One reason that many people die early is that they have a weak immune system. When you have a strong immune system, your body’s natural defenses will hunt down and destroy many bacteria and viruses that cause potentially fatal illnesses – ensuring a longer life. Without it, you are more or less sure to have a shortened life.
When people do not have a healthy lifestyle, they create for themselves an immune deficiency. The good news is that you can strengthen your immune system, which will lead to a better immune response when needed – and increased longevity.
It is rather easy to tell whether or not you have a weak immune system. Some of the symptoms of a deficient immune system are that you will catch a cold easily, have bronchitis or pneumonia often, have ear infections, inflammation, disorders of the blood, slower healing of wounds, fatigue, and digestive problems.
Learning how to live longer involves making several changes in your lifestyle. The more changes you make, the more it will boost your immune system.
1. Stopping smoking and reducing – or even eliminating your alcohol intake, are good starting places.
2. A couple of other things that you will need to reduce or eliminate from your life are stress and carrying around extra weight. The presence of these problems will negatively impact the health of your immune system. A lack of sleep is also harmful to good health in the long run.
Aging naturally tends to reduce your body’s immune system, so it becomes necessary to ensure that you take steps toward strengthening it as you grow older. Growing older causes your body to slowly reduce its ability to produce T cells to fight infection.
You can take some steps to boost your immune system but it will not happen overnight. In addition to eliminating the habits and problems mentioned above, your body will need to be supplied with the right vitamins and minerals to boost your immune system to a higher level of operation.
3. Eating more fruits, vegetables, and nuts will give your body many of the nutrients needed to build a stronger defense system.
These foods also contain various antioxidants which can help fight inflammation, which can lead to many fatal diseases, including heart disease, diabetes, dementia, and several cancers. Fruits and vegetables will also help to strengthen your gut biome, which also strengthens your immune system.
An immune system can also develop difficulty identifying harmful pathogens from healthy ones – causing an autoimmune disorder.
4. You can also strengthen your gut biome to fight harmful pathogens by eating fermented foods such as kefir, sauerkraut, yogurt, or kimchi. Taking probiotics will get the same effect.
5. Reducing your sugar intake will also boost your immune system. Having a diet high in sugar can increase your inflammation and cause it to spread faster, as well as your risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Sugar also weakens the ability of your immune cells to correctly identify harmful pathogens. This effect is why diabetics have more infections than others. Drinking one can of soda weakens your immune system for up to five hours after drinking it.
6. Exercise is another immune system booster. Too much can be harmful, but getting at least 150 minutes per week is healthy and will strengthen your immune system. It does this by helping your body respond faster to pathogens and limiting the immune response to the correct amount. Maintaining a healthy weight and exercising enables your immune response to get to the site of the pathogens faster – preventing serious health problems and enabling you to live longer.
