How to Support Your Child’s Immune System

Most of us know exactly what to eat to feel good, prevent illness, feel better and live longer. So why aren’t we choosing to feed our families the best?

Whatever our emotional, physical or spiritual reasons for menu selections, the quality of the food we eat matters the most. Whole food vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts, eggs and lean meat are vital. Yet most kids have grown accustomed to the taste and convenience of less-vital processed foods. Far too many consider fast food convenience a sacred cornerstone of their day.

Changing to good-for-us food habits is hard. So Naturopath Practitioner Melissa Malinowski of Grand Rapids, Michigan, suggests that an easy place to start thinking about it is to gear up a strong immune system using whole food supplements. The results just may convince us.

"I believe it’s easier for a person to take a supplement than to change a lifestyle," says Malinowski. "So I suggest first filling in any nutritional gaps with whole food supplements. "If I can get family members to feel better by taking whole food supplements, the likelihood that they will want to modify their diet on their own is remarkable."

In her practice Malinowski forwards the common sense philosophy that living bodies need to eat living food. Nature’s plan supplies all the living components necessary to live well. On the contrary, when we feed our living body dead devitalized foods, she says, "It’s a near-certain prescription for illness."

Her recommendation for raising healthy happy children is feeding them whole foods every couple of hours and including a good source of quality protein with each meal. She explains that this helps keep blood sugar and hormone levels in balance, prevents extreme swings in energy and mood and stabilizes youngsters’ concentration. Imbalances beget illness and dis-ease. But glands relieved of the stress of continually having to destabilize blood sugar can function more optimally, in turn serving to relieve stress on the immune system.

According to Malinowski, many times when a child gets sick, the cause may not be attributed solely to a virus or bacteria. If the internal environment is out of balance, the child’s overall immunity may be weakened. Since children are exposed to hundreds of germs in a day, the determining factor in whether or not a child may be susceptible to colds, flu or other illness is the strength of their built-in immune system as well as the internal environment in which their cells, glands and tissues survive or thrive.

Whole food supplements are equally important given the status quo of nutrient-deficient chemical farming that’s overtaken traditional agribusiness in the past 50 years. Derived directly from whole foods, these concentrated natural wonders contain all the enzymes, phytonutrients and living elements needed to rebuild, repair and heal the body from the inside out.

Whole food supplements are a far cry from synthetic vitamins which typically are manufactured solely out of isolates in a laboratory. Synthetic vitamins contain no living components at all.

In other words, whole food supplements are living. Synthetic vitamins are dead.

A proper diet with supplement support also helps the body’s lymphatic system, which works to drain and filter out toxins and help maintain proper immune system function. Processed foods, on the other hand, like white flour, white rice, white sugar and certain dairy products, tend to congest cells, organs and tissues, inhibiting drainage of toxins out of the system.

"It helps to understand that our bodies are in constant recycle mode," says Melissa Malinowski. "Cells and tissues are continually breaking down and building back up." This is why the quality of our food is essential to our well-being. "Remember that our body is an amazing machine doing the best it can at all times. It depends on us to give it good quality raw materials in the form of food, water and supplemental nutrition to do its job."