Resilience: the ability to recover from difficulties. We all need to promote resilience right now – to infection, to stress, to financial troubles, to social isolation. While I can’t coach you in how to be financially resilient, I can give you some pointers towards improving resilience to infection and stress.
1. Control your blood sugar
Increased blood sugar levels are damaging to our immune system, our mental health and our overall health.
Higher blood sugar levels have been found to depress the function of many key elements of our immune system, including reducing the number of natural killer (NK) cells (which are best known for killing virally infected cells, and detecting and controlling early signs of cancer) and cytotoxic T cells (which are very important for immune defence against intracellular pathogens, including viruses), inhibiting neutrophil migration and function (neutrophils are key cells for killing pathogens that are attracted to sites of infection to perform their function), inhibiting the detector functions of the immune system that recognise the presence of infection and, by causing sugar molecules to attach to body proteins can adversely affect the function of many other elements of the immune system. Several studies have found that better blood glucose levels are linked with lower risk of developing infections and better outcomes in hospitalised patients.
High blood sugar also promotes inflammation. While inflammation is part of the natural healing process following an injury, chronic inflammation is an underlying factor in many health conditions. As the biggest risk with coronavirus is developing a runaway inflammation (“cytokine storm”) beyond that with which the body can cope, it seems logical that having a higher underlying inflammation would mean that the body has less capacity to withstand the increase in inflammation triggered by the virus.
2. Eat a nutrient-dense diet
A nutrient-dense (as opposed to calorie-dense) diet is one which maximises intake of the essential vitamins, minerals, fats and proteins needed for our body functions. The immune system relies on many building blocks to work properly. For example, a low protein intake results in lower white blood cell numbers and lower levels of immune system proteins (e.g., antibodies). Certain vitamins and minerals have been well-established as being important for immune function: vitamins A, C, D, and E; folic acid; vitamins B2, B6 and B12; beta-carotene, iron, selenium, and zinc.
As well as providing resilience for our immune system, a nutrient-dense diet supports the resilience of our mental health. Essential nutrients for brain health and resilience to stress include the omega-3 oils, such as found in oily fish (these also help reduce inflammation), choline, vitamins B2, B6, B12 and D; biotin, folic acid, magnesium, zinc, iron, chromium and selenium.
An analysis of the percentage of people eating a standard American diet (aka SAD) found that the nutrients which most likely to be deficient were selenium, phosphorus, vitamins B1, B2, B6, B12, C, D, A, zinc, copper, and magnesium. It is striking that many of these nutrients appear in both lists above.
What does a nutrient-dense diet look like?
The foods with the highest density of essential nutrients are vegetables and high protein foods, in particular, oily fish and seafood, green leafy vegetables (such as spinach and kale), liver, nuts and seeds. Start by filling half of your plate with vegetables and then fill a quarter of the plate with a good protein source (or, if you are vegan, the remaining half should be a protein source as plant sources of protein tend to have less protein per gram than animal sources). The final quarter of your plate can be more vegetables or, if you are not trying to control your weight, starchy foods.
3. Work on your sleep
Good sleep is so important for all aspects of health, but especially for immune function and stress-resilience. And sleep is one of the first things to suffer when we are stressed. Without enough sleep, your body is unable to mount an effective immune response to infections and, at the same time, insufficient sleep adds to the overall stress that your body is dealing with.
I’ve talked about sleep before in an earlier blog post where I’ve outlined my tips for improving sleep. If you’re still not sleeping well, check out these ideas and see where you might make further improvements.
4. Get outside into nature (if you can)
Being outdoors has multiple health benefits, not only in terms of enabling us to top up our vitamin D – a key nutrient for immune function, as I discussed last week, but also for mental health. It seems that exposure to natural environments, especially forests, supports the immune system by increasing the number of NK cells (see above), lowers blood pressure, reduces stress and improves mood. The Japanese have even coined the term shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) for using getting outside into nature to improve health.
If you can’t get to a forest, you could try simply looking at pictures of forest environments: research has revealed that a possible reason why forest bathing is beneficial is the patterns of leaves, light and shade encountered in forests which influences our brain waves. Fractal shapes can be defined by simple mathematic rules that apply to a vast array of things that look visually complex or chaotic. In a fractal, patterns repeat over and over, creating an appearance of chaos but actually have order. Fractals are found in clouds, waves, coastlines, shells, leaves, ferns, lightning, pinecones, snowflakes, mountains and flowers. EEG measurements of people’s brains revealed that a relaxed state is triggered by looking at fractal patterns. Read more about how fractals can reduce stress here.
5. Control avoidable sources of stress
When we are going through a stressful time, especially when the major sources of stress are coming from outside our control, we need to work on what we can control. Un-managed stress decreases the function of our immune system. Check out my article on improving stress resilience here.
Over to you…
If you would like to book an appointment with me to discuss tailoring your nutrition to your own personal health circumstances, please get in touch! And, don’t forget to send me your questions and concerns for me to answer in my future blogs.
Caroline