0:00:00.0 Speaker 1: The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of Mother's Market & Kitchen. Mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

0:00:11.4 Speaker 2: Hello, I'm Kimberly King and welcome to the Mother's Market podcast, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's episode, these days our immunity health is more important than ever, and the foods we eat can have a direct effect on helping it combat any bacteria or viruses in our bodies. Listen closely and find out what foods to eat and which to avoid. But first step, Megan Wroe is a registered dietitian and Manager of St. Jude Wellness Centre. She has experience in a variety of nutrition and health venues and from pediatric to prenatal to weight loss, aging and generalised healing and recovery. Megan has her Master's degree in Nutrition and Food Science, she's a certified lactation educator and certified Culinary Nutrition Expert. She has a passion for making healthy food taste good and she shows her clients how to do this in a weekly virtual cooking class. Megan is a big believer in the Integrative Health, which she helps clients accomplish with her entire wellness team. It's so great to have you back. Welcome to the Mother's Market podcast. How are you?

0:01:14.2 Speaker 3: Thank you so much, I'm good thanks.

0:01:15.4 Speaker 2: Good. Why don't you fill our audience in a little bit on your mission and your work before we get to today's show topic?

0:01:20.7 Speaker 3: Sure, yeah. Well, my specific work is nutrition. I'm a dietitian, so my biggest passion is making real healthy food really feasible for people, make it really real, but that's also sort of morphed into total body wellness and making that really feasible and really realistic for people as I've moved into the wellness centre and now work in multiple discipline, so in nutrition and fitness and mindfulness and actual massage healing, how can you make that real and tangible.

0:01:52.0 S2: Wow, that's great, congratulations. Today we're talking about dietary and multidisciplinary strategies for immune health, which is perfect timing, we're all talking about our immune systems. So with the current state of public health, everyone is talking about immune health, and can you explain in layman's terms what is immune health?

0:02:10.7 S3: Yeah, I think that's such a good question, because we all talk about immunity and foods that are good for immune health, but how does the immune system actually function, I think it's important to understanding why we need to do certain things for our immune health. So there's a lot going on in the immune system. There's cells, and there's tissues and there's organs that are all involved in how your body is able to resist disease, but also how your body is able to heal from disease. There's kind of those two components of how the immune system works. But to make it really just user-friendly and understand how that works, think of your immune system as an army. So all of these cells, they're an army and they are fighting an invader. So the army is looking for the uniform, if you will, of the invader. So certain types of things in your body are considered foreign and those are recognised by your immune system as things that aren't supposed to be there and they will attack it.

0:03:02.1 S3: So you have this innate immune system that's born into you, it kind of helps you resist basic bacteria and viruses that come in but then you also have this ongoing developing immune system where you have these new parts of your army, sort of new generals that come in, they're like, "Oh guess what, there's this other new invader that's coming into play." So you are constantly developing more antibodies to combat these other types of invaders and that's where we hear about things like herd immunity, where we're all being exposed to bacteria, viruses, fungus, things like that, and we're learning what their uniform looks like and how to combat them.

0:03:38.4 S3: So, and then within your immune system you have your acute ability to heal and your long-term, so when something comes in that's a foreign invader you have all these army generals that go and attack it and that creates inflammation, so that's where we hear of this chronic inflammation or anti-inflammatory diet, there is this inflammation that is coming to the rescue and essentially quelching that invader and getting rid of it, so that's supposed to happen, that's your acute healing process, but then long term, if that's happening over and over and over again, then you have chronic inflammation and then you just have a whole bunch of little battles going on all over your body, and that's not good either. So you're kinda looking at all these different components.

0:04:16.8 S2: Thank you for that analogy, that's a great way to look at all of this, and so, can we really do anything to impact our immune strength with food or lifestyle?

0:04:25.6 S3: 100% yes, absolutely.

[chuckle]

0:04:27.9 S2: I knew that was gonna be your answer.

