Health and Wellness Focus
By Gloria D. Evans, R.N
There are no known cures for colds and flu, cold and flu prevention should be your goal. A proactive approach to warding off colds and flu is apt to make your whole life healthier. The most effective way for preventing the flu is to get the flu shot. It may not be natural, but it works better than anything else. But there are other strategies you may want to try.
1. Wash your Hands
Most cold and flu viruses are spread by direct contact. Someone who has the flu sneezes onto their hand, and then touches the telephone, the keyboard, a kitchen glass. The germs can live for hours – in some cases weeks – only to be picked up by the next person who touches the same object. So, wash your hands often. If no sink is available, rub your hands together very hard for a minute or so. That also helps break up most of the cold germs. Or rub hand sanitizer onto your hands.
2. Don’t Cover Your Sneezes and Coughs With Your Hands
Because germs and viruses cling to your bare hands, muffling coughs and sneezes with your hands results in passing along your germs to others. When you feel a sneeze or cough coming, use a tissue, then throw it away immediately. If you don’t have a tissue, cough, or sneeze into the inside of your elbow.
Here How to Cough or Sneeze Correctly in Public
- Sleeve garment
- Tissue
- Soap and water
- Hand sanitizing lotion
Coughing/sneezing into a tissue is helpful but also adds to the potential for spreading germs.
1. Cough or sneeze into fabric such as your sleeve as recommended by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Many of the microorganisms (good old “germs”) do not fair on fabric and die. Coughing or sneezing into your hands, handkerchief or a tissue is NOT the right thing to do, contrary to what we have been socialized to believe.
2. Slightly turn away from people you are around and crook your elbow over your nose and mouth whenever you feel the urge to cough or sneeze.
3. Politely excuse yourself and take the opportunity to go wash your hands in the nearest restroom or apply sanitizing hand gel. Just a basic FYI: the evidenced-based research says that nothing beats good old soap and water for washing your hands-however, sanitizing gels have their place when access to a restroom is limited
3 Don’t Touch Your Face
Cold and flu viruses enter your body through the eyes, nose, or mouth. Touching their faces is the major way children catch colds, and the keyway they pass colds on to their parents.
4 Drink Plenty of Fluids
Water flushes your system, washing out the poisons as it hydrates you. A typical, healthy adult needs eight 8-ounce glasses of fluids each day. How can you tell if you’re getting enough liquid? If the color of your urine runs close to clear, you’re getting enough. If’s it’s deep yellow, you are not getting enough.
5. Do Aerobic Exercise Regularly
Aerobic Exercise speeds up the heart to pump larger quantities of blood; makes you breathe faster to help transfer oxygen from your lungs to your blood; and makes you sweat once your body heats up. These exercises help increase the body’s natural virus-killing cells.
6. Eat Foods Containing Phytochemicals
“Phyto” means plants, and the natural chemicals in plants give the vitamins in food a supercharged boost. So put away the vitamin pill, and eat dark green, red, and yellow vegetables and fruits.
7. Eat Yogurt
Some studies have shown that eating a daily cup of low-fat yogurt can reduce your susceptibility to colds by 25%. Researchers think the beneficial bacteria in yogurt may stimulate production of immune system substances that fight disease.
8. Don't Smoke
Statistics show that heavy smokers get more severe colds and more frequent ones. Even being around smoke profoundly zaps the immune system. Smoke dries out your nasal passages and paralyzes cilia. These are the delicate hairs that line the mucous membranes in your nose and lungs, and with their wavy movements, sweep cold and flu viruses out of the nasal passages. Experts contend that one cigarette can paralyze cilia for as long as 30 to 40 minutes.
9. No Alcohol Consumption
Scientists now know that drinking alcohol is not good for anyone. Heavy alcohol use suppresses the immune system in a variety of ways. Heavier drinkers are more prone to initial infections as well as secondary complications. Alcohol also dehydrates the body — it actually causes more fluid loss from your system than it puts in.
10. Relax
If you can teach yourself to relax, you can activate your immune system on demand. There’s evidence that when you put your relaxation skills into action, your interleukins — leaders in the immune system response against cold and flu viruses — increase in the bloodstream. Train yourself to picture an image you find pleasant or calming. Do this 30 minutes a day for several months. Keep in mind, relaxation is a learnable skill, but it is not doing nothing. People who try to relax, but are in fact bored, show no changes in blood chemicals.
