Immunity-boosting dietary recommendations

If you want to rely on diet to improve your immunity, the core logic has never been to follow the trend of Internet celebrities and eat "immune magic products". Instead, you should first build a solid nutritional foundation for your daily diet, and then supplement key nutrients according to your own condition. At the same time, you should avoid several dietary pitfalls that can easily damage your immunity. This is the most practical conclusion after I have been doing clinical nutrition consulting for 5 years and communicated with more than 200 visitors who have suffered from repeated colds and allergies when changing seasons.

I have seen too many people come up and ask "is it useful to take spore powder or lactoferrin?" I just received a young girl who just started working a while ago. She spends half of her monthly salary on various immune supplements. She still catches an average of one cold every three weeks. During the blood test, her serum albumin was higher than normal. The value was almost 5g lower. When I asked, I found out that in order to catch up with her commute, she always had pancakes without eggs for breakfast. The takeaway dishes at noon always only had two or three thin slices. She couldn't even guarantee an egg or a bag of milk every day. No matter how many supplements she took, it was in vain if she couldn't fill the gap in basic nutrition.

Speaking of this, some people may ask, does that mean supplements are completely useless? In fact, there are two different views on this matter in the nutrition circle: one group insists that dietary supplements are completely sufficient and believes that as long as the daily diet is balanced, there is no need to spend extra money on supplements. The other group believes that people generally eat a lot of takeaways and have irregular work and rest schedules, making it difficult to eat enough basic nutrients. Proper supplementation can reduce the risk of weakened immunity. In fact, both statements are correct. It all depends on your own situation: if you can cook three meals a day at home, including meat, eggs, milk, and vegetables, and you don’t have to stay up late for a long time, do high-intensity exercise, or just have surgery, etc., then dietary supplements are indeed enough. ； But if you eat takeout or vegetarian food all year round, or if you happen to be recovering from a cold or working overtime in preparation for exams recently, taking supplements such as multivitamins, zinc, and lactoferrin to make up for the gap will not be counted as paying the IQ tax at all.

There really is no need to make this matter too complicated. When we make adjustments to our clients, we never ask them to count grams and calories. We just remember the stupidest way: just put together "a punch of staple food, a palm-sized portion of protein, and a handful of green leafy vegetables" for each meal. There was an aunt who ate boiled cabbage every day in order to prevent her from getting sick. She caught two colds in half a month and was very tired when she came here. I asked her to add a boiled egg every day, a handful of plain nuts in the afternoon, and 2 taels of lean pork for dinner. I didn’t let her take any supplements. When I checked again after half a month, the albumin returned to the normal range. Even she laughed, saying that she had misunderstood "light" before, and she was so hungry that her immune cells had no energy to work.

Oh, by the way, there is another pitfall that almost everyone has stepped on: eating too much high-sugar food without restraint. Previous controlled experiments have confirmed that ingesting more than 50g of added sugar at one time will reduce the phagocytic ability of neutrophils (the core virus-killing immune cells in your body) by 40%. This effect will last for approximately 5 hours. Think about it, if you drink a 700ml cup of pearl milk tea, half of the immune soldiers will go on strike for most of the day. It would be strange not to catch a cold when the season changes. When I travel a lot on business, I will also take a small box with me, filled with vitamin D and zinc tablets. It’s not that this thing is very useful, but when I eat out every day on a business trip, it is difficult to ensure that I eat enough dark green vegetables and deep-sea fish. It is better to make up for the gap than delaying things with a cold.

Many people have also asked whether probiotics can improve immunity. This depends on the situation: if you have irritable bowel syndrome and often suffer from constipation and diarrhea, then taking appropriate supplements of bifidobacteria can indeed regulate intestinal immunity. After all, 70% of immune cells grow in the intestines.； But if your stomach has always been healthy, there is really no need to spend hundreds of dollars on imported probiotics. Drinking a small box of sugar-free yogurt every day is enough.

In fact, after all, immunity is your body's own defense system. If you give it good energy, it will naturally work well without all the fancy tricks. The most useful example I have seen is a girl who always gets hives when the seasons change. She just changed her afternoon milk tea to sugar-free soy milk and ate steamed seabass three times a week. After three months, the number of allergic attacks was reduced by 80%. You see, it’s that simple. What suits you is the best. If you always copy other people's recipes, it's easy to put the cart before the horse.