5 Tips for Immune Resiliency

Did you know the immune system can both under-react and overreact? An underreaction might look like getting frequent colds/flu or cancer. An overreaction might look like developing allergies to foods/pollens or an autoimmune disease where the body is attacking its own tissues. Ideally, the immune system reacts to invaders like pathogens and cancer, but it does not react to safe things like foods and our body’s own cells. That is considered a healthy immune response and a sign of immune resiliency. Check the graphic below for a visual of what this looks like.

Image from Danone Nutricia Research

Below are 5 areas of interest for those wanting to restore or maintain healthy immune standards! But first, let’s look at how I was able to implement these 5 areas to put my own auto-immune disease into remission - even by functional blood test standards.

At 21 I was diagnosed with Crohn’s, an autoimmune disease where the body attacks and destroys its own gut lining. Looking back, I’ve had some form of immune dysregulation for most of my life. For me, the pendulum would swing more easily into a hyper-reactive state and I would overreact to safe substances like body care products, food, and eventually my body’s own tissues.

My first symptoms were contact dermatitis and chronic skin issues when I was 8, but as a teenager it progressed to chronic pain in my gut, crushing fatigue, and brain fog. When I was diagnosed with Crohn’s at 21, I was so scared by the extreme treatment options offered to me that I fled the doctor’s office before they could intervene. I left determined to figure out a solution on my own. I figured I had had the chronic pain for years, what’s a little while longer for research and self-experimentation. What happened over the next three months forever transformed my perception of health and healing.

TIP # 1: EAT WHOLE FOODS

I had just serendipitously read Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. This must-read gem opened my eyes to the reality of our industrial agricultural food system and convinced me to seek out fresh ingredients and cook from scratch. This would be a first for me. At the time my breakfast consisted of Lucky Charms or Ramen noodles. Eating whole foods would be a 180-degree turn. A whole foods diet means eating meals made from ingredients that have one ingredient! At this point, I didn’t even know how to boil rice, so to say I was a newbie is an understatement. Internet recipes and some trial and error and I got to some edible meals after a few days. Within three months of not eating any processed or restaurant food, paying attention to sleep, and taking a few supplements, the chronic pain in my gut was gone. WHAT! And it hasn’t come back in over 10 years….

I now understood firsthand why eating whole foods is an important part of healing. The basic takeaway is this: seek out a healthy food store and purchase organic produce and pastured organic animal products. Cook simple meals from scratch. Don’t start too complex. Try instant pot or sheet pan meals. My all-time absolute favorite from-scratch gut-healing food is bone broth. For more details on the why and how to make bone broth, check out my blog post here.

The other option is to purchase precooked food from an establishment that uses organic produce and cooks from scratch. These establishments are rare, so you may have to dig to find a good one. They may not even exist, depending on where you live. Choose your restaurants carefully. Even high-end restaurants often use poor-quality oils. Don’t assume a place uses organic produce because the decor looks a certain way. Just recently, my go-to high-quality hot bar switched to using poor-quality sunflower oil, instead of avocado oil, so I have stopped going there. Stay abreast of ingredient changes at your favorite places, things can change often.

My preference, especially at the beginning of healing from immune dysregulation, is home-cooked meals cooked batch style. This allows you to cook in large batches so you aren’t spending long hours in the kitchen every day. Check out my post on My Top Kitchen Gadgets for Cooking from Scratch.

If symptoms are very severe or long-standing, there is a specific protocol called the AutoImmune Paleo Diet. If you like structure, rules, and black-and-white do’s and don’ts this may be the fastest course to regaining health. You can find more information about the AIP Protocol at https://autoimmunewellness.com/

A special note on foods to include. It is important to incorporate foods that modulate (meaning normalize) your immune system. For many with autoimmunity, either TH1 OR TH2 levels are often elevated, depending on which autoimmune disease(s) you are challenged with. Some compounds that normalize both TH1 and TH2 levels include:

Fermented foods like lacto-fermented vegetables, kimchi, sauerkraut, yogurt, miso paste, kefir, and kombucha.

Vitamin A-rich foods include organ meats like liver as well as cod liver oil and butter and eggs from pastured animals only. If the butter and eggs are not grass-fed or pastured, the vitamin A levels will be negligent.

Vitamin E-rich foods like pastured egg yolks, avocados, and raw organic nuts and seeds.

T-regulatory supporting compounds:

Vitamin D-rich foods and activities such as sunbathing and foods such as pastured liver, cod liver oil, sardines, raw pastured dairy, and pastured eggs.

Omega 3-rich foods are high in EPA and DHA such as fatty cold-water fish like wild-caught salmon, sardines, and mackerel. Found also in pastured eggs and meat, just in smaller quantities.

