carbohydrates you’re eating

If you’re already working on reducing your carbs, ignore this one. Eating enough carbs is important to your energy level, and also to healing. If you’re eating lots of bread, pasta, and rice almost every meal, you can probably cut your carbs in half without suffering or feeling hungry. The only difficulty with this is serving yourself a smaller portion (yikes!) and then not having seconds. Willpower!

Diet can help with a health problem, but won’t solve one

Diet as a cure for illness is a thoroughly researched subject.

Once a person has a chronic health condition, diet change alone won’t get them well. Now it’s also true that you probably can’t get well without changing to a less stressful diet, it’s just not going to work if that’s all you do.

Learn about what does work to end chronic health conditions:

THE SOLUTION TO CHRONIC HEALTH CONDITIONS is to assist the body so that it continues to heal and become healthier and more resilient, finally achieving a good quality of life and stable health with labs showing normal ranges.