Strengthen your

immunity

Bronwyn Stewart talks about immune support

Bronwyn was once a nurse at the Royal Prince Alfred, went on to study Naturopathy, Kinesiology, Homeopathy, Iridology and other modalities as well.
She  currently works from her clinic in Flinders, and is a facilitator on the
Midlife Mastermind programme With Baxter

  • Bronwyn's recommendation for drinking water is a simple formula:
    Your body weight x 33ml = daily quantity.

 

  • She recommends eating as many fresh vegetables as you can. Straight from the garden is best  or bio-dynamically grown where possible. Next comes organic, then conventional veg from farmer's markets and last on the list is supermarkets. Do not overcook them (but certainly cooked is preferable to raw in cooler months) to obtain as much nutritional value you can.

 

  • Ventilate your home for at least 30 mins per day. Viruses love enclosed spaces. Air out you bed, your clothes and lounge covers when possible.

 

 

Since the regulations have now just change with the Naturopathy association, you can now schedule a zoom appointment with her as she is no longer seeing people face to face in her clinic.

“The regrettable truth is that we live in a time of increasingly severe disruption of the ecosystems of our planet. As those disruptions worsen, more pathogenic microbial organisms will flow upward out of those disrupted ecological matrices into the human species.

 

"In reality, Cov-19 infections for around three quarters of those infected will remain relatively mild. Only about 18% of those infected experience a severe infection. Most of those will be older, that is people whose immune systems have aged over time; people with compromised immune systems; and people with existing disease conditions such as COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).

It is important to realise that viruses are some of the oldest living things on the planet. Viruses are in fact billions of years old. As such they are exceptionally good at what they do and like all living things they learn as they go, adapting new behaviours along the way. Plants, in comparison, are only about a billion years old, complex land plants around 300 million years or so. In contrast our most ancient hominid ancestors are at most 1-2 million years old, our species in the form it has now is only around 35,000 years old. Western medicine (at a generous estimate) is 200 hundred years old. Its knowledge of viral pathogens and infections is only around 50years old. Much of that is rudimentary or even incorrect (based as it is on outdated ecological models and medical understandings). All pathogens are sophisticated at modulating human cytokines to achieve their own ends. They have learned how to circumvent many of our normal immune responses in order to facilitate their entry into the body, their reproduction, and their release into new hosts. Elderly and compromised immune systems are quite often unable to respond sufficiently to these viral sophistications; they get overwhelmed.”
Stephen Harrod Buhner.

Robin Koster-Carlyon from Transition Farm

talks about plant health.

for some great food storage tips as well as recipe ideas, head to www.transitionfarm.com

Chris Kresser:

 

"I really encourage people to do some things to try to, if you are feeling really worried and concerned, which is natural, it’s even more important to do things such as:

 

~ a meditation practice
~ mindfulness-based stress reduction
~ spending time in nature
~ Taking hot baths
~ Finishing with a cold shower

 

whatever it is that helps you to manage your stress."

Download our Breath Taking app

and estabish a simple, daily mindful routine to help manage stress - and alkalise your system

Life resource list

Here is a great resource list of things for everyone to do at home - ranging from

free online Yoga classes, to virtual tours of some of the world's leading museums.

 

Immune-Boosting Foods

(Source: Chris Kresser)

Garlic and ginger have antimicrobial, antiviral effects and also immune-boosting benefits.

Citrus fruits and red capsicum (peppers) for vitamin C.

Fermented foods, because we know that somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the immune system, it really exists in the gut, so those can be helpful.

And then a little bit of extra turmeric can be antiviral, anti-inflammatory

Vitamin A, especially if you feel like you’re fighting something, and you come down with some symptoms. Vitamin A improves immune function by several mechanisms. It also increases lactobacilli in the gut, which, in the presence of infection, will produce interferons and other immune chemicals that fight infection. If you’re eating liver once or twice a week, you’re probably getting enough for maintenance. If you’re not, you might want to take cod liver oil, which is a great source of vitamin A as well as D, which is another important vitamin for immune function.

If you feel like you’re catching something, you can take very high doses of vitamin A for a short period. You don’t want to do that long-term, because vitamin A can be toxic at high doses. But 50,000 IU, for example, twice a day for up to five to seven days. You don’t want to take more than 100,000 IU at one time because it can cause headaches, and it’s a good idea to get enough vitamin D with your A because it can, it greatly protects against the toxicity, potential toxicity of vitamin A.

