Immune system booster diet

A lot of people worry about medications they take, but they don't think twice about their diet. Your food is just like pills, and it matters a lot for your overall health.

There are foods that help your immune system more than others. But there is no one menu that is ideal for everyone. Understanding your metabolic type can help you prevent a lot of health problems.

When I read The Metabolic Typing Diet: Customize Your Diet to Your Own Unique Body Chemistry by William Wolcott, I was skeptical. I am a pharmacist, and in school and in practice, all we heard was eat low fat, low cholesterol foods and lots of vegetables. In the book, people with a metabolic type, the protein type, need to eat more protein and fat than the carbohydrate or mixed metabolic types.

I took the quiz in the book, and I was a protein type. According to the book, by eating high protein and fat foods, my health would be much better. I also need fewer carbs, and essentially no starches.

Since I love meat, that sounded pretty good to me, but not worrying about fat made me nervous. I wasn't worried about gaining weight, but I was worried that it would give me heart disease.

What changed my mind

The book provides many examples of groups of people who have certain diets and how healthy they are. For example, the traditional Eskimos eat whale fat and meat and hardly any vegetables, yet they don't have heart disease. Their metabolic makeup is best-suited to their diet.

I thought a lot about it, and I began to eat more of the best foods for my type. Over time, I felt better and I looked better. My cholesterol has not increased, so my fears about heart disease haven't come true.

I also changed the quality of the food I eat. I try to eat 80% organic food. I don't eat trans-fats, but nobody should. And I look for these superfoods in the store:

• Yogurt
• Walnuts
• Cherries
• Eggs
• Leafy greens
• Cranberries
• Strawberries
• Coconut Oil (I cook with it)
• Cinnamon (I add it to almost any fruit or vegetable)

One thing I picked up from a nutritionist is that yogurt can sit out for several hours and still be safe to eat. In fact, the cultures in it just grow with an increase in temperature. So I will take it to work and leave it out for up to 6 hours before I eat it.

Keys to better health

No matter what your metabolic type, we all do better with less sugar. Sugar is not a food. I am always amazed by people who eat the low-fat foods, and they don't worry at all about how much sugar was added to replace the fat in those foods.

Fat is a food. Our cells are made up of proteins and fats, and they use carbohydrates for energy. You need to eat some fats, including saturated fats.

I also recommend cutting back on bread. Wheat is, for many people, a mild allergen, and it causes inflammation in our bodies. A full-blown wheat or gluten allergy is celiac disease, and they have to cut out gluten completely. But the rest of us also usually do better with less wheat. My adult acne has nearly vanished by cutting out wheat.

Natural versus organic

One note about natural and organic designations: natural means nothing legally. Anybody can put that their product is natural. USDA organic means something, on the other hand. It means that the food was raised or grown according to organic practices. The growers can't use synthetic pesticides or fertilizers or genetically-modified organisms, for starters.

You can identify when fruits or vegetables are organic by their label code. If the code is 5 digits and starts with a 9, it's organic. If the code is 4 digits, it is conventionally grown. Genetically-modified food is coded with a 5 digit code that starts with an 8.

Here are some examples:

• 94011 = organic
• 3398 = conventional
• 80277 = genetically-modified or GMO