This is an easy one: Eat more Yogurt!
Yogurt is one of the most important foods you'll ever find when it comes to preventing disease, especially the flu, yet it is so often overlooked. Yogurt made from Organic or better yet raw milk will help strengthen your immune system by strengthening the friendly flora in your gut, one of the building blocks of your immune system. I suggest 1-2 cups a day with different meals, perhaps breakfast and dinner. Over time this small habit will make a huge difference. For that matter raw diary products again will bring so much strength and flexibility to your immune system, you might not even catch the common cold this winter.
Other obvious foods/herbs are garlic and onions, and mushrooms, especially shittake. I like an immune boosting omelet featuring shittake mushrooms sauteed lightly in oil and garlic with some raw milk cheese and avocados on the side; it is a hearty, warming, immune strengthening winter food! Hearty soups are also a great winter food and you can make large amounts once a week and have them during the week. Into these soups you can put American Ginseng (Panax quinquefolius), whether dried or fresh, to enhance the already potent immune strengthening qualities. To use Ginseng you really need to have a relationship with a grower and make sure quality and sustainability are honored; a lot of the Ginseng you may find is not grown properly or long enough to offer the healing powers of the plant. The older roots are more potent and more expensive. Ginseng is pretty expensive overall, much more so than most all the other herbs I write about, so keep that in mind. As far as growers, I can recommend Hardings farm in Maryland; check them out if you wish to try Ginseng. They'll ship to you wherever you are.
Herbal infusions are another gradual yet significant way to enhance the flexibility and strength of your immune system. I favor a rotation of Red Clover, Stinging Nettle, Linden Flowers, and Oatstraw. I usually drink one for a day or two and then move on to another. They're easy to make and relatively inexpensive. All you need is a mason jar, boiling water, and dried plant material. Let the infusion sit overnight and strain out the liquid the next morning, squeezing all the liquid from the plant material; then discard the plant material in your compost pile and refrigerate the liquid for up to two or three days of enjoyment! If you have fresh mints, they are always nice to put in there, but you may find you grow to like the taste of the infusions on their own after a while - give it time.
Find the foods and herbs that work for you and bring them into your diet on a regular basis; that's the key here. Everyday habits that you employ over time to produce a gradual yet dramatic effect. Much more to come so stay tuned.
Uh, how do you make yogurt out of raw milk? You have to heat the milk to at least 115°F in order to get the culture to grow, and then the milk isn't raw anymore, is it?
ReplyDeleteGood question! I'll ask next time I'm at Birchwood Farms. Perhaps they mean simply that the yogurt is made from raw milk to begin with, whereas I'm guessing you can also make yogurt from pasteurized milk, right?
ReplyDeleteThank you so much! I have posted this on facebook and am sharing it with as many people as possible.I personally follow this advice and haven't had the flu in years! And I haven't had a flu shot either!
ReplyDeleteNO you don't have to heat the milk, you just add the yogurt or yogurt culture and let it sit out at room temp, in the summer, or warm it up in the winter.
ReplyDeleteA lot of times they do that to the "raw" cheeses, which is why you can't trust the labels.
Raw milk - not cultured - has hundreds more times the probiotic of yogurt made from Pasteurized milk, so raw is the way to go!
Also, a great flu prevention strategy is taking a teaspoon or so of cold pressed coconut oil in the morning and before bed. It dissolves the coat of the flu virus.
Probiotics are also awesome!