Continuing on from Friday’s post about my five favorite immunity boosters (apparently when I write “tomorrow” regarding the next post, I mean “two days later”…lol!), I can’t talk about improving immune response without also talking about what to do when even the strongest immune system comes under attack.

For years I did what most people these days probably do: I would pop cold pills to mask my symptoms so I could “keep going.” However, the more I learn and study real food and herbalism, the more I have come to reject this approach. First of all, cold pills only mask symptoms, they don’t make your body kick the virus any faster. Symptoms are your body doing what it’s supposed to do, fight. And since it is fighting off invaders, the last thing it needs is to “keep going” with whatever your usual routine is. It needs rest so that it can kick virus butt.

When I decided to start foregoing cold pills, I needed to find other ways to naturally ease symptoms that also help my body fight invaders. Here are my five favorite ways to do that:

1. LOTS of rest. Yep, right at the top of the list. When I know I’ve caught a bug, or even when I suspect it, I start trying to rest as much as possible. I’ve had experiences where I feel something coming on in an afternoon, so I get into bed super early—even if I’m watching a movie, or reading, or knitting, or even still blog-reading—I just get myself more horizontal than not, try to relax, and go to sleep early. If I don’t feel better by the next morning, I repeat the resting the next day, and by the following morning, I feel back to normal. The key here is not just more sleep, but more rest. Sleeping more doesn’t help if, when you are awake, you’re pushing your body. To let it fight well, it needs a lot of rest.
2. Raw garlic: Garlic has antiviral and antibacterial properties (as well as antifungal), and since bacterial infections can often accompany colds/flu (which are viral infections), garlic is a great tool for helping kick all of it. But these properties are only active when garlic is raw and chopped/exposed to air; cooking destroys them and garlic pills are useless for fighting active infections. So to use garlic as a medicine, you gotta eat it raw. I’ve read that swallowing it with honey can mask the taste, but I don’t advise this since sugar suppresses the immune system. Best to cut a clove into a few chunks and swallow with water like you would a pill. I will eat one clove of raw garlic 3-4 times per day when I have an active cold. I do it on an empty stomach before breakfast, then with lunch and dinner, and then once more later on. I’ve never had any issues with smelling too garlicy, but even if I did, too bad, lol! I’m trying to get better, not appease others. However, the raw garlic is only a temporary measure. I must also mention that I have recently started hearing that there is apparently a campaign going on to discredit garlic by saying it “disrupts brain waves” or some such nonsense. Considering garlic’s long use throughout history, and my own personal successes using it, I’m not worried. Garlic is a wonderful ally.
3. Elderberry tincture: This one I learned about from Kiva Rose, my other favorite herbalist (along with Susun Weed, mentioned in the last post). To quote Kiva:
   

   “Elderberry does not simply stimulate the immune system, instead, it modulates the immune system to more appropriately respond to environs and circumstance. It also disarms the some cold and flu viruses and helps them flush through body quicker, while strengthening the mucus membranes, supporting the body’s natural fever mechanism without overheating, improves energy and stress handling AND last but certainly not least, it tastes great too.” From the post Elder Mother Immune Elixir

   If you don’t have any elderberry shrubs near you for harvesting your own berries, you can get them or a wonderful ready-made tincture from Mountain Rose Herbs. The tincture is especially nice since the one they offer is not only from organic elderberries (if ever you did not want pesticides in something, you don’t want them in your medicine), its alcohol base is made from organic grapes.  A “tincture” is an herb steeped in high-proof alcohol for many weeks; the alcohol is what pulls the good stuff out of the plant matter. You take only a few drops or dropperfuls of tincture at a time, no more, so you don’t have to worry about getting a buzz off the stuff. But regular alcohol, like the 100-proof vodka many herbalists use to make tinctures, is made from grains; if you are avoiding grains, you can use this particular tincture without concern regarding the alcohol used to make it.

4. Avoid all sugar. Depending on where you are on your real food journey, this one may or may not be difficult. But sugar is a known immune suppressor. While avoiding most sugar all the time is a goal to strive for, avoiding it when you have an active infection is important. The body can kick out a cold more quickly if blocks to healing are removed.
5. More bone broth: As I mentioned in my post about immune boosters, bone broth is a major player. When I get a cold, I eat more of it than normal, up to 2-3 times per day, either just warmed and in a mug or made into a soup for a full meal.

