In our days almost no foods are off limit. Even in the most bitter days of winter there’s an abundant choice of fruits and vegetables on the shelves of supermarkets. Aubergines and courgettes that don’t come in till late spring/ early summer are available all year round, just like strawberries, Read more…
The spring is in full swing and the sun shines a bit more brightly (when it does). In fact, it begins to trick me into thinking it’s summer whenever I look out to the sunlit garden, or when I’m out and about in the full sun – even if it Read more…
It’s not always easy to turn our lives around and start something new without a clear plan. When we want to change our diet or start exercising, it’s easier to turn to someone who has expertise and knows exactly what to do and how to do it. And so we choose to buy a plan and follow it, rather thank spend time finding out through trial and error what works and what doesn’t. We want to get results and we want them quick.
But even the best sought after diet plans and exercise routines don’t always work the way we expect them to, or only work for a limited time until we lose the motivation to continue. Why does this happen? Why do we fail to follow the plan until the end or stick to newly built routines after the goal is reached?
It’s funny how I started my last post saying that October was finally here and now all I can think about is that it’s almost over, with just a few days of it left. Before we know it, it’s Halloween and the beautiful pumpkins will be gone from stores for Read more…
It’s October and pumpkins are back on the shelves of the grocery stores all across the country. Of course, in Ireland, the main purpose of a pumpkin is not for soup making. You could guess that easily by just looking at the labels stuck on the orange coloured vegetables’ skin: Read more…
The Soup Season is back and I couldn’t be more excited! Not a soup person by nature, I find little joy in regular veg soups or any other soups. Year after year, the only time I would get a soup was when I was sick and couldn’t eat anything else. Read more…
What is Balanced Living?
I often use this in my hashtags and advocate for a balanced lifestyle, but what is it – the balanced living? And how does one go about achieving it?
In simple terms, creating a balanced lifestyle is the conscious choice to counteract the stress and negativity in our lives, as well as other harmful factors. For example, it is a conscious choice to practice a positive attitude to counteract the stress and engaging in activities that bring the feeling of content and happiness. It is a conscious choice to lead a more active lifestyle to combat the sedentary day job you may have. It is a conscious choice to make healthy, nutritious foods the staple of your diet but not forgetting to treat yourself every once in a while – because it nurtures the feeling of balance too.
We have officially entered the dark times, which I thought we would never have to witness – a pandemic that has spread, against all hopes, throughout the world much faster than anticipated.
Just slightly over two weeks ago the Irish newspapers broke in uproar as the first case of COVID-19 has been confirmed in Ireland, while people watched in terror how Coronavirus swept Italy and China, among other countries, into an endless turmoil.
But this is not another post about how to ‘cure’ Coronavirus. We know that there are no known treatments for the new deadly disease today, and educating about the spread and prevention of the disease is the responsibility of the official healthcare organisations, such as the WHO or HSE.
What I can tell you, however, is that boosting your immune system can help you stay healthy in the long run, and this is especially important in the days like these. The stronger your immune system is, the better and more efficient is its response to disease, Coronavirus or not.
Our immune system depends on many different factors – from the food we eat to the quality of the air we breathe. In go our lifestyles: how active we are, how much time we spend outside in the fresh air, how much we are exposed to toxic substances, what our stress levels are, etc. Some of the factors we don’t have much control over, for example, the quality of air in the area we live in; but there are other factors that we can control: like our response to stress, our physical activity levels and, of course, our diets.
The weather is still not great in many parts of the Northern hemisphere, and after a long winter our bodies are most likely to be depleted of many vital nutrients – this makes us even more susceptible to disease and makes it twice as important to get our diets back on track.
So how can you boost your immune system? The easiest way to answer this question is to say ‘Why, by eating nutritious foods, of course!’
But in reality it’s not as simple. Different people have different levels of understanding of what nutritious is. To complicate things further, food companies use various claims about their products’ nutrition profiles, often without any scientific basis behind it. You see, many of the claims they make on packaging are not regulated for the lack of clear definition. For example, the food must contain at least 12% of energy from protein can be claimed as ‘a source of protein‘ and over 20% of energy from protein can be claimed as ‘high or rich in protein‘, but how do you define and measure ‘Nutritious‘?
You can check what different nutritional and health claims mean here.
So for the purposes of this post, we will look at the essential vitamins and minerals that play a role in building your immune system. Let’s divide them by categories first and talk about each separately.
Vitamins are organic compounds that are required in small quantities for the human body to function properly. Many different vitamins play various roles in keeping our immune system up, but in case of seasonal flu and worse ailments, the vitamins that matter the most are Vitamin A, C and D.
‘Have a carrot, my dear! It has Vitamin A’, my mom used to tell me. Of course, I had very little idea why I should even bother with this vitamin A. She would explain that it’s important for healthy vision, and I would argue that I can see great. To be completely honest, I never developed the love for carrots.
But VitA is very important for the immune system as well, partly because of it’s anti-inflammatory properties. Studies have shown that it can play a vital role in protecting against infectious disease and could even have a therapeutic effect.
