Health Insights – Page 15

Time to Winterize Your Immune System

written by Steven Horne
As Jack Frost brings cold days (and even colder nights) people start wearing warmer clothes, put on snow tires and seal cracks in their homes. The cold, damp days of winter also signal the start of cold and flu season, so it’s also wise to take steps to winterize your immune system so you’ll be prepared to resist whatever is going around. Here are some specific tips and suggestions.

Swallow Some Sunshine

with Vitamin D3 (Stock #1155-1 60 tabs)
One of the factors that makes our immune system work better in summer is that we get more exposure to sunlight in the hot summer months. This means we get more Vitamin D, because our skin manufactures this essential nutrient when it is exposed to sunlight.
Vitamin D is essential for many functions in the body, including building strong bones and teeth, but what we are primarily concerned about here is vitamin D’s effect on the immune system. Getting adequate amounts of this essential nutrient helps you stay healthy in the winter by boosting your immune response. It even helps prevent some types of cancer.

Native people living in cold, northern climates naturally supplemented both vitamins A and D, by eating animal livers raw during the winter. Scientists have assumed that fortifying milk with vitamin D2 would be adequate to keep modern people from developing deficiencies, but vitamin D2 is not as readily useable as vitamin D3, which is found naturally in animal foods like raw liver. Furthermore, what about all those people who don’t drink milk?

So, your first step in winterizing your immune system should be to take a vitamin D3 supplement. You may also want to take extra vitamin A as well.

Build Your Defensive Chi with Lung Support

In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), the chi (or energy) that keeps you from getting ill is thought to reside in your lung and colon. This makes sense, since the mucus membranes of your respiratory and digestive tract are the primary route where infections are likely to enter. In fact, we know from modern science that most of your immune response is concentrated in the digestive and intestinal membranes.

According to TCM, breathing cold air damages this defensive chi, which is one of the reasons why we are more susceptible to contagious diseases in the cold winter months. Fortunately there are herbs that build up this defensive chi and protect your body from the cold weather.

Chinese Lung Support (Stock #1004-3 TCM Conc. or #1887-6, 100 caps) is designed to strengthen the lungs and immune systems of those get sick easily during the cold winter months. It is especially valuable for the elderly, who often develop pneumonia as a secondary infection to the flu. If you live in an area where the air is cold and dry, try taking Lung Support throughout the winter months to keep you healthy. If you have respiratory weakness consider taking Chinese Lung Support and Cordyceps (Stock #1240-5) together as this will greatly increase your protection.

These are just a few of the many herbal supplements you can use to keep your immune system in tip, top shape.

Other remedies to consider include Immune Stimulator (Stock #1839-3), Ultimate Echinacea (Stock #3181-2) and Trigger Immune (Stock #1034-0 TCM Conc. or #1889-2, 100 caps). These remedies will also boost your immune system to keep you healthy in the cold months ahead.

Magnesium for Health

Magnesium is regarded by scientists as essential to life, playing a fundamental role in living cells. Magnesium is a crucially important mineral for optimal health throughout the body. A surprisingly large proportion of people do not get enough magnesium: At least 57% (some say 80%!) of the US population does not meet the US RDA for dietary magnesium intake!

Calcium tends to be taken in high quantities – which can cause more harm than good, as it’s very important to have a proper balance between these two minerals. This is the reason why they are sometimes seen paired together in “cal-mag” supplements. Magnesium is critical for heart health and excessive amounts of calcium without the counterbalance of magnesium can lead to a heart attack and sudden death.

Early signals of magnesium deficiency include: Appetite loss, headaches, nausea, tiredness and weakness. Ongoing or more severe magnesium deficiency can lead to more serious symptoms, such as numbness and tingling, cramps, seizures, behavioral changes, abnormal heart rhythm and coronary spasm.

One of the great challenges of testing your own body’s magnesium levels is that only around 1% of the body’s magnesium is in the blood, making the magnesium readings from a serum magnesium blood test inaccurate.

One of the best food sources of magnesium is pumpkin seeds – of which a quarter cup contains almost 50% of the RDA of magnesium! I would suggest to go for the organic ones – typically darker in color because of their higher mineral content. There are numerous other food sources of magnesium.