0:04:29.5 S3: Yeah, you know, genetics play a big role and sometimes just luck of the draw plays a role that there isn't anything that is 100% giving you 100% immunity, even if you do everything right you can still get sick and you can still be exposed to something that your body just didn't recognise for whatever reason. So there's always those things, but diet and lifestyle components are so, so critical to actually lowering that risk of getting sick or lowering the risk of being sick a long time, so maybe you do get a bug but if you've done all these things with your diet and your lifestyle, you're more likely to heal quickly and not have long-term repercussions from that.

0:05:06.3 S2: Yeah, and that's a really good point, 'cause even if it is in your genes but it's whatever you do with your life and your choices.

0:05:12.5 S3: Right.

0:05:12.8 S2: On how to combat that. So let's start with the big picture. What are your top three things we need to focus on to improve the immune function?

0:05:20.0 S3: As a dietician I have a bias, and I think diet is definitely your number one. And it's not just my bias, I mean truly all of the research shows that you can be super active and fit and go to the gym but if you're eating a really kinda crappy diet you're probably not very healthy. So number one is food and I would say two and three are actually stress management and sleep, so those would be my top three.

0:05:43.9 S2: Interesting, and people don't talk about sleep enough, I think.

0:05:46.9 S3: I agree.

0:05:47.6 S2: But it's so important. Starting with nutrition, as you mentioned, how does our diet interact with our immune system and how do we need to eat to improve our immunity?

0:05:57.6 S3: So again, thinking back on that inflammation on all those little battles, anything that you eat that creates an inflammation, so that is considered foreign to the body, is going to stimulate an immune response. So for those of us with a food allergy, let's say you have an allergy to peanuts, if you have peanut, your body is gonna come to the rescue and is going to try and quelch that, and ideally that's the point of your immune system, is if you accidentally eat peanut you will hopefully not have a long-term problem 'cause your immune system is strong. But if you are constantly eating foods that your body doesn't recognise as nourishing, that it recognises as a foreign invader, you're going to constantly be in a state of stress and in over-immune function. So things that... Aside from allergies, if you don't have allergies, foods that will create that response are sugar, any type of sugar.

0:06:48.2 S3: Even one little bit of sugar of raw honey will stimulate a little bit of that, and little bits aren't a problem, we can get into that too. But sugar, inflammatory oil, so soils that are processed under lots of heat, that can create that response and then just artificial. Obviously anything that's artificial is going to be recognised as foreign because it's not an actual food, so that's become, I think, a big problem with convenience foods is there's artificial sweeteners and colourings and additives and preservatives that every time you eat it is not recognised by the body, so there's a bit of an immune response to those foreign invaders.

0:07:25.5 S2: I'm so glad you just said that. And this is just a personal aside, I started a diet about two months ago and it was one of those diets that had bars and shakes, and my body did something I'd never ever had to deal with, and it was probably the inflammatory. It just was rejecting it, and then I'm like, "What am I eating?" But I realised, looking in the ingredients, it was all the artificial things. And then you don't make a life of living on shakes and bars and everything, right?

0:07:50.3 S3: Exactly.

0:07:50.5 S2: And so I'm still trying to deal with that today. I stopped doing it, as you can see. No, I'm just kidding. [laughter] But it is so true when you said that, "Artificial." And just really knowing how to handle what's going on with your own body.

0:08:03.9 S3: Right. Yeah, and if you're otherwise pretty healthy and you have a bar that has artificial stuff in it, it's probably fine, but the problem is, is our society has gone to a point of being 100% focused on convenience foods. I don't have anyone that I talk to, even people who are pretty healthy, that doesn't have some sort of convenience processed foods at least on a weekly basis, if not more than that. And most of my clients are eating fast food and frozen foods all the time, every day, every single meal. And so when you're getting the fake foods and the sugars and the salts and the fats from those all the time, your immune system is responding all the time.

