How to improve immunity?

[Runum]

I've lost count of how many times I was sick last year. Over the last few months, it felt like every couple of weeks or months I came down with flu like symptoms such as a sore throat and runny nose, along with the usual fatigue.

I workout several times a week, have a visible 6-pack, eat clean, don't smoke or drink. Yet I find myself falling sick more often than people who don't even do 1/10 of the stuff I do for health and fitness.

I saw in MJ's GoalSumo.com list, one of his daily tasks is to drink a Health Elixer. Could you guys share any tips or habits that have helped you improve your overall immunity?

Right now I've started drinking lemon water first thing in the morning and taking a Centrum multivitamin with zinc tablet daily before bed.

Do you use a health tracker? It can track stress, sleep cycles, steps, training levels, HRV, etc. You my be able to identify a pattern leading you to illness.

I was having trouble with recovery after workouts. My sleep routine was in the toilet, inconsistent an ineffective. I now shut off all screen time 2 hours before bed, journal and read then bed at the same time each night. I sleep with an air filter machine on and I added flat grounding sheet to sleep on. My sleep scores and other health stats have shown a measurable improvement.

 

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[wade1mil]

Consistent micro exposure to what gets you sick. When I worked at a grocery store, I didn't get sick for a decade. I stopped working at a grocery store and I got sick a few times a year like everyone else.

 

[Xeon]

There needs to be a thread here where everyone posts their supplement stack here so that everyone can refer to it and add to their existing stack.

I'm currently taking only multivitamin and matcha tea in the morning, and protein powder (with oats and chia seeds) throughout the day. I'm looking for more stuff that can make me even stronger, healthier and more immune (excluding PEDs and steroids).

Oh, and if anyone is looking to start a multivitamin or any kind of supplement company, there seems to be a hole in the existing market : small, easy-to-swallow pills (preferably small soft gels smaller than 0.4 inches in size). Current offerings on the market are either

i) large, hard horsepills which are hard to swallow without chewing them (yucks)

ii) multivitamin gummies which has lots of sugar per gummy (and the amount of vitamins/minerals are pathetic and way fewer than normal tablets)

iii) effervescent tablets which are similar to ii) above

So many dietary suggestions have been made so far and nobody has mentioned the sun.

No thanks, because of stuff like this:

and fast-aging due to the sun.
Taking lots of Vitamin Ds will make up for lack of sun exposure.

 

[Roli]

I've lost count of how many times I was sick last year. Over the last few months, it felt like every couple of weeks or months I came down with flu like symptoms such as a sore throat and runny nose, along with the usual fatigue.

I workout several times a week, have a visible 6-pack, eat clean, don't smoke or drink. Yet I find myself falling sick more often than people who don't even do 1/10 of the stuff I do for health and fitness.

I saw in MJ's GoalSumo.com list, one of his daily tasks is to drink a Health Elixer. Could you guys share any tips or habits that have helped you improve your overall immunity?

Right now I've started drinking lemon water first thing in the morning and taking a Centrum multivitamin with zinc tablet daily before bed.

Cold works for me. If I get into a cold bath every morning I don't get sick. I started last year around August or so, I did it right through the winter. Even though my wife and daughter caught several colds and such in that period, I never once got sick. (I do smoke and drink by the way).

As soon as I slacked off, I got a sore throat and was coughing and sneezing for a week.

I'm not so regular now, but I try and do at least three times a week.

Science:

Various studies have been done, notably by a Norwegian researcher (can't remember her name), showing that the cold triggers an adipose tissue response and fires up the immune system. A similar thing was found in a Wim Hof study, whereby they found that subjects who had been exposed to the cold water techniques were able to fight of a simple virus injected into them.

Give it a try!

 

[Borderless CLTV]

It might sound oversimplistic, but what I've found/seen mess up with immunity for people without a particular disease/auto-immune disorder is:

1. Unbalanced diet lacking vitamins, minerals, etc and featuring fat. - Nothing like a Mediterranean (or similar) diet, despite mainstream influencers trying to make bank from making people unhealthy giving BS diet advice. Just observe and see who lives 85+ with good overall health, people who it this way, or Keto bros eating greasy ribs.
2. Lack of exercise - It's proven that exercise boosts the immune system.
3. Stress - I see people getting sick all the time when they are over-stressed. Stress hormones mess up with the immune system badly.