But it’s not only about food. There are other things I implemented that to this day help me maintain immune system balance. Keeping my immune system not too reactive and not under reactive. These tips are so important for those with any type of dysregulated immunity.

TIP # 2: OPTIMIZE SLEEP BY TRACKING SLEEP

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. I believe this to be true of many things in health, including sleep. Getting even a little bit more deep and/or REM sleep a night can add up to health gains. But how do you know how well you are sleeping? That’s where sleep trackers come in.

The best way I’ve found to track and optimize my sleep is using an Oura Ring. I do not have an affiliation with Oura. I just love their product and have seen many clients improve their health with regular use of this little thing.

I wear my Oura ring every night and have used it to track my sleep for 3 years so far. In the morning, the phone app connected to your ring shows you the total amount of deep, REM, and light sleep you got the night before. It also shows your total sleep time, the total amount of time in bed, how many times you woke up and for how long, how quickly you fell asleep, your body basal temperature, and your heart rate variability. Pretty cool! Over time you will notice your own trends and be able to tweak your routine accordingly.

All these metrics make it very clear the next morning if what I did the night before encouraged deep restful sleep or not-so-restful sleep. Personally, I can notice huge differences if I drink alcohol, am dehydrated, watch tv too late, work too late, workout too late, or eat too late. Timing is everything. The ring is a daily reminder to not have too many splurge nights in a row!

This ring also happens to track physical activity during the day and gives you a readiness score each morning to indicate how well your body recovered and if it is ready to do a big workout that day. One perk of this ring vs a typical Fitbit is that you can keep it on airplane mode all the time, except when you are syncing it to your phone. This is so you avoid having a Bluetooth signal against your body day and night. This is important.

This one piece of technology has been my best health purchase to date. It showed me the black-and-white data of what even one alcoholic drink drank too late in the day does to my deep sleep, how late-night eating keeps my heart rate elevated, how sleeping alone in a bed vs with another human allows me to get better sleep or how blacking out my room makes a huge improvement in my sleep quality compared to a room lit by street lights, headlights or the moon. I now use this info to make data-driven decisions about my sleep environment. Your body will be different from mine and that is why it’s important to track your own data and adjust your routines accordingly!

I have many more sleep tips on a more comprehensive sleep blog entitled Deep Sleep in 10 Steps.

TIP #3: IDENTIFY FOOD SENSITIVITIES AND OTHER TRIGGERS

Immune dysregulation always has a gut dysbiosis component. A damaged gut leads to food sensitivities, a symptom of immune hyper-reactivity. Identifying these inflammation triggers is a big big part of stopping the inflammatory cascade and reversing your symptoms. The most common triggers are gluten, dairy, soy, corn, and eggs. These common triggers are not to be underestimated for how disruptive they can be. Seriously consider removing them from your diet if you are having any immune dysregulation. I’ve also seen other allergies such as seaweed, citrus, beef, carrageenan, and strawberries so do not be surprised if you also find other food sensitivities, not on the most common list.

Once the gut is healed, you can (sometimes) add back in the offending foods. There are cases where they should be avoided for life. There are two ways to identify food sensitivities and I recommend doing both for a more complete picture. The first way is using a blood test.

My favorite lab for food sensitivity testing is Cyrex Labs and the most comprehensive panel they offer is Array 10. A skin prick test is not the same as a blood test. Often someone with a lot of food sensitivities will have a completely negative skin prick panel, so don’t assume you have no food sensitivities if you had a skin prick test come back negative. Array 10 tests for delayed immune reactivity. Some food sensitivities can take up to four days to express outwardly in the body, so it’s often very difficult to pinpoint these items without blood work or an incredibly detailed food and mood journal.

A food and mood journal is the other way to identify food triggers. This is done by tracking what you eat and then how you feel immediately after. This is especially important to do during a flare-up of symptoms. During flare-ups, try and write down all the details you may have left out about the past few days, including foods eaten (hopefully you’ve logged those along the way) but also things like activities, sleep, and other important notes like stress levels or other unusual events. The best thing you can do is to start to connect the dots between lifestyle factors such as food and activities with symptom severity. Often a picture starts to emerge within a few days of journaling; sometimes with symptoms that have been around for decades! I had one client identify her coffee creamer giving her chronic hives within a week of journaling. She had been having them for months and was miserable.

It may seem easy to remember everything you’ve done but it’s actually very difficult to track so many elements without physically writing them down. You will not remember everything you ate, drank, did, and experienced. You may only need to do this journal for a few weeks, so give it your all. You are worth it.

