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Getting seriously ill from Covid-19 is not just a major inconvenience or a gigantic financial drain, it’s also potentially life threatening especially for those who are weak and/or elderly. With this new coronavirus going around and spreading like wildfire, it’s best to do everything we can to minimize the risk and stay healthy.
You may have already read these tips all over social media before, but it’s best to revisit them and remember. After all, it’s not just your health that’s at risk, but those of your parents and grandparents too.
3 Ways to Reduce the Risk and Protect Yourself from Covid-19
1. Practice Social Distancing
While it’s sad that this is not practical for the poor blue-collar workers and people in the informal economy, this is still something we should all consider and attempt as best as we can. The principle behind this is simple: if you don’t want to get hit by a bullet, then stay away from places where bullets fly. If you want to avoid a disease that spreads among groups of people, then minimize contact with large groups of people if you can.
Go out only when necessary, cancel unimportant meetings, and minimize contact with groups. That way, you minimize the risk of catching the disease from those who are infected but do not show symptoms, and you also reduce the chances of spreading it to others if ever you already have been infected.
2. Practice good hygiene: Wash your hands with soap and disinfect yourself often!
I remember from highschool biology that viruses cannot really be called “living” things like bacteria. They don’t eat or grow, and they’re just a nucleic acid (DNA/RNA) covered in a coating (fat and/or protein). Because of that, I didn’t know a lot about how to “defeat” them, until I read this article by Pall Thordarson: “The science of soap – here’s how it kills the coronavirus”.
It’s a pretty good read, but the short version is that soap’s fat-like amphiphiles mess with the lipid (fat) layer of viruses, and with a little rubbing the structure of the virus just breaks down. Remember to wash your hands with soap and disinfect yourself often! If you want to be more secure, take a bath and wash your hair and body with soap after every time you go out.
3. Lastly, do what you can to improve your health and immune system.
I used to read a lot about herbs and phytochemicals, traditional medicine, and health. While I do know a bit about them, I don’t write about those here on YourWealthyMind.com because I don’t want to diversify my topics too much. I might, however, write about health and wellness on my other blog, OneAdventurer.com.
Anyway, although we can reduce our exposure risk through social distancing and good hygiene, our absolute last line of defense if our body’s immune system. While we can’t protect ourselves 100% against especially virulent diseases, we can at least give our body a fighting chance. Good health won’t only increase our chances of fighting infection, but it could also reduce how bad symptoms can get and improve our rate or recovery.
Immunity, when optimized, can ward off infection; and if infection does occur, it is much more likely to have a harmless outcome.
— Joel Fuhrman, M.D., Super Immunity
While I’d love to write about all sorts of stuff like isothiocyanates, allicin (garlic), the synergistic effects of phytochemicals in herbs like curcumin (turmeric) and piperine (black pepper), the diets of the healthiest world populations and all that stuff, it would take an entire article for each one so we’ll just talk about some basics here.
Here are a few top health tips from all the books I’ve read about health and nutrition:
- Eat more fruits and vegetables. Don’t believe those fads saying you just need to drink this essential oil or that pill or this herbal juicee. Good health comes from a varied diet. Fruits and vegetables contain a huge number of antioxidants and phytochemicals that not only protect your cells from oxidative damage (antiOXIDANTS, remember?), they also contain a whole lot of nutrients that your body and its immune system needs to function well. To get better results, eat different kinds of fruits and vegetables, as well as all sorts of herbs and spices.
- Reduce stress. As a psychology graduate, I’ve read quite a bit about how constant stress can weaken your immune system. It’s one big reason why you tend to get sick more often after a stressful work week or a traumatic experience. Practice ways of reducing your stress levels, such as by getting better sleep, taking naps, meditating, etc., and you should be able to improve your health by quite a bit.
- Eat less junk food. The preservatives, sweeteners, and other synthetic additives in junk food can have all sorts of nasty effects on your body. While we can’t avoid them completely, we can at least lessen the amount we spend on junk food and hopefully eat healthier alternatives instead.
The best combination for improving your immune system, according to Dr. Joel Fuhrman, is eating cruciferous vegetables (cabbage, broccoli, kale), mushrooms, and onions and garlic.
Cruciferous vegetables have isothiocyanates that improve interferon response so your immune system is faster and more effective at attacking viruses. Mushrooms enhance NKT cells that destroy virus-infected cells, and the allium family of vegetables (garlic, onions, scallions, chives, etc.) have organosulfur compounds that ward off infection and improve immune function. That’s a really, REALLY short summary of what they do (and I haven’t even included all their anti-cancer effects), so if you want to learn more I’d REALLY recommend that you read Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s book.
Remember: Eat more fruits and vegetables, reduce stress, and eat less junk food!
There’s an old and famous saying, “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure”. While we can’t completely avoid infection and disease, we can at least reduce the chances of exposure and infection. In order to protect ourselves and our loved ones, we have to practice a bit of social distancing, good hygiene, and improve our health and immune system. It may be inconvenient at first, but it’s much better than not doing any of them at all.
That ends our short lesson for today. If you want to learn more about improving your health and immune system, you can check out these books below. I have read them all, and I really recommend them.