0:08:43.4 S2: Yeah, having to work overtime, right?

0:08:45.0 S3: Right. So that's... I think the biggest thing is the convenience foods versus the whole food, so whenever people ask me about, "What kind of diet should I follow?" Whole foods. Just eat real food and that doesn't mean it has to be raw vegan food all the time, but move away from the foods and boxes and bags and packages and cook.

0:09:02.9 S2: Amen, I totally agree with you on that, I learned the hard way, I guess. Anyway, thank you. So are there specific nutrients that play a role in the immune health and what supplement should we be taking to make sure that we get the immune system nutrients?

0:09:17.3 S3: That's a very good question. So that's kind of a two-parter, is the nutrients that are important are, I would say, you have top four: Are vitamin D, mineral zinc, omega 3s and vitamin C. So those are kind of our top four, and we hear a lot about vitamin D these days, that's all over the news and especially with COVID and people who are low in vitamin D are getting higher risk of COVID, and that's for good reason, I'm glad that's all over the news, because it's really not been focused on, the nutrition piece of immune health, and vitamin D is involved in everything, it's actually technically a hormone more than a vitamin, so it's involved really deeply in all of the processes of the immune system, and most of us are low, maybe not deficient but possibly insufficient. We don't spend enough time outside in the sun, and vitamin D just isn't super available in food, it's in a handful of foods and it's not in very high levels in those foods. So if we're not outside, if we're not eating those foods, we're probably pretty low, and that's gonna get in the way of our immune health.

0:10:22.7 S3: Zinc is another big one that is really closely tied with vitamin D, Zinc and Vitamin D are like best friends, and they like to hang out together. So if we're low in one, we're probably low in another. Omega-3s are anti-inflammatory fats, and if you're not eating fatty salmon two or three times a week, you're probably not getting enough omega-3s, and that is really important when we talked about that inflammation of the immune system, those are helping with the anti-inflammatory part of that, is bringing the inflammation back down. And then Vitamin C, we all know vitamin C is really important for immune health, around flu season everyone tells me, "I'm drinking orange juice."

[laughter]

0:11:01.1 S2: Yeah. But we should be doing that all the time, right?

0:11:02.8 S3: Exactly. But you know, vitamin C, there's a lot wrapped up in it. Vitamin C is better absorbed if we have enough iron, so if you're vegan, for instance, and you're not eating any animal meat, and if you're low in iron you may need to take an iron supplement to make sure that you're actually absorbing your vitamin C. You might be eating plenty of vitamin C foods but you're not absorbing it very well. So there's kind of a lot wrapped up in even how we absorb and eat those foods.

0:11:29.1 S2: So I was just gonna say, doesn't it drive you crazy that all of your life you've been saying and screaming like, "Yeah, do this, do this. "And now the media has a hold of... Which is a good thing, but you're like, "I've been telling this the whole time."

0:11:38.2 S3: It's kinda like, "I told you so."

[laughter]

0:11:40.3 S2: Right. So how do we find out how much vitamin D we need? Is there a way to test for that?

0:11:45.5 S3: There is. In fact, you can test for all of those nutrients, for the Omegas, for the zinc, for the Vitamin C, for the vitamin D, and it's funny 'cause you really have to ask for those tests, usually vitamin D is now kinda wrapped up and a lot of doctors are testing for that, but they're separate panels, you have to get a separate Omega panel, and it's not just kind of wrapped up in your normal. The problem with any of these tests though, is it's that one-time test, so if you test today it doesn't necessarily mean that you are sufficient all the time. And a lot of, or all of, the baselines where the cut-off is, is that insufficiency number.

