Super Immunity summary

It’s comforting to know that if you were in a severe car crash tomorrow, you’d have a great chance of surviving due to medical advances made in recent decades. But aside from these emergency cases, modern medical care is rather regressive. Why? Because it treats the symptoms, not the causes of a disease.

Take type 2 diabetes, for instance. This is an illness that doctors combat with prescription medicine. A study of over 90,000 participants diagnosed with type 2 diabetes revealed that the two most popular prescription drugs for this illness actually increase the risk of congestive heart failure. This statistic is shocking, but perhaps not surprising when we consider the one key drawback of drugs.

So what exactly are superfoods? Well, there’s a whole range of them. From mushrooms to greens to cruciferous vegetables, superfoods all have one thing in common: high amounts of great nutrients and phytochemicals that help our bodies heal.

New research has shown adding superfoods to your diet can lead to lower rates of cancer. But how does this work? Well, cancer is tied to the process of methylation, where a methyl group containing one carbon and three hydrogen atoms is added to a gene. This methylated gene malfunctions, and can affect the process of cell division so that cells grow at an explosive rate. This is what leads to cancer.

Antibiotics often seem like a great response to any annoying sickness – at least, that’s how many doctors and pharmacists portray them. Antibiotics are effective against bacteria, but not viruses. And yet, viruses cause 95 percent of acute illnesses, including the common cold. So, antibiotics are useless in most cases. But it gets worse.

When taken unnecessarily, antibiotics destroy much of the vital bacteria in our gastrointestinal tract, which is also home to 70 percent of our immune cells. Painful digestive disturbances and immune-system dysfunction are both the results of damaged gut bacteria.

How should we choose what to eat? With countless diet books out there, it’s tempting just to focus on fats, carbs or proteins when assessing the foods available to us. But there’s far more to healthy eating than just those.

In fact, a healthy diet should feature lots of nutrients and few calories. Colorful vegetables, especially greens, count as nutrient-rich foods that help us meet our body’s needs for fiber, vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals.

Let’s face it: we can’t eat a perfectly healthy diet every day. Unfortunately, this means we’re likely to be deficient in the vitamins and minerals we need. Supplements can be a great way to ensure your body is always nourished. But be discerning!

Vitamin D, vitamin B12, zinc and iodine are essential vitamins and minerals that are tricky to keep at a sufficient level. Iodine intake decreases naturally if we eat less salt, while zinc and vitamin B12 are hard to source in food unless you eat meat. As we spend less time outside in the sun, many people have a vitamin D deficiency too.

Who doesn’t love a salty snack? Human bodies are actually drawn to salt consumption. Whether it’s potato chips or sardines, we’ve got our salty craving. And no kitchen is complete without table salt for seasoning. But for millions of years, human diets didn’t feature any added salt.

Although we need the sodium that table salt provides, too much salt can be incredibly harmful. Today, humans consume around 3,500 milligrams of salt each day. Yet, our ancestors tended to consume far less – around 600 to 800 milligrams per day. This increased intake is putting us at risk of stomach cancer, osteoporosis and heart attacks.