Most people treat recovery from a cold, flu, or stomach bug like a waiting game. Stay in bed, sip some tea, let the body sort itself out. For a mild bug that clears in a day or two, that mostly works fine. But for anything that knocks you flat for more than a couple of …
A reader wrote to me a few weeks ago describing something I hear constantly this time of year. Her flu had been gone for almost three weeks. Her cough was quiet, her appetite was back, and on paper she was “better.” But she said that when she sat down to answer a work email, she’d …
Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough. When people are sick, they tend to lump “sleep,” “rest,” and “taking it easy” into one big category, as if they’re all the same thing pointed in the same direction. They’re not. And the gap between them turns out to matter a lot more than most advice …
Most people assume getting better is automatic. You catch something, you feel terrible for a few days, and then your body does its thing and you’re fine. That’s the version people seem to expect. But that’s not quite how it works. Recovery from a viral illness isn’t just a waiting game. What you do (and …
Your gut doesn’t get a memo when the fever breaks. People tend to think of being sick as something that starts and ends cleanly, you feel bad for a few days, then you’re “better,” and everything resets. The gut doesn’t work on that timeline, and if you’ve been through a rough stretch of back-to-back colds, …
Years into writing research-based health content, I came across something that genuinely surprised me. The probiotic strains appearing most frequently in peer-reviewed clinical trials, things like Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG, Bifidobacterium longum BB536, Saccharomyces boulardii, show up on pharmacy shelves far less consistently than you’d expect. The products dominating the market often contain strains chosen for …
Every office has one. The person who sits two desks over from someone hacking through a meeting, shares a coffee pot with half the building during flu season, and somehow comes out the other side untouched. Coworkers usually chalk it up to good genes, or joke that they’re “built different.” There’s a sliver of truth …
Four things are quietly working against your immune defenses right now. None of them feel dramatic. Most of them don’t feel like anything at all, which is exactly what makes them hard to address. The slow erosion of immune function rarely traces back to one cause. What it traces back to is a cluster of …
The misconception I kept running into when writing health content was that gut health and immunity supplements lived in separate categories. Two different aisles at the pharmacy, two different decisions, two different kinds of people. Someone would describe taking zinc lozenges and elderberry syrup from October through March, and in that same conversation mention that …
A 2018 paper published in the European Journal of Epidemiology followed over 2,200 Finnish men for up to 25 years. Among many health markers they tracked was one that surprised me when I first read it: sauna frequency. Men who used a sauna four to seven times per week had significantly lower rates of pneumonia …
