Immune System Supplements

Your gut wall is the largest place where your body is in contact with the outside world. Everything you eat and drink passes through it, which is why roughly 70% of your immune cells are located there. It is no coincidence that people who are focused on their immune defences sooner or later end up looking at their digestion.

That also explains why, alongside vitamins and minerals, you will find probiotics and fermented products in this collection. Looking back generations, you see the same thing: sauerkraut, kefir, fermented vegetables and bone broth were on the table in almost every traditional kitchen, long before anyone used the word microbiome.

Your defences consist of two parts that complement each other. The innate part is the fast one: fixed responses that kick in immediately, without your body needing to know the intruder. The adaptive part is the learning one: it builds up through exposure and remembers what it has encountered before.

The word immune comes from the Latin immunis, exempt. In Roman times it referred to those who were exempt from taxes or military service. That it is now the word for your defence system says something about how people have always viewed it: as something that exempts you from what affects others.

Vitamin D is the only vitamin your body makes itself, in the skin, under the influence of UVB from sunlight. At the latitude of the Netherlands, the sun is too low in the sky between October and March to get that production going. That is why demand for vitamin D peaks in precisely those months.

You will come across two forms on labels. D3 or cholecalciferol is the form that is also produced in your skin and found in animal sources, such as cod liver oil. D2 or ergocalciferol comes from yeast and mushrooms. Because vitamin D is fat-soluble, it usually comes in a softgel with oil and you take it with a meal containing some fat.

This is the largest collection in the webshop, and it is made up of four areas. The vitamins and minerals, of which vitamins A, C, D, B6, B12, folate, zinc, selenium, copper and iron are chosen most often. The botanicals such as olive leaf, oregano and elderberry.

Then there are the probiotics and fermented products, and the organ extracts such as thymus and bone marrow, from the nose-to-tail tradition in which the organs were considered the most valuable part of the animal. If you know which substance you are looking for, those categories will get you where you want to be faster.