John Arts Abundant Living www.johnarts.co.nz

To most people, our immune system is our defence against colds, flu and other bugs.

Just as important is its ability to initiate healing when our body is damaged by disease or trauma.

Your immune system has two main divisions. The first is your built-in defences, which include physical barriers such as skin and mucous membranes, the creation of fevers to make invading bugs uncomfortable and attack cells to kill invaders. These defences include the inflammatory processes to start healing from trauma and disease. The second part is our adaptive defences and includes a variety of cells such as B and T cells that learn to recognise and attack specific threats such as individual viruses.

Like all body systems our immune responses are largely influenced by nutrition. Immune cells need B vitamins as co-enzymes, they need the trace minerals as enzyme co-factors and they need the antioxidant nutrients. Vitamin C is found in high levels in immune (white blood) cells and these require greater amounts when actively fighting an infection. You should aim for 500-1000mg of vitamin C when well and increase this to 1000mg twice daily if unwell.

The trace mineral zinc is essential for our both killer T cell and natural killer cell production. Zinc is involved with more enzymes than any other mineral and helps with immune (antibody) response and may even help to limit bacterial and viral growth. Your daily multi should have 15mg of chelated zinc plus all the other trace minerals.

Vitamin D is one of the most important immune system nutrients because it helps to make the immune system more responsive and additionally helps protect against autoimmune disease and cancer cell formation. Unfortunately our national levels of vitamin D are very low contributing greatly to many disease processes. I take 1000IU daily from spring through autumn and an additional 1000IU during winter.

If you are using supplements to help your immunity, make sure that you cover all the vitamin, mineral and antioxidant groups before you add specific nutrients. While there are some notable exceptions, such as vitamins C and D, for most people their daily multi-nutritional complex should provide all the minerals (major, trace and ultra-trace), all the vitamins and all the main antioxidant groups. Give me a call if you need help. To join my weekly newsletter go to www.johnarts.co.nz and visit www.abundant.co.nz

John Arts is the founder of Abundant Health. To contact John, phone (local) 578 9051 or 0800 423 559.