0:12:19.8 S3: So let's say you're within normal of your vitamin D test, you might be normal enough to not be deficient, you're not having deficiency-related diagnoses, like for vitamin C, if you were deficient you'd have scurvy, but just because you don't have scurvy doesn't mean that you have enough vitamin C to help you prevent the flu. So there's this in-between that the tests don't quite tell you the difference between deficient and insufficient, and that's kind of a whole different realm because the studies just aren't there, but for instance, I got my vitamin D tested and I was right on the cusp of being too low, and I eat really well, a whole food diet, and I actually take vitamin D supplements, but this was right after I had a baby, so I was pretty low in a lot of things, so I took twice as much as I normally would recommend for someone, so... But that doesn't mean that twice as much as good for everybody.

0:13:08.2 S2: Everybody. Right, so I see there's a line. Can you ever have too much of these supplements?

0:13:14.3 S3: For some, yes. It's pretty rare to have too much of Vitamin D, you have to have a crazy amount of vitamin D. So I never worry about that. Even vitamin C, it's water soluble, so any that you have of extra you kinda just pee it out. So, again, you'd have to take a ton at one dose to have any sort of toxic-related issue. Too much zinc can be a problem because zinc can block your absorption of other types of nutrients, but there's pretty much no supplements out there that have a toxic level, they're usually just kind of a little added boost.

0:13:48.0 S2: That's so interesting. Well... And again, timing is everything. We're all talking about the immune system, so great information. We have to take a quick break, but more in a minute. Don't go away, we will be right back.

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0:14:02.4 S2: Welcome back to the Mother's Market podcast. And we wanna remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show you can find us on iTunes by searching Mother's Market or download the show from our website, www.mothersmarket.com. Click the link for podcast and listen to past shows. Plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at www.mothersmarket.com.

0:14:24.8 S2: So now we're back to our interview with registered dietician Megan Wroe, and we're talking about dietary and multi-disciplinary strategies specifically for immune health. And so Megan, let's talk a little bit about other top immune health strategies. Why did you choose stress management and sleep?

0:14:39.8 S3: Yeah, stress is... Stress and sleep, both, they're so important to that immune function, that whole inflammatory cascade and they're so realistically manageable. And I think people just forget how much power we have over those two things, so first of all, with the stress management, actual stress creates inflammation, and it's all perceived stress. So if you take two people that experience the exact same stressor, that exact same day and that exact same moment, one of them is gonna perceive it one way and one will perceive it another. That's why a lot of people will be like, "Oh, that's not that stressful. What are you freaking out about?" But to that person, they're really freaked out. So the big analogy that everyone uses with stress is the tiger. If you are being chased by a tiger you are going to run. Your adrenaline is gonna go up, everything else about your body is gonna shut down, your metabolism is gonna shut down, your clarity of thought, your creativity is gonna shut down, your only goal for your body is to get your blood sugar up and sprint and get away from that tiger.

0:15:40.3 S3: That is stress, that is an acute stressor, and then as soon as you get away from that tiger, okay, now you calm down, the heart rate goes back down, you start to think, "Okay, what am I doing in this tree? How am I gonna get down?" Whatever you're doing, and that's supposed to happen, but if the tiger is always chasing you, you are always stuck in traffic, you are always worried about your job, you are always having arguments with your spouse, you are constantly being chased by the tiger, you are constantly having that shutdown of the system and the boost of adrenaline. And now you take someone else: You were born in the jungle, you know what it's like to get away from a tiger, yeah you're stressed to get away from it but you know what to do and how to get to that tree. You have someone who grew up in New York City and suddenly lives in the jungle.

0:16:22.2 S3: That same tiger comes to them and they're going to have a very different perceived stressor from that tiger, even once they get up the tree, they're probably gonna stressed the whole rest of the day. They're like, "Is there gonna be another tiger? What if there's not another tree?" And you're freaking out, so it's not just about removing the stress, because that's not realistic. We're not getting rid of stress any time soon, you can't get rid of it, you can maybe modify your lifestyle a little bit, but stressors are gonna be there. How do you perceive it is the important part in how your immune system will respond to it.

