Health care essentials: Take a deep breath and relax

Published 7:00 am Saturday, November 7, 2020

{photoSource}La Grande Observer{/photoSource}

Take a deep breath and relax. That’s good advice, especially with current political angst and COVID-19 stalking us. This column will focus primarily on respiratory health and its vital role in your overall health over the next few months.

Since respiratory failure is the most common cause of death from COVID-19, a healthy respiratory system is especially important now. Slower, deeper breathing is calming, fills your lower lungs, is more efficient and improves immunity. Shallow, rapid breathing is more work with less benefit. Shallow breathing acts like a 911 call to your system. The more messages your system gets, the bigger the emergency.

Breathing is a unique portal connecting your consciousness to deeper, automatic functions of the body. How you breathe can be a reaction, or a choice. The body automatically controls breathing, but you can consciously override it, too. This gives you a powerful tool to improve your immunity, mood, blood pressure, and blood flow to the brain.

Breathing techniques can calm the nerves and reduce inflammation. The powerful, safe benefits of slow breathing have been used in prayer for thousands of years by Christians, Buddhists, Native Americans, Hawaiians and Africans.

In the recently published book “Breath,” author James Nestor researched breathing at length and determined that the most efficient way to breathe was to inhale for 5.5 seconds, followed by an exhale for 5.5 seconds — which actually comes to 5.5 breaths per minute. You can practice this a few minutes, or a few hours each day.

Since COVID-19 attacks the lungs, here are some more ways to improve your odds of staying healthy this winter:

•Your body is like a garden. Viruses are like weeds. Help your body support healthy life while resisting the weeds. Regular, adequate sleep improves immunity and is especially important in resisting viral respiratory infections.

•Fresh air and sunshine improve resistance in many ways, not to mention allowing safe social distancing. Sunshine increases serotonin, the “feel good hormone.” Serotonin is the precursor to melatonin, a hormone with strong antiviral and antioxidant properties.

•A 1973 Loma Linda University study found sugar significantly impairs immune function. And sugar also increases inflammation and gut dysbiosis. Brightly colored fruits and vegetables contain compounds that improve immunity and snuff the fires of inflammation.

•Vitamin D is key this winter. This vitamin affects nearly every cell in your body. Proper levels are important to a strong immune system, moods, reducing inflammation, promoting wound healing and improving practically everything related to cardiovascular health.

Oh, I forgot bone health. I bring this up because most of us are deficient in vitamin D. We get this vitamin from certain foods, but mostly from sunlight on our skin. Sunscreen, clothing and dark skin color reduce the skin’s vitamin D production. Winter sunlight in Oregon is too indirect to stimulate the skin to make enough; you’d have to live in Southern California to get direct enough sunlight to make adequate vitamin D. So, if you live in Oregon, take a vitamin D supplement. My patients do well while taking about 2,000 to 5,000 IU of vitamin D.

Professor Michael Holick, M.D., at Boston University is a leading vitamin D expert. He states any dose under 10,000 IU daily is safe, so a few thousand IUs daily is conservative. A blood test for “25 OH Vitamin D” is available. The acceptable range of results is 32 to 100 ng/ml. Optimal levels are 50 to 80 ng/ml, so don’t scrape by with 32.

•Medicinal plants have been used to treat viral illnesses for millennia. Oregon Grape is directly toxic to viruses. Elderberry, echinacea, propolis and astragalus are other treatments backed by studies and experience. Garlic is especially useful in treating lung infections because its antimicrobial elements are exhaled through the lungs, right where you need them.

Other healthy ideas are: turn off the news, drink plenty of water, take a multiple vitamin, take extra vitamins A and C, exercise moderately, get outside, take a sauna — and breathe.

Conventional medical advice is wear a mask, wash hands, keep 6 feet from others and get a flu shot. There is, in fact, much more you can do. Unfortunately, limited space here doesn’t allow for further details. Email me if you have questions, or suggestions for future columns.

Here’s to your health.

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