Prevent colds, flu, and pneumonia....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 11-8-2011

Why feel rotten or have your work or life temporarily put on hold or slow speed when you can avoid it?

Why risk damage to your lungs or death if you can avoid it??

To a surprising degree you can by preventing colds, flu, and pneumonia!

Each of these methods reduces your risk. If you use all or most of them, your chances of escaping this stuff go WAY up.

Unfortunately this is the season for catching these and bronchitis besides.

The good news is that you can make catching any of them MUCH less likely.

Today we list many ways to prevent these. Do as many as you can that you aren’t already doing.

Many of the ones that work best cost very little. Taking vitamin D3 has truly astounding other health benefits besides. We also list two methods that cost very little that also may help prevent you from getting colds if you overdo your exercise or do competitive athletics of some kind.

Let’s start with the most important ones.

1. You can’t avoid all the risk. But I’ve read over half the risk comes into your house and into YOU on your hands.

If you touch the corners of your eyes and inside of your nose ONLY when using a clean tissue or toilet paper or handkerchief and NOT your fingers directly, you cut your risk.

But even more important, touching things like ATM keys and debit card number entry keys and gas station self-serve pumps and grocery store cart handles or ever visiting a hospital for any reason exposes you to an astounding amount of bacteria and viruses from simple colds to almost incurable bacteria like MRSA.

So, every time you come home from work or have touched such things before you eat, ALWAYS wash your hands!

You can sing the Happy Birthday song if you like to wash long enough even if only silently.

But I think that inaccurate and silly myself.

This works better:

Use a liquid hand soap you can squirt onto your hands. Do the hand washing motion until all of each hand is covered. That action WITHOUT water puts the oils on your hands and the viruses and bacteria in them into suspension. Then turn on the warm or hot water and repeat until most of the soapy feeling is gone. Then turn on the cold water and repeat the hand washing motion about that long. These two parts ensure all the soap and the oils and viruses and bacteria in it have gone down the drain!

This is more accurate and easier to do than just singing. These are the 3 parts that do the job!

2. Take the optimum level of vitamin D3 each day; get flu shots each year, and the pneumonia vaccine once every 10 years.

That combination is extremely effective if you do each of them!

You’ll get far less cases of the flu, over 85% perhaps will miss you completely. Over 90% of the times you would have gotten pneumonia, you’ll escape it. And, you’ll often be the only one at your work who misses the cold that everyone else is getting.

Vitamin D3 is to your killer cells in your immune system is what ammunition is to guns. We now know that without optimum levels of vitamin D3, your immune system’s ability to help you prevent all viral and bacterial disease is much less. Not having enough vitamin D3 is like disarming a good bit of your immune system’s killer cells.

Most people today work inside and play inside so much, most of us get little vitamin D from sun exposure often even during the summer. So most people today are from severely deficient to low in their levels of vitamin D3.

(People used to get over 3,000 iu a day from sun exposure even in winter because they walked so much and over 10,000 iu a day from sun exposure during summers because they walked so much and did things outside on evenings and weekends. Very few people do this now!)

Similarly, it’s been found that your body will use about 3,000 iu of vitamin D3 a day if it’s available. And, recently there have been a lot of studies done on giving people 4,000 to about 10,000 iu of vitamin D3 a day. (Since people get little sun in the winter and most people who don’t work outside today get very little sun most of the time, these studies were important to do.)

(Getting close to the 3,000 your body actually uses looks to be quite safe. The studies I’ve read say the optimum level of intake is 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day. Also most researchers in the field tend to take 10,000 iu a day. Only take over 10,000 iu a day if a doctor has measured your blood levels and recommended it. Wikipedia says it takes 100,000 iu a day to begin to be harmful. But you get that much in 4 days at 25,000 a day. Since I’m a bit conservative, I think for some people 25,000 iu a day or more may be a bit too much.)

It seems that taking 4,000 to about 8,000 iu of vitamin D3 a day boosts your immune system well enough it looks to help prevent all cancers. (A recent study using the 400 iu of vitamin D3 daily that used to be the recommended amount, by contrast, did not show cancer protection. The amount was simply too small.)

This immune boosting has been found to help prevent tuberculosis. (The old idea of getting TB patients extra sun may have actually helped some people because of this effect.)

Even more important, I read last year that in people with low vitamin D levels, the pneumonia vaccine tended not to work. But in people with high levels of vitamin D, the pneumonia vaccine was quite effective.

Because of the many reports of this strong immune system building effect, I suspect that taking 4,000 to about 8,000 iu of vitamin D3 a day also very likely makes flu shots much more likely to be protective.

