Natural ways of keeping you, your kids healthy from ‘Father of Functional Medicine’

Is boosting the immune system a myth?

Seems like kids are getting sick, or there’s always a lingering threat of them going down with something. FOX 26 anchor Rashi Vats spoke with a nutritional medicine expert who is known as the "Father of Functional Medicine" and says boosting the immune system is a myth especially when the kids are sick!

HOUSTON - Seems like kids are getting sick, or there’s always a lingering threat of them going down with something. I spoke with a nutritional medicine expert who is known as the "Father of Functional Medicine" and he says boosting the immune system is a myth especially when the kids are sick!

"Boosting something that is already in balance often can produce more harm than it does good. We start to look at this from a different perspective. We said when the body’s immune system is working in its perfect way it is resilient," said Dr. Jefferey Bland, who is an internationally recognized leader in the nutritional medicine field. "It knows when to turn itself up and it knows when to turn itself down, and it knows how to form that balance at least resilience. That I what we call rejuvenating the immune system not boosting our immune system."

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Bland co-founded The Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991 and is known to many as the "Father of Functional Medicine."

He says every 90 days, the cells that make up our immune system that travel throughout the body are being regenerated and being formed new and so we basically end up with a new immune system every month and a half to two months.

How do we end up with a better immune system?

"Diet and lifestyle play big roles in rejuvenating the immune system. In fact, there are some families of nutrients that have been discovered that I think have been overlooked for many years that are really important in rejuvenating the immune system," she said. "We start to see there are forms of foods that we can put in our diet that have the principals of really helping our immune system to be more vigilant, more resilient and to protect us against infection and other things of injury."

Dr. Bland recommends having a diet that includes foods like whole grains, beans, root vegetables, gluten-free cereals (like buckwheat and oatmeal), whole fruit, lean cuts of meat, fresh fish, and minimally processed oils like virgin olive oil, flaxseed oil, and omega-3 oils.

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Immuno-supportive foods that families can prioritize in light of cold and flu season to rejuvenate their immune systems: