Better Body Chemistry for flu season

You need to seek out coughing and sneezing displays from a distance

You’re standing in one of those slow, barely moving ques – patiently waiting your turn, okay maybe not patiently, but there you are WAITING.

It is mid-winter, the people who you are sharing your space with are snotting and sniffing, coughing and spluttering. You seriously contemplate leaving the building and mumble under your breath about how inconsiderate and selfish people are, but the need to get your business done, keeps you glued to the spot. You try to hold your breath or breathe through your scarf, in a feeble attempt to avoid “catching” a cold .

Going down with a cold is a numbers game so avoid children

Catching a cold is never pleasant, for most of us, it boils down to a week or so of misery, snots and sniffs, but for people with underlying lung disease, it can be fatal.

So vigilance is necessary.

But what should you WATCH out for ? What makes you a sitting duck for a cold ?

Experience suggests being “run down” i.e. being a little a lot STRESSED, makes you especially vulnerable to respiratory tract infections. And logic suggests, anyone who has inherently “weak” lungs, due to underlying lung diseases, such as COPD, is going to be at increased risk of “catching a cold”.

But research published in the Journal of Clinical Virology, concludes the biggest risk factor for going down with a cold, is neither stress nor lung weakness, but it is spending time with (sick) young children.

Yup, the snotty nosed little ones, are quite literally cesse pools of germs, that MAKE you sick.

Fumigate your lungs with a little vitamin D bug spray

The lungs are a front line.

The air we breathe is laced with potentially dangerous bugs and chemicals, so the lungs need to be equipped to handle these intruders.

A veritable army of immune cells battle the bugs that try to gate crash the body via the respiratory system. But, the respiratory epithelium themselves do battle with their own chemical weaponary. These chemicals are the human version of antibiotics – designed to crush foreigners.

The weapons are natural antimicrobial peptides, AMPs for short.

What happens when you “catch” a cold ?

Someone spits directly on you, or on a surface that you touch and one of a host of different respiratory tract viruses ends up in your respiratory tract.

If conditions are just right, the virus will be able to “hook” onto one of the cells lining your respiratory tract and attach on to it. The official word for this is the virus has adsorbed (it isn’t a typo – it adsorbs not absorbs). Once the virus “adsorbed” to the cell, it begins the process of getting inside. Each virus has its own particular style, but at the end of the day, it manages to stick its genes inside of your cell. Your cell gets a little confused, so instead of ignoring extra bits of DNA, your cell treats the bits as normal DNA.

It starts to make copies of the DNA and to translate the DNA into proteins, as if the DNA was you. So in a very short space of time, your cell has accidently made new virus (lots of it).

Doggie cuddles take away health troubles

Dealing with sickness and disease is never easy, but a little love helps big time. The source of “love” doesn’t need to be human, four legged friends are just as capable of giving an emotional lift up.