0:16:51.0 S2: That is such a good point. I say this all the time, that's a class in and of itself, like a life moment. We're always going to have stressors, and it could be covid-related, it could be a loss of a parent or whatever, it's just knowing what's up ahead and preparing for those tigers in our life. So that's a good analogy as well. Talk a little bit about sleep.

0:17:17.1 S3: Yeah, so sleep kind of plays into stress, if you're always perceiving stress and you're always reacting to that you aren't going to sleep very well, so they're kind of tied together. But if you don't sleep, that is when that part of your immune system that allows you to recover happens. When you sleep or when cells regenerate themselves and that healing can happen. So if you skip out on that, if either you don't sleep enough or you don't sleep well enough, your immune system is just on overdrive, it's always having to work, it's not getting that chance to reboot itself, so you're going to end up with chronic inflammation and everything shows, the research, that kids are only sleeping sometimes less than five hours a night because they're up doing homework and all these other activities, adults barely sleep at all, and when we do sleep oftentimes we're not reaching deep sleep, that's why there's all these apps now for how to track your melatonin and serotonin and all these things, and it's like just we need to set up an environment for sleep, because there's so much that is keeping us from a deep sleep: Our screens, the sounds in our households, again, the stress, all these things are keeping us up.

0:18:21.9 S2: Yeah, that's so true. It's so funny that there's an app for that, there's app for that.

0:18:26.2 S3: There really is.

0:18:26.8 S2: That's so funny. So how do we reduce stress? You just mentioned one thing which is so important, I hear it all the time, your screens, going to bed, shut it down and get your TVs off and just meditate or just get, as you say, your environment prepared.

0:18:42.2 S3: Yeah, so with sleep and with stress, kind of dealing with both of those things is setting up your environment. So for sleep, I call it, "What's your sleep hygiene?" All my clients know when I ask them that I'm asking, "What are the lights like in your house before bed, what are the sounds like and what's the temperature like?" Because if it's really noisy and really bright and you're in front of your screen and it's super hot, you're probably not going to fall asleep very quickly and you're probably not going to sleep very well, you're gonna toss and turn all night long. So your sleep hygiene should be at least 30 minutes before bed, the lights should be dimmed. You should not have a screen on at all, and if you do you should have one of those light-blocker app things or your orange amber glasses on. And then your room should be actually fairly chilly, so that when you come jump into bed, you wanna bundle up, that all helps you with actual sleep, it helps you to stimulate your melatonin, that just darkness by itself stimulates melatonin, so that's why babies will fall asleep all throughout the day when there's darkness.

0:19:44.5 S3: So it's really important that those lights are dimmed. And that helps with stress too, if you're setting up that environment, and maybe you have some essential oils going and some of the lights that are dimmed, you can't help but just have the sense of "Ahh." When the lights get dimmed, even if it's the middle of the day. If you walk into these bright offices and you have screens in your face you kinda have this amped-up stress feeling, so getting rid of those external stressors, and then the biggest thing that people totally forget they have power over is breathing.

0:20:15.9 S3: Just taking a deep breath. Any time kids are stressed out and someone's freaking out you say, "Take a deep breath, take a deep breath." Because it actually brings your heart rate down to just take a deep breath in, deep breath out. We call it "Counts of four". Count for four in, count for four out. And we actually have coaches here now at the Wellness Centre to do one-on-one breath coaching, because people forget how to breathe.

0:20:38.9 S2: Oxygen is so... I know we were talking earlier about I'm a migraine sufferer, and that's one of the first things they said is just "Oxygen is gonna kill your migraine if you just help breathe it in." Yeah.

0:20:49.6 S3: Yup. So if you have a stressor, which we all do, how do you perceive it? Well take a deep breath in and out before you react to that stressor, and nine times out of 10 you're gonna respond a little bit differently if you just take a few deep breaths. You're also going to metabolise your food better if you are not stressed out and if you take some breaths in between bites, so it's all kind of related.