So those are my five favorites at this point in my journey. I know that some of these are easier to do than others. The most difficult things will be rest and avoiding sugar, but I believe that both are really important for fighting colds and for general well-being. The fact that we balk at these ideas says a lot about our culture and our health. I truly believe that incorporating more rest into our lives and consuming much less sugar daily are significant first steps toward reclaiming full health.

It seems I can’t go a day without hearing about someone “catching a cold” or about someone who knows someone who has the flu (or swine flu, or H1N1, or whatever strain the media are scaring us into believing are out to get us). Sure, it’s winter, so it’s “that time of year.” But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if winter just meant cold weather, and not an inevitable cold?

This has been my goal for awhile now, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. While lots of factors play into whether or not I (or anyone) catches a cold, I realized that the most basic thing I could do to significantly lessen my chances of catching anything was to build up my immune system via nutrients & rest. So I started reading up on my options, and as of this winter, I’ve got five favorites that seem to pack the most punch: bone broth, butter, minerals, sauerkraut, and rest.

I am a firm believer that the main “medicine” we should ingest, and spend money on, is real food. So much can be healed by food that if the knowledge really spread, the pharmaceutical industry would be done for. They’ve taken certain elements of real foods, extracted them, and put them into pills (with 45 seconds of listed side effects—my favorite that most commercials mention: “risk of death.” Oh gee, now I really wanting to try that pill). And then they spend billions to convince us that we need those pills to be healthy. Well, in a sense they are right; whatever substance they’ve extracted and put into the pill probably is a substance we need…but we don’t need it from a pill. We can get it “for free” from food. Ok, yes, food isn’t free. But if we spend just a little bit more on good, real food—food that is full of so much good stuff that not only our bodies need but that our bodies can actually break down and use without side effects—we would not need to spend twice as much on pills. As we keep hearing in the health care debate, health care is a right. Indeed it is, but I think of it as a right to just say no to “health” that requires piles of money to acquire and instead a right to embrace health I create on my own with simple foods.

So in a bit more detail, my five favorite immunity boosters to help keep the pills away…

1. Eat bone broth regularly. “Good broth resurrects the dead.” –South American proverb, as quoted in Nourishing Traditions. When you hear old tales about how chicken soup helps fight colds, the “chicken soup” they mean is NOT the vapid, tasteless muck sold in cans in stores (Cambell’s chicken soup…ugh, how did I ever think that was actual chicken soup?). They’re talking about real chicken soup made from bone broth. Bone broth does require cooking, so someone could argue that it’s not a “simple” remedy. It’s not as easy as popping a cold pill, obviously. But it is simple enough that the rewards to be had from consuming bone broth on a regular basis so completely outweigh any “trouble” you go through to make it that I consider it my main line of defense against a list of ailments, colds/flu being just one. I plan to write in detail about the benefits of bone broth, but for now check out this WAPF article.
2. Eat grass-fed butter. More specifically, increase your intake of fat-soluble vitamins. Fat-soluble vitamins are vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin K, and vitamin E. But here’s the catch: you can’t just pop these as pills and get the full benefit. To be properly used by the body, they need all their cofactors, which you get when you eat them in food. Happily, getting more of these vitamins & their helpers into your diet is not only easy, but delicious. You will find the most fat-soluble vitamins in quality animal fats (fat-soluble vitamins need to be eaten in/with fat to be properly absorbed): grass-fed butter, pastured whole eggs, yogurt, raw milk cheese, raw milk, and meats from pastured animals. If you can’t do all of these, I’d suggest going with grass-fed butter. An excellent source, and one that I think is fairly widely available, is Kerrygold Irish butter; it might seem expensive compared to what you usually buy, but try buying just one a week and working it into your diet; as an example, veggies have a lot of fat-soluble vitamins in them, but they need to be eaten with fat for your body to get those vitamins…so adding butter to veggies is an easy way to up your vitamin intake. Remember, small additions are better than none, and the extra fat-soluble vitamins to be had from adding in just a small amount of grass-fed butter are worth it. As for the other sources, add them in as you can. Of course, replacing your current dairy & meat consumption with grass-fed is the ideal, but if you can’t do that yet, just buy some when you can, here and there. Think of them as vitamin shots: instead of spending money on vitamin pills, which are rarely absorbed well, can cause reactions due to their coating, and cost too much compared to the return they give, spend the money on good food. You can also budget to buy more of them in the fall and through the winter to boost your immune system when the bad bugs are more likely to be looking for hosts.
3. Ingest more minerals. If you’re eating bone broths and grass-fed butter, you’re already getting a lot more minerals. But I know I’ve been nutrient-starved for so long—and so much in modern life/diet leeches minerals from our bodies—that I’ll say again, every little bit helps. One simple thing I did is that I switched to using real sea salt (“Celtic Sea Salt” brand is my favorite) instead of refined table salt. It’s full of minerals as well as flavor. My other favorite way to get more minerals is to drink nourishing herbal infusions on a regular basis. I learned about herbal infusions a few years ago from Susun Weed, and they are a very, very simple way to boost mineral intake. Happily, Susun is now making videos, and here’s a video of her explaining infusions:
   