Avoid all 3 and you should have an edge. #NotMedicalAdvice

#3 is the hardest though. Stress is this ethereal thing that we can't quite measure like the other two. I suffer from it as well.

 

[FierceRacoon]

Had a period like that and spoke to a couple doctors.

It turned out, immunity is a very complex topic. For example, if I understood correctly, there was some recent research how a certain vitamin B (forgot which one) is used to make a marker to mark the invading bacteria to be later destroyed by the leicocytes. Then the deficiency in this vitamin B can lead to the body being unable to produce enough markers and mark the invaders quickly enough to destroy them, even if the body is otherwise perfectly capable of destroying them.

In other words, if a person is getting sick frequently, a zillion different things can be going on, and without conducting a thorough investigation it's impossible to say if, in fact, there's anything wrong with the immune system per se, and if so, what it is. I also learned that lots of people can be getting a cold 6, 9 or 12 times a year and/or have colds for 1 or 2 or 3 weeks, even if they used to have a lower number, and it doesn't always mean there's something awfully wrong with them; there's some variation in how the viruses mutate, etc.

Some things I learned from advice/experience:
- you can't build up the immunity when you are in the middle of a sickness. Definitely not by stressing yourself. That is, don't start doing cold showers while you have a cold unless you are an ultra-athlete and know what you are doing.

- if after a year you reduce the length of your colds from 2 weeks to 1 week or from 15/year to 7/year, whether you do it by exercise, supplements, or it happens naturally, this is great progress. Even if it took less time for things to get worse. And especially don't interpret it as "immunodeficiency" and don't do anything drastic; it's just frequent colds (or flus, or sinus infections).
A real problem would be if every time you have a flu you end up in the emergency room because you can't recover.

- sometimes disease is opportunistic: the body is weakened by something. Then you can get sick more often. Getting enough sleep, eating enough food (!) and drinking enough water are the first things to fix. Before worrying about diet ensure you plainly eat enough calories. Then you can check stress and air quality.

And if you keep getting stressed while you are sick, then sometimes you may get a secondary infection at the same time. (And, by the way, you can get vaxinated from things like pneumonia.)

- people in certain professions including entrepreneurship can sometimes wear themselves out to the point that the immune system does get compromised and you need special shots, but that is uncommon, and a good period of rest (a couple months?) should fix most problems.

- sometimes disease is environmental to some extent. It can be mold in a house, or it can be a certain personal anatomy leading to frequent sinus infections. Certain environments can make everyone sick. Try to look for patterns. Sometimes people make themselves sick by their health practices: using and not cleaning a humidifier, using a neti pot with unclean water (search about brain-eating amoebas in neti pots), adopting an exercise routine that is not appropriate for the person's fitness level.

If you are staying sick at home, ventilating the room and letting some fresh air in reduces the concentration of pathogens in the air. If you are not doing it, that's an environmental issue, not the problem of the body's resistance. Gargling a saline solution (or another agent) to prevent an inflection (of the throat/ear) is, in a way, also an environmental intervention. (And there are more effective things like miramistine.)

- you can certainly do a blood panel and see if there's something terribly wrong or if you have some acute vitamin deficiency. (Vitamin deficiencies aren't always easily solved by supplements as sometimes they are caused by the body not absorbing some substances.)

- there's some evidence you can build up immunity, but again, first get well from the current stretch. Which generally just means, eat well (and enough of it), sleep well, take it easy for some time.

 

[The Racing Driver]

If your mind is ever racing and your can't seem to stop. Direct it toward every single person you know in life and thank them, be grateful about specific things about them that make you happy, person by person.

Thank you for the tips! I admit I used to do some visualisation and keep a gratitude journal but fell off. The mental aspect of this cannot be underestimated.

 

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[okmail]

Thank you for the tips! I admit I used to do some visualisation and keep a gratitude journal but fell off. The mental aspect of this cannot be underestimated.

I feel you man, I'm getting back into it now myself.

I haven't meditated in a while but starting back today.

 

[StrikingViper69]

So many dietary suggestions have been made so far and nobody has mentioned the sun.

