In our review of the immune system, you learned that inflammation can be a double-edged sword. Inflammation naturally happens when something that’s not us, like a pathogen, gets into our body, like an infection.

What we want to do is to reduce or eliminate factors that drive excess inflammation, or inflammation that has no value, as well as related dysregulatory impacts on immune function. 

To do this, the smart thing to do first is to address your baseline level of systemic inflammation.

What we want to do is reduce or eliminate factors that drive excess inflammation, or inflammation that has no value, as well as related dysregulatory impacts on immune function. For this to happen, the first thing to address our baseline level of systemic inflammation.

This short lesson covers how a mindfulness practice can reveal the source of your stress and thereby reduce it; and the ability that three herbal adaptogens have on reducing stress.

Our focus is on how stress impacts your immune system. Once that’s clear, the next step is to become mindful of what generates your stress. This you need to know in order to let it go.

Improvements in diet are strongly associated with reductions in inflammation. If you want to enhance your immunity to COVID-19, what you eat needs to be a primary focus.

We're going to focus on:

• Glycemic control
• Microbiome balance
• Dietary nutrition

Regular exercise clearly enhances immune regulation. 

But, to decrease baseline inflammation, the right exercise intensity is critical. If you do too little exercise at low intensity, there’s little to no impact on baseline, or systemic, inflammation. 

If you do too much exercise at high intensity, you can actually lower your resistance to infection and inhibit a regulated, balanced immune response. 

Let's find the right balance.

The nutraceuticals I’m going to review can support a well-functioning immune system, and many of them play dual roles in immunology, in that they can support immune surveillance, while also reducing inflammation.

This purpose of this lesson is to give you an appreciation of how a master antioxidant that your body makes not only fights free radicals, but also helps improve immune system modulation, so that it doesn’t have an excessive inflammatory reaction to SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 disease.

Your risk of getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 and then getting very sick from COVID-19 illness can get substantially higher if you have a number of pre-existing conditions, referred to as “comorbidities” or if you’re older than 50.

We will address comorbidities first, and then discuss how and why Covid gets more and more nasty as we get older.