[laughter]

0:21:09.5 S2: Don't inhale your food, yeah. What about, I noticed you didn't mention exercise as one of your top three immune-boosting strategies. Why is that?

0:21:17.6 S3: Yeah, and you're talking to someone who runs a gym, so fitness is very important to me, but it is not the top three for immune health, because I find that most people turn to that as their stress reliever. "I'm gonna go for a run, I'm gonna hit the boot camp, I'm gonna do this intense fitness" But if your body is stressed or you're not in physical condition to handle those things, excess fitness can actually be a stressor, can actually cause more inflammation and damage, and then your immune system has to respond to that. So for someone who's overly stressed or at risk of being sick or has just been sick, I usually recommend just do some restorative yoga and some stretching and maybe walk, but that shouldn't be your top three. You need to look at your food, your stress management and your sleep before you even dive into exercise.

0:22:02.0 S2: That's interesting, that's probably the first time I've heard that, but okay. Just in everything, at a minimum maybe just to start off. Really interesting information, but let's switch it around to COVID recovery. If someone... What can you talk about with that?

0:22:17.7 S3: As far as the research leading up to COVID and preventing COVID, there's nothing I can find that's a telltale of, "If you do this, you won't get COVID." I mean, it's so new that we just... We can't say that you can prevent it from any way, but just like any sickness, what we're seeing is if you've set up your body to be fairly healthy and fairly immune strong, you're more likely to recover faster and better. So what we do know is there's certain things you can do once you get COVID. And there's... Unfortunately, there's a huge array of symptoms that you can get, so there's some different strategies depending on what your symptoms are, but one of the biggest things that I have found is breathwork.

0:22:56.2 S3: So breathwork will help with lung capacity, because it seems like most people with COVID are getting some sort of lung reaction, even if it's not a really major one, some people obviously are going on to ventilators, but there are some people that just have a little bit of a cough, either way, your lung is being impacted. Deep breathwork and there's actually specific research around the six-eight count breath. So it's six in, hold, and eight out, hold. That can actually increase your lung capacity and your breathing capacity, which in and of itself will help you to breathe better, bring down perceived stress, reduce your inflammation. Your whole inflammatory cascade.

0:23:35.2 S3: So that by itself is probably my number one thing, once you've gotten COVID create a breath practice, whether that's meditation or restorative yoga, or you use an app to kinda start doing different types of breathing, you should be focusing on breathwork if acutely. If you've just gotten COVID, multiple times a day. Leading into once or twice a day, once you're kind of long-term strategies. So that's the biggest thing that actually has shown something that you can do after you've gotten COVID. So we have an online COVID Recovery Program here at the wellness centre so that you don't have to come in in person.

0:24:09.1 S3: And basically every day for 30 days you get some sort of video, and the majority of those videos are breathwork leading up to that six-eight count breath, and then it's a four-part of that, so you're doing that in four parts each time. The rest of the strategies are fitness-related, but they're really restorative fitness, so we're looking at core strength and balance, because a lot of times even you might not even notice it if you didn't get COVID very badly, if you're one of lucky ones that had just minimal symptoms, you may have a little bit of an off equilibrium, to where your balance might be a little bit off your core strength, might be a little bit off, so working on balance movements, functional movements, can you actually just do one normal, good squat without sort of losing your balance? Can you do lunges that way? That's some of the major work that's fitness-related, and then food-wise it's all focused on those top four nutrients, so Vitamin D, Vitamin C, zinc and Omega-3s, and for anyone who's had COVID, I would do high supplementation of all of those things, in addition to healthy food, specifically Vitamin D. You might wanna do somewhere like 10,000 IUs a day, which is pretty high.

0:25:15.7 S2: Wow, that is high.

0:25:16.5 S3: Yeah.

0:25:18.0 S2: Okay, that's really interesting. And I know people really aren't talking about the recovery process of COVID, so that's great that you guys offer that, and online, and you have new videos. Since you're a dietician and clearly nutrition is your number one strategy for immune health, let's now wrap up by circling back to food, and can you tell us some of your favourite immune-boosting recipes?