Note that calcium and magnesium also need to be balanced with vitamin D and vitamin K2. In other words, any time you’re taking any of magnesium, calcium, vitamin D3, or vitamin K2, you need to take all four into consideration, since they all work synergistically.

Stock #1786-6 Magnesium (180 tabs)
Stock #1859-8 Magnesium Complex (100 caps)

My “Cure” for the Common Cold (and Flu)

Written by Steven Horne

Let’s start by understanding that the symptoms of a cold or a flu are simply a flushing of toxins from the system. The body grows toxic and weak and becomes a home for microbes (yeast, viruses, bacteria). The microbes release additional toxins as they reproduce. These toxins damage surrounding tissue creating more breeding grounds for microbes. That’s how the infection spreads.

The symptoms of fever, runny nose, etc. are created by the body’s immune response to both inhibit the growth and spread of the microbes to flush the toxins from the system and clean up the environment so there is no more breeding ground. So, the goal is to help the body detoxify and flush the irritation. The faster this happens, the sooner you will be well.

Here are the basic things I do for colds and other acute ailments.

First, when you feel a cold or any acute ailment coming on, stop eating! This is usually easy to do because we tend to lose our appetite when we’re acutely ill. If you are hungry, limit your intake of foods to liquids—preferably fresh fruit or vegetable juices or soup broths.

Second, if this is the early stage of a cold, where there is watery, clear or white mucus, use aromatics such as capsicum, ginger, garlic, horseradish, mustard, etc. My favorite remedies here are Herbal Composition Powder (sold by Nature’s Sunshine Products under the trade name HCP-X) and Herbal Crisis (a modified form of composition powder). For children I use Children’s Composition. Recipes for all of these formulas are found in the Fundamentals of Natural Healing course.

Take these stimulating remedies in small, frequently repeated doses. (They work faster when taken in liquid form, but if you’re swallowing capsules use warm or room temperature water. Do not take them with cold liquids.) In liquid form I sip the stuff constantly until I’m feeling better. If using capsules, I would take two every hour.

Third, drink plenty of liquids. This helps flush toxins from your body.

Fourth, do something to open your bowels. If you are comfortable doing so, take an enema. I actually use the Herbal Crisis formula or Herbal Composition tea with a little Lobelia in it. A good alternative I’ve discovered is to take 2 Proactazyme every hour until the colon evacuates.

Fifth, get yourself to perspire. Do a sweat bath. Drink some Herbal Composition or Herbal Crisis tea with warm water, then get in a hot bath and soak for 15-20 minutes. You can add your favorite essential oils to the bath or 10 capsules of ginger if you like. After the bath, go to bed, pile on some blankets, drink lots of liquids and “sweat” the cold out.

Sixth, do not use antihistamines, cough suppressants, etc. Instead, use an expectorant and decongestant like ALJ (Nature’s Sunshine Products) to break up mucus and help the body get rid of it. Take 2-4 capsules every two to four hours. If you’ve got fluid in your lungs, add 1 clove of raw garlic or one High Potency Garlic with each dose of ALJ.

If the mucus gets yellowish and thick, then add Goldenseal/Echinacea. If you get diarrhea, take some activated charcoal to bind toxins in the gut.

Seventh, if you have swollen lymph nodes, mix 1 teaspoon Kidney Drainage and 1 teaspoon Lymphatic Drainage into a quart of water and sip frequently. Rub Tei Fu Lotion or Oil into the swollen lymph nodes. (All of these products are available from Nature’s Sunshine.)

I’ve gotten over colds in as little as a couple of hours following these procedures. Sometimes it takes a day or two, but it always shortens the duration and severity of the illness.

Finally, it is true that herbs have some direct antifungal, antibacterial and antiviral actions, but more importantly, herbs have the capacity to help rebalance the terrain in the body so that it is no longer a host environment for the microbes. So, you select remedies based on looking at the host terrain and not the organism that’s inhabiting it.

For example, garlic and goldenseal are both antibacterial. But garlic is pungent, stimulating (warming) and dispersing, while goldenseal is bitter, cooling and astringent (consolidating). Knowing when different remedies are appropriate will help you get better results. For more detailed information, consult our Fundamentals of Natural Healing course.