Whole Family Nutrition

Perhaps the most important thing you can do at this time of year is increase your family’s stores of Vitamin D and Omega-3. Vitamin D and Omega-3 can be easily obtained by purchasing cod liver oil at your local health food store and giving it to your family.  This is important for all: the young, the old, and the pregnant.

Why Vitamin D and Omega-3?

Scientists are unraveling a link between Vitamin D levels and susceptibility to respiratory infections. Low Vitamin D levels are cited with the fact that colds, pneumonia, and especially the flu are confined to winter months, when exposure to sunlight is most limited.  It’s no mere coincidence. And Omega-3 fatty acids (like DHA and EPA) are important in preventing your immune system from causing excess damage.

Vitamin D and Omega-3 (both found in cod liver oil) greatly diminish flu problems in two ways:

1. Vitamin D is necessary for immune cell production of anti-microbial peptides. These peptides, spurred only by vitamin D, are indispensable for directly killing the influenza virus.  Without Vitamin D, the immune system is greatly crippled.
2. Vitamin D and Omega-3’s help lower respiratory inflammation. Often, what is worse than the actual infection itself is the body’s response to the infection.  This is no less true with the flu and swine flu.  Without the calming effects of vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids, the body often damages itself by an over-reactive immune response, making the infection worse.  Over-reactive immunity is analogous to “friendly fire” in a war zone.  Without vitamin D and omega-3, your body will end up killing itself trying to fight the enemy.

Action Steps

1. Get cod liver oil. Cod liver oil can be found at your health food store.  TwinLabs is the best “cheap” brand, while Carlson’s and Nordic Naturals are the highest quality (and highest priced).  Consider lemon-flavored.  Don’t get emulsified (comment if you’re curious why).
2. Feed it to your family by the teaspoonful every day. Cod liver oil doesn’t taste bad (if it’s fresh), although most people aren’t used to the buoyancy of pure oil on their tongue.  It “don’t seem right.”  Therefore, I give you permission to gently bribe your kids with a treat (eek!).  After swallowing the oil they can have a chewable vitamin!  (By the way, this last tactic worked for us when we started cod liver oil a few years ago with Isaac.  Now they eat it without bribery.  Anika loves it unconditionally because she’s had it from infancy.)
3. Read more about Vitamin D.

Alternatively, you can get separate Vitamin D tablets or capsules and fish oil capsules.  This is fine.  You can smash vitamin D easily and since it doesn’t have a taste, you can sprinkle it in the child’s food.  The food needs to have fat in it for proper absorption of the Vitamin D. Vitamin D capsules have the added benefit of allowing you to load up quickly by giving a more concentrated form of Vitamin D.  But you shouldn’t give anyone more than 2,000 IU for extended periods.  Post-menopausal women should not eat cod liver oil because they lack the hormones that would handle the Vitamin A correctly.

Vitamin D is not the only factor in susceptibility to bad respiratory infections.  A healthy diet full of whole foods is an important protection.  But increasing your levels of Vitamin D is so easy, and can make such a vast improvement in your health, that I recommend you purchase it as soon as you can.

Oh, and don’t forget to make sure you’re getting enough zinc in your diet!  Zinc is also essential for the immune system, but that’s for another post.

Good luck and flourish.

Nick