0:25:36.0 S3: Yeah. This is my favourite part, because it's fun and it tastes good. So two of my favourite immune recipes are actually liquid, they're just drinks, which in and of itself is actually great for the immune system to sometimes have liquid food, because it's like an IV. You absorb it really quickly, there's no fiber involved, there's no GI issues involved, if you're recovering from COVID you probably don't have much of an appetite at this point, so having liquid foods is just straight to the system. But you need to be careful what those liquid foods are made of. If it's all fruit and you're just having juice, like orange juice per se to get your vitamin C, you're also gonna get, there's blood sugar spike, so one of my favourite recipes is a ginger-turmeric tonic, so you do fresh ginger, fresh turmeric, or powdered turmeric, there's benefits in both, and turmeric is anti-inflammatory. Ginger has something called gingerol, which is a potent antioxidant. You mix those with a little bit of water and some cinnamon, which is also an anti-inflammatory herb, blend that all up, and if you're really gung ho, super powerful, you could add a little fresh garlic.

0:26:38.0 S3: I personally have trouble with that one, downing the actual garlic, 'cause the flavour of it.

0:26:43.1 S2: Right.

0:26:43.9 S3: But you blend that all up and it's gonna be actually pretty thick, and so then you just add an ounce of that to hot water and drink it like a tea. So doing that throughout the day kind of infuses your body with those anti-inflammatories. You can also squeeze an orange into that mix and then get some Vitamin C there. Another one of my favourite drinks is a mushroom hot cocoa. So mushrooms are really potent immune boosters because, we share a lot of the genetic structure of mushrooms. There's a lot of cool brands out there now that have powdered mushroom mixes, so you could find one of those and get a... I like the blends that have multiple types of mushroom in them, and just mix like a teaspoon of that with a teaspoon or two of cocoa powder and just a little bit of sweetener with your favourite milk alternative, so that's kind of a nice cozy drink.

0:27:26.5 S2: I was trying to think of mushroom hot cocoa. Interesting, I'd have to find out.

0:27:29.7 S3: You won't even taste it, if you have enough hot cocoa or enough of the cocoa powder, you won't even taste it in there.

0:27:33.7 S2: You won't even know it. But you know you're doing good for your body.

0:27:35.8 S3: Exactly. And then another one of my favourites is pesto on anything, but specifically pesto salmon. So if you make a homemade pesto with arugula and cilantro and basil, you're getting awesome, awesome immune boosters right there, and then you get some Omega-3s from a healthy oil, some vitamin C from some lemon juice, blend that up and put it on omega-3 healthy salmon and it's super yummy and really good for the immune system.

0:28:00.6 S2: That sounds really good.

0:28:01.3 S3: Yeah. So those are probably my top three. There's a lot of other stuff you can do with even probiotics, so doing things like a crout, maybe some cabbage and some sour crout and put that on a taco or on top of some fish or some chicken or beans, and then you're getting some probiotic benefit for your gut too, which again is a whole other subject, but all good for the immune system.

0:28:19.5 S2: And so do have your recipes online?

0:28:21.8 S3: I do, yes. If you're a member of our virtual membership you can have access to all of the ones that I show in my cooking classes, but then we have a variety of other ones on our website at stjudewellnesscenter.

0:28:29.8 S2: Excellent. Well, this is great information, I'll be checking out those recipes. Some great advice, and we really appreciate your knowledge and we look forward to having you on again, but in the meantime, Megan just mentioned the website, it is stjudewellnesscenter.org. And we look forward to your next visit.

0:28:45.1 S3: Thanks so much.

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0:28:51.3 S2: Thanks for listening to the Mother's Market podcast and for shopping at Mother's Market.

0:28:54.6 Speaker 1: The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of Mother's Market & Kitchen. Mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

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