Without extra vitamin D3, flu shots may prevent only 57% of the cases of the flu recent research found. Still worth doing in my opinion. But with even taking 4,000 iu of vitamin D3 a day it may be 75 or 80% or more instead!

Similarly, getting flu shots every year likely gets you above 57% protection. For the strains that were the same in prior years your immune system just needs a reminder and likely works better for those than starting new. And, you still will have some immunity to strains from prior years that are NOT in this year’s shot.

Flu shots are free from many HMO’s or about $25; and pneumonia vaccine only needs to be gotten about every 10 years and is free from many HMO’s or about $25! And, taking 4,000 to 8,000 D3 now only costs about $20 a month. Getting both shots and taking the vitamin D3 costs at most $50 to start and $20 a month or so after that.

Not only will doing these three things slash your risk of getting flu and pneumonia (and TB), it will also very likely make you less likely to get colds.

And, over a 10 year period the cost of doing all three is about $20 a month. Plus you’ll save MORE than that in antibiotics, cold medicines, doctor visits, and time off work.

(And, there’s even more benefits to taking that much vitamin D3 each day. I discovered recently it protects your DNA enough that it will slow aging by 5 years if you do it long enough.

Taking 4,000 to about 8,000 iu of vitamin D3 a day also looks to prevent many autoimmune diseases. Not only does taking vitamin D3 each day help your immune system kill the invaders it should kill, it apparently also helps it avoid harming parts of YOU that it should leave alone.

Do you get SAD during the darker days of winter and get the “wintertime blues”? In many people, taking 4,000 to about 8,000 iu of vitamin D3 a plus mid-day outside exercise often turns that off.

Vitamin D3 also helps prevent heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease. So you get many extra benefits besides being a lot less likely to get sick if you take enough vitamin D3.)

3. Here are two more inexpensive ways to prevent colds and flu. (The second one also helps prevent allergies.)

These two may help prevent you from getting colds if you overdo your exercise or do competitive athletics of some kind.

People who exercise a bit too much or too vigorously tend to lower their immune response. If they do, they can come down sick. Two times I had this happen to me. First time was when I set a personal best for running a mile, for example.

But a study of runners found that this is much less likely to happen to people who take antioxidant supplements and eat foods high in antioxidants. Natural vitamin C, natural vitamin E only, alpha lipoic acid, and others do this. So does eating foods like raw broccoli florets and bananas and organic wild blueberries and many other foods high in vitamin C. So does eating raw, unsalted nuts; eating avocadoes; and using extra virgin olive oil since these are high in the whole natural vitamin E complex.

Last year in I read in an article in Early To Rise, an e-zine dedicated to making money, improving your health and quality of life. (For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.)

In it I found an article by a woman, Kelly Herring.

In her article she said that red onions, the red apple peels of whole apples, and broccoli and tea are each high in a nutrient called quercetin. (You can also buy quercetin as a supplement.)

She found that an article in the American Journal of Physiology quoted research showing that quercetin by itself negated the dip in immunity that comes with physical fatigue.

So that’s another way to get this protective effect. So if you work hard physically or exercise vigorously or dance or do even low level competitive athletics, use these two methods to stay well.

4. Taking the herbal supplement astragalus twice a day has also been found to boost your immune system. This is new to me since last year’s similar post. But I recently found that multiple research supports this and the website www.wholehealthmd.com lists it as long known and well supported.

So I’ve been taking that since.

5. Taking probiotics also has been shown to boost your immune system. So, since I learned that, I’ve taken that also.

I’ve read that people who take probiotics do get fewer colds and cases of the flu.

I like this one since I think it works two ways.

Your immune system “sees” these beneficial and harmless bacteria every day-- which I believe keeps it tuned to up to check often and gives it a model to compare newcomers to. That means it hits back at the bad guys faster when they show up.

But the other part is what I like best. In your body these good guy bacteria are in residence. So when invaders show up, your body is their turf. That means your immune system has help! Your beneficial bacteria fight back too!

To sum up, at the very least, always wash your hands; get your flu shot each year; and your pneumonia vaccine every 10 years—and begin taking 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 if you haven’t already been doing so.

(Get the flu shot and pneumonia vaccine within the next few days if you haven’t had your flu shot yet this year or ever had the pneumonia vaccine.)

I think the other supplements boost your protection enough that I take them myself. But the first group are the heavyweights.

The heavyweights cut your risk by about 60 to 90%. So always do those.

The other supplements cut about half the remaining risk. So the result is your risk is then cut by about 80 to 95%. I like those numbers better, so I add those too.