   Growing your own herbs is best, but if you can’t, or if you’re like me, you just don’t have them growing yet (I’ve got my seeds–can’t wait for a huge nettle patch!), you can buy all the herbs you need, affordably, at Mountain Rose Herbs (1 pound of dried organic nettle is only $8.50; I use 1 oz of dry herb per quart of infusion weekly (drink it over 2-3 days), so 1 lb of herb lasts me 4 months!).
4. Eat homemade sauerkraut daily. Did you know that sauerkraut is one of the best sources of vitamin C? Sauerkraut contains something like 10-20 times more vitamin C than cabbage, thanks to fermentation. But here’s the catch: you’ve got to make your own, because pretty much every brand of sauerkraut on the market is pasteurized, even the organics, and heat kills not only the good enzymes of sauerkraut but also destroys the vitamin C created during the fermentation. Lucky for us, it’s easy & cheap to make, since you need only three ingredients: cabbage, salt, jar. A head of organic cabbage doesn’t cost much, maybe $1-2, and will yield about a pint of sauerkraut (give or take). Of course, if you love kraut, you’ll want to keep more on hand. Happily, it gets better with age, so if you plan to buy a few heads of cabbage and have a marathon kraut-making session, you’ll be in kraut for months. The best book on the subject is Wild Fermentation, and its author has generously provided the how-to for sauerkraut on this page (I’ll post soon on how I’ve been experimenting with making it in small batches).
5. Sleep, sleep, rest, sleep. And more rest. Nothing attracts sickness like unending stress and being on-the-go (which I learned the hard way, especially when I was teaching). No matter what, every single person needs downtime, rest, relaxation, and enough sleep. Everyone. No excuses.

So there they are, my five favorite things to do to help keep my immune system humming along. I hope the information helps someone out there! Tomorrow I’ll post about five simple things I do to fight an active cold/infection if I get one, things I’ve tried and that have worked for me.

This post is part of Fight Back Friday for February 26, 2010.

Whoops…I’m a bit late posting my next month’s self-challenges…heh. *blush*

As for the January self-challenges, I “won” two out of three. I’d posted already that I decided to forego the no-TV challenge, since I just missed it too much. NOT the ads and NOT the news—I refuse to watch either (egads, I’ve become my father…I mute commercials!). But there are a handful of shows I just really enjoy watching, and since during the day I’m usually writing or doing chores or cooking or tending the gardens, I really do like sitting down to watch Bones or Chuck or Fringe or Lost (other favs include Extreme Makeover Home Edition, Big Bang Theory, Human Target, and Cougar Town). Sometimes I knit or crochet while watching, sometimes I’ll do pixel art on the computer. But I enjoy following along with those stories enough that I’m not yet ready to let them go (I wanna know how they end! ).

As for line-drying laundry…not only am I still doing it, but I really enjoy it. A lot. Ok, ok, I’m weird. I admit it. But I thought I’d made that clear already? (No? I haven’t? Well, here ya go: I’m an odd duck!) There is something soothing about hanging laundry and taking in dry, sun-warmed laundry that I enjoy. I actually had to use the dryer one time because a blanket I’d washed, one favored by Bast, still had lots of cat hair on it. So I used the dryer on a no-heat setting so as to remove the extra hair. But I resented having to use it; I need to figure out a way to remove cat hair without it (and without going through a lint roller a day). There has to be a way, surely…

And the January real food self-challenge was successful…hence this blog.