Member when they taught you how plants use water and sunlight to produce energy at the cellular level?

Here's what they didn't teach you:

I can talk about this for days.

But I don't have the time for it. So I'll just send you the plug to learn as much as you want on the topic of water+sunlight=energy.

My biggest tip is to get sunlight every day.

* Watch the sunrise and sunset every day.
* Walk at least 30 minutes every day.

Build a solar callus with dusk/dawn light as it's lower in UV rays.

Progressively build your tolerance.

By the time summer roles around, you'll be able to withstand >1h midday exposure.

If you're too busy to watch the sunrise, watch the sunset, and walk peacefully for 30 minutes a day, you're dead already and no vitamin will save you.

Are you arguing that haemoglobin needs sunlight because it has a similar shape to chlorophyll? I totally agree that sunlight (with restraint) is great for the immune system (and health in general), but I don’t understand purpose of the diagram

 

[Robdavis]

My daily drink...

Tumeric
Black pepper
Soluble fiber (acacia usually)
Resveratrol
Spirulina (the biggest ingredient)
Ashwaganda
Vitamin D drops
Fisetin

I continue to add to it as long as I can stomach it.

All of this is mixed up in a base of prebiotic dragon-fruit, pomegranate juice and electrolytes with water-- one hellish taste! Actually I don't mind it, although it makes my wife want to vomit.

@MJ DeMarco,
Couldn't you replace the pomegranate juice with something like tomato juice to make the taste better?

I know that the pomegranate probably isn't what tastes bad, but tomato is quite a strong flavour and so can mask other not so nice flavours.

Just a suggestion...

 

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[MitchC]

Gerald Pollack | UW Bioengineering

UW Bioengineering - Core Faculty - Gerald Pollack, Professor

bioe.uw.edu

Pollack Laboratory | EZ Water | University of Washington

EZ Water, sometimes called Fourth Phase Water was identified by Dr. Gerald Pollack and his laboratory.

www.pollacklab.org

In addition to your inability to read, you can't even do a basic search on the author.

"pseudoscience" is what you do when you read a wikipedia article to shape your opinions instead of studying facts.

When I said I can talk about this for days it's because I've read dozens of his papers, followed up with the reference papers, watched documentaries on it, and devoured at least a dozen books on the topic.

View attachment 54742

The worst part about this interaction is that you missed the point I made to begin with: go outside and use the sunlight to improve your immune response.

But you decide to argue with me about shit you don't know anything about.

Is there anything else that’s practically applicable that we should be doing other than getting sun and drinking water?

Reminds me of wim hoff and James Nestor’s books, interesting, heaps of science and research, but at the end of the day the only thing you can do after reading them is tape your mouth do the breath work and cold exposure.

I’ll listen to any practical advice you’ve gotten from that research but I really don’t feel like reading it all if I don’t have to. Maybe I will, I did enjoy reading about Wim and James research and experiments.

 

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[StrikingViper69]

Gerald Pollack | UW Bioengineering

UW Bioengineering - Core Faculty - Gerald Pollack, Professor

bioe.uw.edu

Pollack Laboratory | EZ Water | University of Washington

EZ Water, sometimes called Fourth Phase Water was identified by Dr. Gerald Pollack and his laboratory.

www.pollacklab.org

In addition to your inability to read, you can't even do a basic search on the author.

"pseudoscience" is what you do when you read a wikipedia article to shape your opinions instead of studying facts.

When I said I can talk about this for days it's because I've read dozens of his papers, followed up with the reference papers, watched documentaries on it, and devoured at least a dozen books on the topic.

View attachment 54742

The worst part about this interaction is that you missed the point I made to begin with: go outside and use the sunlight to improve your immune response.

But you decide to argue with me about shit you don't know anything about.

And rather than deliver an explanation/summary of the book that you asked me to read, you jumped to insulting me and demanding that I research the book you recommended.

 

[MTF]

Build a solar callus with dusk/dawn light as it's lower in UV rays.

Progressively build your tolerance.

By the time summer roles around, you'll be able to withstand >1h midday exposure.

