BOOST YOUR CHILD's IMMUNE SYSTEM
Ten Ways to Support Your Child's Immune System
5 min read
Introduction
Over the last twenty years, I have been inspiring parents to look beyond convenience and make food choices to support healthier and happier children. A healthy child has a healthy immune system. This has never felt more important post pandemic.
A strong immune system is partially formed from the foods they eat. A healthy diet will not only help them keep well when they are young, but also build up their resistance to disease and protect them in later life. Simple changes can make all the difference. It is never too late to make a difference to your family’s health.
Here are my top ten simple, natural ways to support your children’s immunity.
Contents
- Eat Real Food
- Include Plenty of Variety in Their Diet
- Variety is the Key to Good Health
- Good Gut Vibes
- Healthy Fats for a Healthy Immune System
- Vital Vitamin D and the immune connection
- Become Supermarket Savvy
- What is your child drinking?
- Exercise, Sleep and Screen Time
- Avoid being over anxious about dirt
1. Eat Real Food
In our busy lives, many of us have lost touch with real food. Supermarkets bombard us with ‘children’s food’, ultra processed products in the form of breakfast cereals, fruit flavoured yoghurts, pizzas, snacks laden with hidden sugar and harmful fats and ready meals of processed meat, fish or fake alternatives. It is time to take back control of our children’s health and feed them real whole food, as nature intended. Whole foods are foods in their natural state.
Try swopping a sugary breakfast cereal for a bowl of porridge and fresh fruit or a super simple overnight oats. A boiled egg and wholegrain soldiers rather than an egg McMuffin. Instead of buying ready made chicken nuggets, opt for a super quick homemade version, roast a whole chicken for a weeks meals or create a 15 minute chicken stir fry. These are healthier options that support immune health and can be enjoyed by all age groups.
2. Eat the Rainbow
Incorporate at least five portions of colourful fruits and vegetables (red, yellow, orange, green, purple) a day into your child’s diet. Colourful plant foods are rich in vitamins such as vitamin C and betacarotene that act as powerful antioxidants as well as polyphenols including anthocyanins and flavonols that help protect and strengthen your child’s immune defences.
A portion for a toddler could be, for example, 2 tbsps peas, 2-6 cooked carrot sticks, a couple of florets of broccoli, a satsuma or a small handful of chopped blueberries. Incorporating fruit into smoothies, adding chopped veg into soups, stews and stir fries are all ways to elevate your family’s intake of rainbow foods.
3. Variety is the Key to Good Health
Offering a wide range of seasonal whole foods to your family is a great way to ensure a good variety of nutrients required by the immune system. Recent research indicates that eating 30 different plant foods a week creates a more healthy gut microbiome which, in turn, directly affects the efficiency of our immune system.
It is easy to achieve at least 30 a week if you consider that pulses, legumes, spices, herbs as well as fruits and vegetables count. Experiencing new tastes and textures encourages an adventurous appetite and could help to avoid faddy eating habits in young children too.
4. Good Gut Vibes
Incorporate foods that encourage great gut health and that allows your child’s developing gut microbiome to blossom. Approximately 75% of our immune cells are located in our gut lining and so the two are intrinsically linked. Offering probiotic and prebiotic foods from an early age help to encourage good gut health. Probiotic foods include natural, live yoghurt, kefir, cottage cheese, creme fraiche as well as fermented foods such as kimchi, sauerkraut, pickled vegetables, tempeh, miso, kombucha and water kefir.
Prebiotic foods are fibre rich foods that our beneficial gut bacteria feed and grow on. Prebiotic foods are fruits and vegetables including leeks, onions, garlic, bitter greens like chicory, radicchio, dandelion, endive, flaxseeds, asparagus, aubergine, oats, barley, cocoa and fruits including apple and banana.
5. Healthy Fats for a Healthy Immune System
Include plenty of omega-3 fatty acids in your child’s diet. These polyunsaturated essential fats (so called because we can’t produce them ourselves, we have to obtain them through our diet) play an important role in immune health. They exhibit anti-inflammatory properties as well as helping to regulate the activity of white blood cells. Good sources of omega-3’s are oily fish, including mackerel, herring, sardines, trout and salmon.
