13 Easy Ways to Improve Your Immune System Naturally in 2013
By LaKenya McClough, MPH
Happy New Year family! Given the recent spike in flu incidences in California and across the country, I thought it might be helpful to highlight a few more options on how to stay healthy this season. In this article, I’m sharing with you 13 different and simple ways you can naturally boost your immune system. These are not new ideas. In fact, they are easy everyday practices that when adopted on a regular basis can make a world of difference for your health and may even help prevent you from getting the flu!
Over the next 13 days I’ll be posting a tip per day on simple, easy, and natural ways to protect and boost your immune system!
Tip #4 of 13 – Drinking Green Tea
However you choose to have it (plain, or with honey, sugar or lemon), drinking green tea has several natural health benefits for the body. Some of these immune system benefits include better control of inflammation throughout the body, improved immune function and cancer prevention. Several studies site an association between reduced risk for cancers such as, prostate, skin, breast, lung, colon cancers and drinking green tea. (W. Tisdale, Healthyblackmen.org)
Here’s how it works: Green tea contains a key compound that has the ability to increase the number of “regulatory T cells” an essential part of immune function and suppression of autoimmune disease.” Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars on making synthetic drugs that can perform similar roles in , but these drugs can often be toxic to your body. Green tea is a natural food and drinking the compounds found in the natural green tea is “a sustainable way (to get all the benefits of green tea naturally) and “without toxicity.” (Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University)
For more about the health effects of green tea for African Americans, click here.
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Click here to see Tip # 3 of 13