UVB doesn't penetrate the atmosphere unless the sun angle is above 50 degrees. Many places in the world have several months when the sun doesn't go above 50 degrees. This includes places where people think you can tan year round like California or Miami.

Consequently, solar exposure in the morning or in the late afternoon does nothing to build up your tolerance. You need to expose yourself to the sun when it's above 50 degrees.

I always use this tool (I picked Miami as an example but it gives data for every place in the world):

Sunrise and sunset times in Miami

Calculations of sunrise and sunset in Miami – Florida – USA for May 2024. Generic astronomy calculator to calculate times for sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset for many cities, with daylight saving time and time zones taken in account.

www.timeanddate.com

On March 16, sun angle is above 50 between 11:30 am and 3:30 pm. To build up tolerance, you can start for, say, 10 minutes per side (front and back) at 11:30 am and then add a minute or so every day. Or ideally, you can start exactly when the sun is the highest (around 1:29 pm) and do just 2-3 minutes per side and take it from there (that's my preference - less time but in more intense sun).

I've been sunbathing for years and always tan using this tool and this rule. I use it both for timing when and for how long to tan as well as when to avoid the sun to avoid sunburn (this is what causes most serious damage, not just sunbathing).

I tested sunbathing at angles between 45-50 and it doesn't work. It has to be above 50.

And of course, the higher the sun angle (the closer to the tropics you are), the more you'll tan and the more vitamin D you'll get.

After almost 6 months of living in Barbados (where the highest sun angle is 90, the highest possible) and tanning daily my vitamin D levels were 174 ng/ml. I built up to being able to withstand more than an hour in the strongest tropical sun where most white people would have serious sunburns within minutes.

After tanning the entire summer in Poland (where the highest sun angle is merely 61 for my city) my vitamin D levels were only 80 ng/ml. I could tan for 2-3 hours of the strongest sun and have zero reaction.

There are some extra factors that I pay attention to when sunbathing such as:

• humidity (I've found that lower humidity means a higher risk of a sunburn due to dryness),
• elevation (UV radiation increases with elevation),
• reflection (being by the water or any reflective surface like white tiles will increase UV radiation),
• air quality (higher pollution = less UV penetrating),
• cloud cover (some light cloud cover can reflect UVs and actually increase the radiation).

 

[The Racing Driver]

My daily drink...

Tumeric
Black pepper
Soluble fiber (acacia usually)
Resveratrol
Spirulina (the biggest ingredient)
Ashwaganda
Vitamin D drops
Fisetin

I continue to add to it as long as I can stomach it.

All of this is mixed up in a base of prebiotic dragon-fruit, pomegranate juice and electrolytes with water-- one hellish taste! Actually I don't mind it, although it makes my wife want to vomit.

Thanks for the ingredients MJ!

Turmeric, Black Pepper and Vitamin D have been a staple part of my diet. I've recently started taking Ashwaganda on @socaldude's recommendation and am feeling some improvements. I'll admit I've never even heard of some of the other ingredients, but they sound interesting and I'm going to check them out.

 

[socaldude]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua_YR0lgsLY&t=170s


Quercetin is also a very good supplement for immune.

 

[Simon Angel]

I usually get sick if I'm really stressed and lacking in sleep.

However, I also used to have a lower-than-average WBC (white blood cell count), which is pretty much the biggest factor in how often you get sick and how you handle infections.

But after recovering from covid in March 2022, I've been taking cold showers every single day and my WBC is nearly DOUBLE what it used to be. For context, my WBC was lowish for quite a few years, so that was my normal AND I've made no other changes.

Last week was the first time I'd been sick since covid – because both my girlfriend and my mother, whom I was visiting, were coughing and sneezing all over the place.

There IS scientific evidence that cold showers boost your white blood cell count. Google "cold showers white blood cell count" and "cold showers lymphocytes".

But there's also an interesting story...

Many, many years ago a famous Roman botanist called Antonius Musa helped a very young and very ill Augustus Caesar recover with cold compresses and baths.

Augustus Caesar, plagued by chronic illnesses throughout his childhood and early adulthood, used to be so ill at the time that Rome's enemies mocked him and did not take him seriously at all – probably because their spies told them things were looking dire for the young emperor.

