Top 6 Vitamins to Boost your Immune System

At SOUL IV, one of our most popular requests is the Immunity Boost.

Many of our clients contact us when they’re run down or dealing with a lingering illness after coming home from holiday and need some support to get back to their old selves.

As such, we’ve come up with the top six vitamins to boost your immune system.

1. Vitamin C

Vitamin C is perhaps the “stereotypical” vitamin infusion, with research on its potential uses against viruses and oxidative stress stretching back decades. Recently, one focus of vitamin C trials has been post-viral fatigue. A review of nine papers, totalling 720 patients, found that seven of these revealed significant relief. Pain, lack of focus, depression, and other related symptoms also showed improvement in a range of situations.

These benefits are largely thanks to vitamin C’s anti-inflammatory and antioxidant benefits throughout the body.

Additionally, by protecting your immune cells from excessive oxidative damage, they may be better able to clear threats instead of letting them linger.

2. Vitamin B12

You may think of vitamin B12 as an essential nutrient for anaemia prevention, but it doesn’t just help produce red blood cells. White blood cells, the heart of your immune system, require it too.

Supplementation with vitamin B12 increases counts of several immune cell types responsible for fighting off viruses, especially in severe deficiencies.

Better yet, it boosts your populations of memory cells, which you need to “remember” previous infections so they don’t make you sick the next time you encounter them.

3, 4 & 5. Glutathione, Zinc and Selenium

Glutathione is your body’s “master” antioxidant, requiring zinc and selenium for its production and function.

If it sounds like we’re constantly raving about antioxidants for immunity, there’s a good reason why. Your immune cells are exposed to massive amounts of oxidative stress, especially as it’s part of their defence against harmful microbes.

So what can these nutrients do? A trial combining whey protein (which contains glutathione precursors), zinc and selenium even found significant benefits to immune health among cancer patients. This is a severely immune-depleted population and should not be seen as representing a typical Soul IV client. However, while the control group saw a fall in levels of protective antibodies, the treatment group had some improvement.

Zinc and selenium have benefits of their own, too. In the case of zinc, it’s also necessary to make superoxide dismutase (SOD), another powerful antioxidant that our bodies produce. Zinc regulates the production of inflammatory chemicals used in the immune response while raising levels of certain immune cell types. Selenium also has immune-modulating properties, such as taming your body’s inflammatory “master switch”. At the same time, selenium could boost your immune cell counts and improve your response to vaccines. A strong sign of immune system aging is an impaired response to vaccination, which is an unwelcome development if you’re about to travel or visit a new grandchild.

6. B Vitamins

We sound like we just love banging on about B vitamins too, and for very good reason. Some, such as B6, B9 (folate), and B12, are critical for both red and white blood cell production. These three also keep homocysteine levels low, a process that may help reduce inflammation and immune dysfunction. Vitamin B6 deficiency may contribute to age-related shrinking of the thymus gland, your immune system’s school for new cells. Vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, and B6 are used in cellular energy generation, which your immune cells need to survive and carry out their duties. Some also tame inflammation overall by lowering NFkB function, which acts as an inflammatory master switch.

Looking at the growing body of research that we’ve sampled above, IV vitamin infusions are worth considering if you’re over feeling run down.

To book an appointment, click here.

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To learn more about how vitamin infusions might help you, contact SOUL IV’s Customer Experience team on 1300 GO SOUL or click here. 

References:

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33807280/
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8259612/
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29565716/
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8073305/

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Disclaimer: The information provided on this website is for educational purposes only. Please consult a physician before beginning any therapy program or making any adjustments in your healthcare, diet, and/or lifestyle. Do not remove yourself from any prescribed medications or therapies without consulting your doctor. Any and all dietary supplements or nutritional products discussed on this website are not TGA-approved and are not intended to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease. The information contained on this website is for general information purposes only. While we endeavour to keep the information up to date and correct, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied.