Although these stressful times can lead to sleepless nights, it’s important for all kinds of health reasons to make the effort to get enough good quality sleep.  But the most pertinent reason right now is that it helps prevent viral infections. But how much sleep do you need to avoid getting a cold or perhaps COVID-19? According to a 2015 study, the answer is more than 6 hours a night. While poor sleep and not getting enough sleep had been implicated before in increased susceptibility to infectious illness, prior studies relied on subjective measures—that is individuals’ own assessments of their experience.  This study was different in that it used an objective measure called wrist actigraphy to assess occurrences of the common cold after the researchers gave 164 healthy participants nasal drops containing the rhinovirus.  Like COVID-19, the common cold is a coronavirus that infects the respiratory system. The study’s conclusion? Less sleep increased ris…

When you think about immune-building nutrients, vitamin E probably isn’t among the first that come to mind.  But it should be.  Vitamin E is one of the most effective nutrients known for supporting immune function—especially when it comes to fighting off viral infections, and even a marginal deficiency will throw a monkey wrench into your immune system’s response to a challenge. Laboratory, animal and human studies have shown that vitamin E has a variety of effects on immune cell production, differentiation, proliferation and activity; that vitamin E insufficiency diminishes these effects; and that supplementing with vitamin E at higher than government recommended levels enhances them. Yet as we confront the current viral pandemic, approximately 90% of the US population isn’t getting enough vitamin E from their diets to meet even minimal government standards. The average American diet supplies less than half the government’s Recommended Dietary Intake (RD…