He recovered, obviously, and ordered a statue to be erected in the center of Rome to honor the healer. He also promoted him to "equities" or "knight" which was only second to the Senate in the Roman hierarchy.

Oh, and he made all Roman doctors exempt from taxes.

A friend of mine got this from a book, but there's some info online, too:

Antonius Musa was a Greek botanist and the Roman Emperor Augustus's physician; Antonius was a freedman who received freeborn status along with other honours.

When the emperor was seriously ill, and had been made worse by a hot regimen and treatment, B. C. 23, Antonins Musa succeeded in restoring him to health by means of cold bathing and cooling drinks, for which service he received from Augustus and the senate a large sum of money and the permission to wear a gold ring, and also had a statue erected in his honour near that of Aesculapius by public subscription. (Dio Cass. l.c. ; Schol. ad Horat. Epist. 1.15. 3; Sneton. August. 59, 81; Plin. Nat. 19.38, 25.38, 29.5.) He seems to have been attached to this mode of treatment, to which Horace alludes l.c.), but failed when he applied it to the case of M. Marcellus, who died under his care a few months after the recovery of Augustus, B. C. 23. (Dio Cass. l.c.)

The emperor likely suffered from a liver abscess or typhoid fever.

So Augustus recovered with cold therapy but his nephew didn't.

Unexpectedly, Marcellus fell ill and died in Baiae in 23 BCE. As often happens in such unexpected situations, there were voices about the assassination. There were rumors that Livia had poisoned Marcellus. This version of events was supported by the boy’s mother, Octavia. Most likely, however, the reason for the death was natural. Marcellus became ill with an infection of the upper respiratory tract, which was unskilfully tried to heal. Hydrotherapy (cold baths) was fashionable at that time, which only accelerated the development of the disease and led to death. Octavian, despite his family tragedy, kept searching for his successor.

Interestingly, there are quite a few disagreements when it comes to what they were actually afflicted by. Some sources state that Augustus Caesar likely had a liver abscess or typhoid fever while in the paragraph above it's stated that Marcellus, his nephew, suffered from an upper respiratory infection.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, has this to say:

That year, an illness was spreading in Rome which afflicted both Augustus and Marcellus. Augustus caught it earlier in the year, while Marcellus caught it later, after the emperor had already recovered. The illness proved fatal and killed Marcellus at Baiae, in Campania, Italy.

So what's the truth? Who knows, this happened 2000 years ago, lol.

But it looks like cold therapy isn't as novel as people perceive it to be.

Medician Antonius Musa « IMPERIUM ROMANUM

In the times of the first emperor - Octavian Augustus, the princeps himself was highly appreciated by a medic, a certain Antonius Musa.

imperiumromanum.pl

Marcellus (nephew of Augustus) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Marcellus - Augustus' nephew « IMPERIUM ROMANUM

Marcus Claudius Marcellus was the nephew of Augustus. The emperor saw in the boy his successor, whom he carefully prepared for the future role.

imperiumromanum.pl

 

[The Racing Driver]

Reading this I see lots of people reccomending lots of different things based on anecdotal evidence.
That's fine and a legitimate way to present evidence for someone who can't conduct actual studies.

However the only common threads I've noticed are
1. Cold exposure
2. Vitamin D
3. Exercise

To me that's a green flag for those. If several different people from all over the world have anecdotal evidence for something and nothing to gain by recommending it, it's likely there's something to it.

I get a reasonably good amount of #2 and #3. With cold exposure are you talking about cold showers or even exposure to cold weather?

For me, exposure to cold weather has gotten me sick, especially when I last walked in cold rain, I woke up the next day with cold symptoms and became more sick in the days after.

I used to be deficient in Vitamin D, until I did a blood test nearly 8 years ago for something. The Doctor gave me a course of medicines to increase my Vitamin D levels. Since then I've fallen sick way less, and blood tests I've done years later show no deficiency. I would add that getting blood test done can reveal a lot of underlying issues.

 

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[Visida]

Include more fresh fruits, vegetables, herbs and protein foods in your diet. Eating a diet rich in vitamins and minerals helps support the immune system.
Continue to exercise, but be sure to ensure adequate recovery after exercise. Regular moderate physical activity helps strengthen the immune system.