Salmon fish fingers, fish pie, sardine pasta sauce and mackerel fishcakes are all popular choices with children. The best vegetarian sources are walnuts, chia seeds and flaxseeds. Other healthy fats to include in the diet are olive oil, avocado, nuts and seeds.
6. Vital Vitamin D and the immune connection
In the UK, according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), 1 in 5 adults and 1 in 6 children are lacking in this essential vitamin due to poor diets, lack of sunshine and indoor lives. Research is ongoing into vitamin D’s anti-viral action since the scientific discovery by Cambridge University, that those with adequate levels of Vitamin D recovered quicker from Covid-19 with significantly lower casualties than those deficient in the vitamin. It is believed that vitamin D supports the immune system by suppressing the ability of viruses to replicate.
The NHS advises that all adults and children over 12 months should be taking 10mcg (400iu) daily from October to March in addition to dietary sources. Vitamin D is made by our bodies when we are outdoors in direct sunlight. It is also rich in foods such as red meat, dairy, eggs and oily fish. For vegans, it is found in fortified cereals and some plant milks. Vitamin D is also found to a lesser extent in mushrooms. Research has proven that exposure to sunlight raises the level of vitamin D in mushrooms. Leaving them out in the sunshine for an hour before using might really work. Several supermarkets now sell UV enriched mushrooms as well.
7. Become Supermarket Savvy
Labelling can be extremely confusing and it is worthwhile spending time getting to grips with the tricks of the trade and be able to differentiate the health makers from the health breakers. Keeping sugar to a minimum in your child’s diet is essential as research suggests that it may act as an immunosuppressant and encourage pro-inflammatory responses.
Cut down on sugary foods such as cakes, biscuits, jams and over sweetened puddings. Remember that one teaspoon of sugar is equivalent to 4g in weight. Therefore if a yoghurt contains 15g of sugar, that is nearly 4 teaspoons! Swap to natural yoghurts with fresh fruit or homemade compotes. Often the foods that are targeted at young children contain the most sugar. Shocking but true.
8. What is your child drinking?
Being well hydrated is really important for the healthy functioning of their lymphatic system which is a pivotal part of the immune system. Lymph is made up of 90% water and helps to remove waste, toxins, pathogens and abnormal cells out of the system as well as transporting infection fighting white blood cells where they are needed. Fresh, clean water and plenty of it is recommended.
Avoid giving squashes that are full of flavours, colours, sugar and sweeteners and substitute for highly diluted (70/30) cold pressed apple juice, milk or pure water. Encourage your child’s school to allow water bottles as even mild dehydration affects cognitive function too. Using a water filter, even the jug types, really helps improve the taste of water and is likely to encourage your children to happily drink it from a very early age. Once the habit is established, they are less likely to reach for fizzy, sugary and caffeinated drinks whilst teenagers, other than for a moment of curiosity.
9. Exercise, Sleep and Screen Time
As a rule young children never keep still for long! However, encouraging an active lifestyle for all the family is vital for immune health. Without exercise, the lymph, whose job it is to transport some of the immune cells around the lymphatic system can get sluggish. Limit screen time and discourage unhealthy snacking habits during these times. A plate of chopped vegetables, hummus and nut butters with some homemade popcorn or seeded oatcakes will be happily munched if nothing else is on offer.
Bad habits start young and are much harder to reverse down the line. Sleep deprivation can also actively interfere with the healthy functioning of the immune system, increasing the risk of infection as well as affecting brain function and mental wellbeing. Children’s health is far more important than the odd tussle over phone access and limiting screen time to allow uninterrupted sleep can make all the difference to their overall wellbeing.
10. Avoid being over anxious about dirt
Some health professionals cite our obsession with hygiene as one of the reasons why allergies are on the increase. There’s nothing like splashing in a muddy puddle or playing with a pet in the garden. One study found that children growing up with animals had a 50% reduction in their risk of asthma at school age.
Children need a healthy exposure to germs in order to build up their immunity. A bit of dirt never hurt anybody and in terms of your children’s health it maybe just what they need!
Thank you for Reading! If you enjoyed this please do try out my recipes, all of which are on my Instagram.
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