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Following on from our Low Immunity and Supporting Immunity series, we hope that you feel empowered with an understanding about how to comprehensively and holistically reduce your risk of infection in the first place, and support yourself if and when you have an infection. Now, we are shifting our focus towards how best to support ourselves post-infection since this is often characterised by symptoms which have a significant impact on an individual’s quality of life.

We often under-estimate the importance of supporting our immunity until we fall ill, and also how long it can take to recover until we experience lingering symptoms following an infection. Recovery from an infection ‘normally’ lasts one to two weeks. For some, however, this recovery process can last months, even years, characterised by prolonged post-infection symptoms, such as chronic fatigue, brain fog, muscle aches, and loose bowel movements. So, why do some individuals experience this prolonged recovery period, and others do not?

Identifying the underlying drivers of lingering post-infection symptoms, and how they can go on to affect our physical and mental health, facilitates implementation of tailored nutrition and lifestyle interventions which have the most chance of helping individuals to feel better. This is important now more than ever given the emerging problem of ‘post-viral fatigue/ syndrome.’

Over the next few blogs, we will delve into the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind these prolonged post-infection symptoms, focusing on three integral areas: energy, cognitive health, and digestion.

In the first instalment of our Immunity Series, we explored the various factors which can increase our risk of low immunity, with a view to you learning how to nourish your immune system at a deep level. Moving forward, we want to empower you with an understanding of the nutrition and lifestyle ‘tools’ which you can use to support your immunity in day-to-day life.

As the days get shorter and darker, many of us are feeling emotionally fatigued at the prospect of more challenging months ahead with the pandemic. If you feel the same, we’re keen to fill you with fresh inspiration about how you can support your immune system, and overall health and wellbeing, over the coming months.

With the reduction in daily sunlight exposure, and the higher risk of infection during the cooler months, it is essential that we work towards optimising our vitamin D status for immune and bone support in particular.

The bare minimum requirement for adequate vitamin D synthesis is sufficient daily exposure of our skin to sunlight. It therefore comes as no surprise that 25% of the UK population may be deficient, especially when you consider that we live in the northern hemisphere with heavily indoors-based lifestyles, particularly during the year 2020! It is therefore vital that we increase our daily intake of vitamin D over these cooler months to mitigate for our reduced ability to make enough of this nutrient at this time of the year.

Our Clinical Nutrition team have shared this tasty immune smoothie recipe which includes our favourite supplement - Immune Intensive.