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!