Beat This Year’s Cold & Flu Season
Welcome back to this week’s blog post!
Happy New Year, y’all! We hope you all had a good holiday season with your friends and family. We know as the holiday season comes to a close and the new year begins, we’ve unfortunately entered peak Cold and Flu Season. While a cold or the flu can occur at any time of the year, Cold and Flu Season tends to peak during the colder months, with a noticeable increase in cases happening between December and February. It always seems hard to stay healthy this time of year, especially when the weather is ever-changing. The stresses from the holidays have taken their toll, wearing down our energy stores and impacting the strength of our immune systems. Today, we are going to talk about ways that you might be able to help provide your body with the best chances of fending off illness this year.
This will be a brief overview, and we will discuss some of the topics in more depth in future blog posts.
One of the best and surest ways to fend off illness is sleep. Aim for a minimum of six to eight hours of sleep per night. While not always achievable, do your best and try to maximize your sleep time. For now, we will not be going in-depth on optimal sleep hygiene, but we will mention some basics, such as try and stick to a semi-regular sleep schedule to regulate your Circadian rhythm better. It is also advised to turn off electronics—I recommend 20-30 minutes before you go to sleep. It is not just the opinion of this chiropractor that your sleep position is overly critical. Many studies have discussed how sleeping positions can impact your quality of sleep. The average person changes positions 8 times throughout the course of the night, so in general, it’s good to try to achieve as neutral of a body position as possible when falling asleep.
The next most important thing you can do to maximize your immune system is to simply drink water. We discussed water intake in “The Importance of Hydration”. There is no function in the body that does not require water at some point in the process. This is true for everything from cellular metabolism, to fat burning, to your immune system fighting a pathogen (bacteria or virus that causes an illness).
One of the biggest things you can do is help provide your body with the nutritional foundations it needs to run at its’ best. This is done through a balanced nutrition program. The more colors on your plate, the more vitamins and mineral diversity you’ll achieve. Because nobody's nutrition is perfect and our foods are not as nutritionally dense as they once were—more to come on that topic in a later post—we need to help “fill in the gaps” to ensure our bodies have everything it needs to run optimally. We recommend supplementing your nutrition with a good multivitamin (we love Ortho Molecular Products’ “Alpha Base Premier Packs”). These nutrition packs contain a combination of three high-concentration formulas providing comprehensive nutritional support in convenient, easy-to-take packets, providing full spectrum multivitamins, high-concentration fish oils to provide your body with healthy omega-3s, and “Resvoxitrol” a combination of bioactive antioxidants to help your body combat free-radical damage and oxidate stresses.
Yours in Health,
Dr. Grant Shelton, DC
Doctor of Chiropractic at Peace of Health Chiropractic Wellness Clinic