Preformed VitA can only be found in animal products, as it is synthesised from its inactive form (provitamin) by the animal’s body. However, many orange and fruits and vegetables are rich sources of provitamin A, from which your body makes your own VitA in the amount it requires. So to get your vitamin A safely, include the following foods into your diet:
Everyone knows about this vitamin and its role in the immune system, the reason for which, again, is the anti-inflammatory properties it possesses. VitC is one of the most powerful antioxidants and may not only keep a doctor away, but also help protect your youthful look and prevent many other non-infectious diseases.
VitC cannot be made in the body, therefore, it is required to be taken through food on a daily basis. The sources of VitC are:
This sunshine vitamin is something that people in Ireland generally lack in. But VitD is capable of modulating the immune response in our bodies, thus reducing our susceptibility to disease. This, along with its bone-strengthening properties, makes VitD very important.
Unfortunately, this vitamin cannot be found in plant foods, so your best bets are VitD fortified cereal and plant-based milks, supplements and sunshine. Luckily, we are now well into spring and the weather should improve soon. Make sure that you catch a bit of sunshine each day that it’s available (15 minutes without wearing any sunscreen).
You can safely get your exposure without interacting with other people, which is important for not increasing anyone’s chances to get infected with COVID-19. Simply go for a stroll on your own, keeping away from passers-by, or ‘lounge’ in your garden or even on a balcony. Sit by the sunlit window, if you wish.
Minerals, unlike vitamins, are inorganic compounds that are also required for a healthy body. The functions of minerals in the body are many, from building bones to helping transmit the neural impulses and even maintaining the heartbeat. The key point here is that without a regular intake of certain minerals, your body can become depleted and lead to serious health issues. Now let’s take a look at the minerals that play the utmost role in the immune system.
Iron is known to everyone as the mineral that helps deliver oxygen throughout the body. Iron deficiency can cause anaemia, a condition resulting in a low count of red blood cells, or haemoglobin. Aside from anaemia, iron deficiency is known to weaken the immune system and make us prone to infections. In fact, having frequent infections is one of the signs of iron deficiency.
There are two types of iron: heme iron, from animal sources, and non-heme (plant-based) iron. Non-heme iron is inactive form of iron that our bodies need to convert to heme iron to become available. Heme iron is easily absorbed, because an animal body has already done the work for us. However, consuming non-heme iron gives your body control over how much iron it needs to convert and absorb. To avoid the harmful effects of too much iron, I always suggest to load up on non-heme iron instead.
Sources of non-heme iron are:
Magnesium is an essential mineral that takes part in many biochemical processes in the body. Magnesium deficiency is linked to many disorders, such as uncontrollable blood glucose and diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and, of course, inflammation. Frequent infections can also signal that your magnesium stores are depleted. But luckily, magnesium can be found in many yummy foods. Here’s the list:
Apart from being another powerful antioxidant with anti-inflammatory properties, Zinc plays a more direct role in the immune system because it is critical for development and function of the immune cells. In fact, it is so crucial for normal immune function that studies have found a link between Zinc deficiency and premature deaths, mostly from infections. Fortunately, Zinc can also be easily obtained from the following foods:
Though seemingly the same, prebiotics and probiotics are two different things. Probiotics are live microorganisms that support the gut health, and we all know that immune system starts in the gut, right? Prebiotics, on the other hand, are compounds, consisting mostly of fermentable carbohydrates, that provide favourable environment for the good bacteria to grow. These two types of nutrients are essential if you want to be healthy.
Known sources of probiotics include: yogurt (plant-based, too!), sauerkraut, pickles, miso and tempeh.
Known sources of prebiotics: garlic powder, steel-cut oats, quinoa, bananas, beans and apples.
I have emphasised so many times that when choosing your produce, you should always opt for seasonal and local if it’s available, because the foods that are out of season and/or have travelled a long distance to get to your supermarket shelf are most likely to be depleted of many nutrients by the time they reach your table.
However, we now live in the times of crisis. The shelves of supermarkets have gone empty; the supply chain could be suffering and as a result, we have only one option: to buy what is available.
This is where frozen produce could come in handy. Did you know that there is no nutritional disadvantage to frozen fruits and vegetables? In fact, they could be more nutritious because they weren’t lying around in storage rooms or on the shelves for days. Frozen can be a perfect option for such times when fresh fruit and veg are hard to come by.
But hopefully we will be out of this crisis soon and able to go back to our normal grocery shopping routines, not to mention lifestyles!
I often play association games in my mind. Like, things that associate with autumn? Apart from the obvious red and yellow leaves, blazing sunsets and rainy or windy days? It’s apple picking and apple ciders, hiking and knitting, sitting by the fire (and the smell of it), carving pumkins for Read more…
Organic food was something relatively unheard of up until the last decade. And then the markets suddenly filled up with expensive organic produce now sitting on the shelves right next to their normal, cheaper peers, and harassing people as they questioned, unaware of what organic was, why should they pay Read more…