Zinc lozenges support immune function and have also been proven to be effective in blocking coronavirus and other viruses from multiplying in the throat and nasopharynx. And you can use these several times a day as soon as you begin to feel symptoms. It’s best to lie down and let the lozenge dissolve in the back of your throat and the nasopharynx, so it really penetrates to those areas.

Join our our Midlife Mastermind programme -

a smart way to take control of your health with experts in Wellbeing.

 

sandor katz fermenting at Transition farm

In March 2020, we hosted Sandor and Sharon Flynn at the biodynamic Transition Farm. Here he is, giving us the basics on fermentation...

 

 

sharon flynn at Transition farm

Join us when Sharon Flynn returns to Transition Farm to dive once again, into the fermenting crock! Date to be announced once the virus has passed.

 

Home Remedies  for boosting the Immune System

 

These two remedies are from Dr N.Chandesekaran MBBS in Chennai:
Preparation of ginger tea
Ingredients: ginger and lemon
Instructions: peel the skin of ginger and cut it into small pieces.
Cut the lemon into 4 pieces.
Add the chopped ginger and cut lemon to 300ml filtered water
Cover, bring to boil and let simmer for 20 minutes.
Then filter the residues and drink it immediately when it is warm.
P.S Don’t keep the prepared ingredient for a long time.
Preparation of turmeric-pepper tea
Ingredients: turmeric powder and crushed black pepper.
Instructions: in a litre of water, add these two ingredients , cover, bring to boil and let simmer for 15-20 minutes.
Then filter and consume the preparation when it is warm.
P.S Don’t keep the prepared ingredient for a long time.
These preparations are to be made from natural ingredients, freshly prepared every time and to be consumed immediately when it is warm. Don’t bother about the exact measurement of each ingredient. Because, they are all natural edibles. Your experience will teach you the required quantities of each component according to your taste and palatability.

 

 

This is from Stephen Harrod Buhner's site. For further reading - please reference his website where he maintains regular posts on the COVID-19

1. Stephen Harrod Buhner’s Botanical Formula
For this formula, you’ll need to combine:
Three parts Cordyceps
Two parts Angelica sinensis
One part Rhodiola
One part Astragalus
Take one teaspoon of this formula three times per day for protection against infection. Take one teaspoon six times per day if you’re experiencing symptoms.

2. Fresh Ginger Tea
To create this tea, follow these steps:
Juice 500g- 1kg of ginger, and place juice in a jar and refrigerate.
Place 60- 120 ml (two to four ounces) of ginger juice in a mug with the juice of one-half lemon.
Add one-eighth teaspoon of cayenne pepper and six ounces of hot water.
Once it's cooled to under 35 deg C, add a large tablespoon of honey (you don't want to heat honey otherwise you'll lose its healing properties.)
Drink two to six cups of this per day, sipping slowly throughout the day.

3. Shuang-Huang-Lian Antiviral Formula
For this formula, you’ll need to combine:
Two parts Forsythia suspensa (also known as lian qiao or weeping forsythia plant)
One part Lonicera japonica (also called jin yin hua or Japanese honeysuckle)
One part Scutellaria baicalensis (also known as huang qin or Chinese skullcap)
Take one teaspoon of this formula three times per day. It’s best to take it in combination with immune-boosting herbs.

If you are into botanicals, then you’ll find Stephen Harrod Buhner’s recommendations to be helpful.
Stephen developed the most complex understanding (at the present time) of the sophistication and synergy of herbal medicines in the treatment of chronic diseases and their capacity for subtle modulation of human physiology during such disease conditions.
He also created the first comprehensive and sophisticated (western) understanding and treatment protocols for COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) utilising herbal medicines.

An excerpt from Chris Kresser's interview with Ramzi Asfour

(a board certified infectious disease and internal medicine doctor)

How Infectious Is the Coronavirus?
Chris Kresser:  I want to talk about prevention and how concerned people need to be. And I think the answer to that also varies depending on their age and their health status, and where they live and some other factors. So I want to dive into that a little more deeply.
But before we do that, I think it would be helpful to compare what we know currently about coronavirus in terms of its R0 value. How infectious it is compared to something like seasonal influenza, which people are more familiar with and can use as kind of a benchmark? And then, what are the risks relative to something like seasonal flu with coronavirus for different populations? Because I think part of the panic is coming from, at least with some people I talked to, not really understanding the risk of what it means to get infected with coronavirus.

