What is needed to improve immunity

There is never a shortcut to improving immunity overnight. The core is the long-term dynamic balance of eating, sleeping, moving, and emotions. Simply relying on "shortcuts" such as taking supplements and sudden exercise will not achieve long-term effects.

I have an enthusiast who has been running marathons for five years. Last year, in order to hit the 330 mark in the marathon, he only slept for more than 5 hours a day for three months in a row, strictly controlled his diet to almost zero carbohydrates, and did no other exercise except running. As a result, he had two fevers in those three months and got herpes once. After seeing a nutritionist, he learned that it was long-term overconsumption that disrupted the immune balance. Later, he adjusted his sleep duration to at least 7 hours a day, added slow yoga twice a week, added whole grains such as corn and sweet potatoes to the table, and ate a handful of seasonal berries every day. Not to mention a fever, he didn't even catch a cold during the change of seasons in the past six months.

As for the hotly debated issue on the Internet today, "Can taking supplements improve immunity?", in fact, there is no unified conclusion in the academic community. If a healthy adult can eat one pound of vegetables and half a pound of fruits on a daily basis, and the intake of meat, eggs, and milk is also up to standard, additional popular supplements such as vitamin C and lactoferrin can hardly reduce the incidence of colds. At most, they can slightly shorten the duration of the disease. Those "immunity miracle drugs" that cost thousands of dollars are more of a psychological comfort to individuals.； However, for people who have digestive and absorption disorders, or have insufficient dietary intake for a long time, or for patients who have just undergone major surgery and have severely weakened immunity, supplementing specific nutrients or medical-grade immunomodulatory preparations according to the doctor's advice does have a clear effect. There is no need to label all supplements as IQ taxes.

In fact, for most ordinary people who sit in the office every day, the easiest thing to ignore is the impact of emotions on immunity. My former colleague who worked in operations stayed up until two or three o'clock every day during the 618 sales for a month.

To put it bluntly, the immune system is like a kitten you raise. If you feed it well every day, let it sleep enough, and don’t torment it all the time, it will naturally help you catch mice. You don’t need to buy it ridiculously expensive imported snacks every day. On the contrary, it will be easy to feed it to a picky mouth and stop doing its business.