So for February, here are the three goals I’d like to make:

1. Learn to make real bread from scratch and make all the bread that I and my roommate eat. So far, so good on making the bread. Right now I’m learning how often I need to bake a loaf so that there is always bread. My roommate loves this goal of mine, lol. She loves the bread so much that she said she now refuses to buy store-made, so I better keep making more bread! lol! We’re splitting the cost of flour, too, so it works out really well. And the better I’m getting at the dutch oven method, the easier it is to keep loaves coming.
2. Make my own kombucha. I’d forgotten how much I love kombucha until I bough a couple of bottles this week. Ooooh man, that’s good stuff. But NOT cheap. Happily, it appears to be super duper easy to make your own, so I’m going to use that recipe and try it very soon. I’ve got everything I need (organic tea, bottle of raw kombucha, big jars), so next week I’m going to start growing my own SCOBY and then after that, brew my first batch. I’ll use organic fruit juice when I first make it, so that I get the hang of the process, but very soon I plan to collect tangerines from my neighbor’s tree (he’s got a huge tree full of fruit that he never eats, and has told me to take all I want), juice them, and make tangerine kombucha. Mmmm!
3. Make my own sauerkraut. I’ve had this on my to-do list forever! But now I’ve got cabbage in my fridge and I don’t want it to go bad…so it’s gonna be shredded and mashed and left to ferment very soon. I’ve been craving sauerkraut, but I refuse to buy any, since making it is so simple and I just won’t buy the pasteurized kind. There is no reason why I haven’t made it yet besides the fact that it just keeps getting pushed down the to-do list. Therefore, I make it a self-challenge so that I have to do it, and soon.

Whoops, I better go mix up more dough…bread’s getting low around here!

This post originally appeared on my other blog, Avidly Dreaming.

Seems lately that I’m learning something new every day, and I love it. It’s also funny how, after a few years of reading & absorbing health info, I can easily think I understand stuff. Then I read some more, little nuggets of wisdom start popping up, and light bulbs—ok, make those compact fluorescent light blubs—come on over my head. I love it when that happens.

It happened today.

I’ve been reading all sorts of wonderful real food & health blogs for the past few weeks (links coming soon!), and have been getting loads of information from them. Today I learned that agave nectar is not a natural sweetener, and reading a wonderful post by Food Renegade made even more lights come on when she got to talking about fructose.

BTW, agave nectar is a highly processed sweetener and contains MORE fructose than high fructose corn syrup! I’d been thinking of trying it, but not now.

I know that fructose, and any excess sugars for that matter, are the real evils in the food supply. Too much sugar (actual sugar as well as the kind from carbs) is behind so many of our health problems (and political food issues). But I’d never really gotten my head around the nitty-gritty specifics of why fructose is bad; I mean I understand in a general sense, but I did not know this:

“The sugar that occurs in nature is called “levulose,” sometimes called “L-fructose.” Fructose, on the other hand, is a man-made sugar created by the refining process.

‘…Refined fructose is processed in the body through the liver, rather than digested in the intestine. Levulose [fructose from fruit] is digested in the intestine. (source)’

I want you to pay special attention to those last two sentences, for they are a huge key that will help unlock the mystery of why fructose is bad for you.

Because fructose is digested in your liver, it is immediately turned into triglycerides or stored body fat. Since it doesn’t get converted to blood glucose like other sugars, it doesn’t raise or crash your blood sugar levels. Hence the claim that it is safe for diabetics.

But it isn’t.

That’s because fructose inhibits leptin levels — the hormone your body uses to tell you that you’re full. In other words, fructose makes you want to eat more. Besides contributing to weight gain, it also makes you gain the most dangerous kind of fat.” (Read the entire post at Food Renegade here)

This clicked in so many ways, such as why processed foods rarely fill you up and make you want more (I’d always joked that they put crack cocaine in it) and why there are so many problems with eating it in general. Mess with how your body regulates its sugar, and you mess with fire. This also clicked with something else I read yesterday about how a regular body with normal blood sugars only contains a tablespoon of sugar…and most people consume something like 1.5-2 cups of sugar a day.

All this also jelled with yet another article I’d read recently* about non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and that it’s becoming a new problem. This is when excess fat accumulates in your liver, and if it gets bad enough, can cause liver failure. According to mayoclinic.com, it is “thought to be very common.” Hrm. I kept reading at that site…they list the following as risk factors: “certain medications, gastric bypass surgery, high cholesterol, high levels of triglycerides in the blood, malnutrition, metabolic syndrome, obesity, rapid weight loss, toxins and chemicals, such as pesticides, type 2 diabetes, Wilson’s disease.” Now, I obviously do not have a medical degree, but what I see listed here are many conditions that are caused or exacerbated by eating the Standard American Diet, which means mostly processed food loaded with HFCS and other sugars. Such a diet will obviously overload your liver with fructose, and hence the “common” development of at least a mild form of NAFLD. And then the Mayo Clinic site says, “Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease occurs when your liver has trouble breaking down fats, causing fat to build up in your liver tissue. Doctors aren’t sure what causes this. The wide range of diseases and conditions linked to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is so diverse that it’s difficult to pinpoint any one cause.”