Ramzi Asfour:  Right. Thanks, that’s a great point. So the risk of infectiousness is probably about as bad as a bad flu, perhaps a little bit more. We don’t really know. Epidemiologists call that the R naught value or R zero. And that means how many people are likely to be infected from one person who’s carrying the virus or who is infected. And for seasonal influenza, it’s about 1.3 people are infected for every person [who] has the flu. And, initially, we thought the R0 for coronavirus was higher. It appears to be about 2.2 right now, but it might actually be lower. It’s difficult to say because, initially, the reporting from China was spotty and there was concern with testing capacity of some of the issues we’ve already discussed.

 

Supporting Your Immune System to Prevent Infection

Chris Kresser:  And I want to start with just the basics, because I think we forget, we tend to forget the basics in situations like this. Really freak out or hoard the hand sanitizer and the gloves and all that stuff, and forget to just do the basic things. And, actually, one of those basics is stress management. We know that stress weakens the immune system as much [as] or more than just about anything. And there’s a little bit of a catch 22 here or a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are totally freaked out and panicked about coronavirus, that’s actually going to impact their immune system in such a way that it would make them more susceptible to acquiring coronavirus.

Ramzi Asfour:  Absolutely.

Chris Kresser:  I really encourage people to do some things to try to, if you are feeling really worried and concerned, which is natural, it’s even more important to do things like a meditation practice, mindfulness-based stress reduction, spending time in nature, preferably not in large groups, but, you know, outside. Taking hot baths, whatever it is that helps you to manage your stress, that’s even more critical in this situation. So that’s one of the four pillars of immune boosting.
Another one is getting enough sleep. I’ve done so many podcasts on this [that], hopefully, I don’t need to go [into] any detail about why that’s important, or how to do it here. But seven to eight hours a night. And following all the good sleep hygiene practices. It’s critical for immune function. Physical activity is also really critical for immune function. So making sure to reduce your time spent sitting and then getting enough exercise throughout the week. And then the fourth pillar, of course, is a nutrient-dense, whole-foods, anti-inflammatory diet. But specifically within that context, really a focus on foods like liver, which is very high in vitamin A, which has many different immune-boosting benefits we’ll talk about shortly. Zinc, same thing for zinc, and many other nutrients that are a little harder to obtain, even in the context of a healthy diet.

 

Honey and Other Bee Products

Chris Kresser:  So another preventative remedy, and something I will use for treatment, as well, that I like is propolis. Propolis is from the beehive, of course, and it increases cellular immune response and acts as an antiviral. My favorite way to take propolis is the Beekeeper’s Naturals propolis spray. It’s very convenient. You can spray it in the back of your throat several times a day at the first sign of symptoms. I will also use it prophylactically when I travel, even when I am not experiencing symptoms. And then another product from Beekeeper’s Naturals that I love for its immune-boosting and protective effects is called B.Powered, which is a honey, raw honey.
Honey is antimicrobial and antiviral, and it also has royal jelly, bee pollen, and propolis in it. So I will often take that if I feel like I’m coming down with something. You can just eat it right off the spoon.

 

Ramzi Asfour is a board certified infectious disease and internal medicine doctor. He graduated from New York Medical College, then completed an internal medicine residency program at California Pacific Medical Center, followed by a fellowship in infectious diseases at UCSD [University of California San Diego]. He’s worked for the World Health Organization [WHO], Columbia University in South Africa, and UCSD. Prior to attending medical school, Ramzi majored in genetics at UC Davis [University of California, Davis] and he’s currently assistant clinical professor of medicine at UCSF [University of California San Francisco]. And he is a staff physician at California Center for Functional Medicine.

Host of the podcast is Chirs Kresser. Chris is the co-director of the California Center for Functional Medicine, creator of ChrisKresser.com, and New York Times best-selling author, Chris is a prolific communicator; his newest book is Unconventional Medicine. Chris was nominated “Best Inspirational Voice” and “Best Health & Wellness Website” by Paleo magazine 2019. Named one of the 100 most influential people in health and fitness by greatist.com

© 2020 All Rights Reserved