TIP #4: GET HEALTHY SUN THROUGHOUT THE DAY

We’ve been conditioned to be scared of the sun due to burning or skin cancer risks. However, this chronic sun avoidance has gotten us into a bit of a pickle. Our vitamin D levels as a nation are at a record low and skin cancer incidence has never been higher. This is despite the record use of sunscreen and sun avoidance! After delving into the statistics, I discovered that regions with the lowest sun exposure in our country like Seattle, Maine, and Vermont have the highest incidence of skin cancer in the country. So perhaps it’s not so cut and dry to just avoid the sun.

The other tidbit I found interesting is that office workers are just as likely, if not more likely to get melanoma; these are people who work under artificial lights all day and next to windows usually without tint. When you sit next to the untinted office or car windows, you are exposed to UVA rays without UVB rays. UVB rays are filtered by untinted glass, but UVA rays are let through. UVB rays trigger Vitamin D production in the skin, which is protective against all cancers including skin cancer. UVB rays also cause sunburn, which is nature’s way of telling you you’ve had too much sun and to cover up. This safety mechanism is disabled when you block the UVB rays with glass.

So with the above facts in mind, I delved into the idea of daily healthy sun exposure. This looks like getting little bits of direct sun exposure every day, throughout the day. With that goal in mind, I try and drink my coffee or eat my meals outside, as much as possible. I also often take morning walks. I do not wear sunglasses and get direct sun on my skin for up to about 30 minutes at a time. I do wear a hat to prevent squinting and for shading my face. If it is not possible for me to eat my meals al fresco, I will try and take calls or do other work outside to consistently get sun each day.

Everyone is different in how much sun they can handle, so adjust your sun exposure amount accordingly. Start conservatively and work up to more and more once you get a nice base tan. Make sure not to burn. Getting regular natural light boosts my mood, immune health, and attention span naturally. Natural light exposure also promotes deep sleep by creating a very big contrast between bright sunlight during the day and darkness when you sleep. If you are curious to learn more about this, check out my blog post Lighting Your Home + Office for Health.

TIP # 5: IMPLEMENT HERBS THAT BALANCE YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM

Guess what - there are also herbs that help balance our immune response. They are called immunomodulators. Most immunomodulators are in a larger class of herbs called Adaptogens. Adaptogens help your body become more adaptable by working through your HPA-Axis. Adaptogens help soften your physical, mental, and emotional stress response. Lowered stress levels over time can also boost immune resiliency.

Immunomodulating herbs specifically calm your immune system if it is hyper-reactive and boosts your immune system if it is hypo-reactive, keeping things in the goldilocks zone of just right. These herbs work best if used for at least a few months. They are considered tonic herbs. Tonic herbs are safe to take every day for the rest of your life.

Immunomodulators include Cordyceps, Reishi, Fo-ti, Ginseng, Tulsi Basil, Turmeric, Eleuthero, Schisandra, and Rhodiola. While some of these plants have neutral energy, which means they are good for most people, others can be very stimulating or drying and must be used with only certain conditions and constitutions. This is why it is important to work with a knowledgeable herbalist when incorporating any herbs into your routine.

I worked with an herbalist at 21 after my Crohn’s diagnosis and was put on a Reishi mushroom formula. It was my first experience with herbal medicine. I had a profound reaction within a few weeks. Once I had been on the formula for a while, I noticed the calming of other autoimmune symptoms including cystitis. I could even tell I missed a dose as my symptoms would return. After about 6 months of herbs and the above lifestyle shifts, my symptoms abated and I did not have to continue with them indefinitely. This is a benefit of herbal medicine. You can rebalance your body and not have to take the same herbs forever. You are normalizing, not just covering up symptoms for the moment.

BONUS TIP: REMOVE CHEMICAL STRESSORS FROM YOUR ROUTINE

Natural products are becoming more common, but having totally clean body care and cleaning solutions is far from easy. It takes a discerning eye and a fair amount of research to figure out which products are going to offer the least amount of body burden. By body burden, I mean which products are going to require the least amount of work from your detox pathways. The average US woman uses 12 personal care products and/or cosmetics a day, containing 168 different chemicals, according to the Environmental Working Group. For men, depending on the products they use, the number can be just as high. My rule of thumb is, as much as possible, to use simple products with simple ingredients you recognize and that are preferably unaltered. For example, I like to use raw honey to wash my face now, or apricot oil to remove makeup, whereas I used to use a face wash and a makeup remover with close to 20 ingredients in each. By simplifying my products, I err on the side of historic safety vs using new ingredients that are formulated using the latest “technology.” They may be fine, or they may not be, but at least I don’t have to be the guinea pig for it all. This goes for cleaning products too. Simple is best. I’ve made my own in the past with distilled water, vinegar, and a few drops of essential oils. I now use Branch Basics and really prefer them. Check out the Branch Basics website here. You can also check out the Environmental Working Group’s database called The Skindeep Database and search for the score for your favorite products. Ideally, you want between a 0 and 3.