Uh. Hello? I see a fairly obvious cause, myself.

Ok, ok, I’ll let them off the hook. There are lots of reasons why that website has to toe the line of medical-political-correctness. And once I started searching for NAFLD and fructose, lots and lots of sites came up. So many, in fact, that I am sitting here feeling sheepish, as if I should have know all this already, but yet happy that I’m getting enough facts straight in my head to start making sense of all the food info I’m taking in. Here are a few of them:

• “How to fatten your liver” – Whole Health Source
• “Foie gras, c’est moi?” – Dr. Eades (from 2005! I’m sooo late to the party)
• “Missing link between fructose, insulin resistance found” – sciencedaily.com
• “Consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans” – Journal of Clinical Investigation

There is lots more out there. I love the internet.

The good news is that the liver can heal itself, and once we stop force-feeding it fructose, it can repair the damage done. The body really is amazing.

*Yes, I’ve been doing a LOT of reading lately in & among my other things to do. This means I tend to stay up way too late at night. I think the crack is in the internet…

This post originally appeared on my other blog, Avidly Dreaming.

Ok, time to start putting my daily practices where my mouth is. Time to start walkin’ the talk. During my year of switching to as much of a “homesteading” way of life as possible while still living in a suburb, I’ve got to learn new skills (and learn to do without). I am going to challenge myself each month to new ways of doing things, some more radical to me than others, but all in the name of getting used to more self-sufficiency.

And the idea is for the challenge topics to take root as habits and stick around long after the month is over.

So for January, I’m challenging myself to…

• Switch to a real/traditional foods diet. I’ve already started this over the past couple of weeks, and honestly I’m so excited about it that it’s not really going to be much of a challenge. Well, ok, learning to use sprouted & soaked grains instead of refined flour will be a challenge. And, er, affording pastured meats on my budget will be a challenge. But I’m ready to learn to plan ahead and to switch around my shopping list, making do without some other things (such as diet soda) in order to afford it. So we’ll see. My diet will include pastured dairy & meats (raw dairy if I can find it), fermented foods, no processed “food,” no additives/colors/etc, no nitrites, no MSG (already have cut that out), no fake sugars…and the no fake sugars thing means no more Diet Coke. For all my moving to better eating, I still drink that crap. But not this month! My roommate thinks it’s impossible to cut out, lol, and she’ll still be drinking hers. So the temptation will be there. But lately I’ve so enjoyed drinking milk with meals that I actually haven’t wanted any soda. Let’s see how I feel in a week or so…
• No TV. This just means no turning on the tv set…I do enjoy several TV shows, but I will watch them all online. I don’t turn the TV on that much to begin with, since most commercials seem to trigger latent homicidal tendencies in me, but if I know I can’t watch the set, I expect to want to. So I’m challenging myself not to use it. My laptop is all the entertainment center I need (and hey, it’s an Energy Star appliance, and my older, large-and-in-the-way TV is not).
• No clothes dryer. This one should be a no-brainer; I live in Florida, where there is plenty of sun, so drying clothes outside shouldn’t be that much of a hassle. My goals are to learn to live without this particular energy & money eater; I plan to do this challenge again in August when the electric bill typically skyrockets due to A/C. I expect the hard part of this will be getting into the habit of actually taking laundry outside & hanging it (which might take 20 minutes) instead of just tossing it into the dryer (which takes a minute or two), as well as dealing with weather patterns (five days of rain will crimp drying plans or result in clothes hung willy-nilly around my living spaces). But like changing my eating habits, it just means getting used to a bit more planning and learning to deal with the unexpected.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

P.S. My roommate just came back from the thrift store with a hand-crank meat grinder that she got for $5! Just the other day I was looking at pre-packaged sausage at my local supermarket, and was instantly disgusted to see that every d*mn brand had MSG in it. When I mentioned it to roomie, she said we could just get a meat grinder & some pork and make our own sausage (she’s a more advanced cook than I am). I’d never considered doing that, and I suppose I didn’t realize it was possible. Duuuuh me! *smacks forehead* So we said hey, we’ll both keep an eye out for a grinder. Then lo & behold, today she finds one! Check it out:

Look at that beauty! I can’t wait to try it out. One more step toward controlling what goes into my body!