Five Immune Hacks for Back to School

If you want your family through the autumn term with fewer bugs, five things do most of the work: swap the hand sanitiser for something that does not strip the good bacteria off the skin, feed the gut that holds around 70% of the immune system, protect sleep, replace the magnesium that a busy September burns through, and give recovery the same attention you gave prevention. None of it is complicated, and all of it works for adults as well as children.

That is the Instagram Live I did with Deepa last night, written down so you can come back to it. Thank you to everyone who joined, and thank you to Deepa for having me on. I am a naturopathic and functional nutritionist and I work with people from fertility and pregnancy, through babies and young children, right up to adults — so most of what follows is simply what happens in my own house at this time of year.

Why does everyone get ill when school goes back?

Term starts, thirty children share one classroom, and whatever they pick up comes home in a school bag. It goes round the house and then into workplaces. That part is not avoidable. What is avoidable is walking into the term already depleted — short on sleep, short on magnesium, short on fibre, and scrubbing the skin with sanitiser on top of it.

The immune system is a surveillance system. It needs the body calm enough to let it patrol, and that is the reason four of the five points below are not immune supplements at all. They are sleep, stress, food and toxic load.

1. Bugs — what I use instead of hand sanitiser

My answer to school germs is not sanitiser. Your skin is a barrier and that barrier is part of your immune system, so when we over-wash and over-sanitise we are not only taking the bad bacteria away — the protective good bacteria go with it.

What I use instead is a spray called ENT, from Noble Naturals. The name is for ear, nose and throat. It is nano zinc and nano silver: the silver is antibacterial, antifungal and antiparasitic, and it targets the bad bacteria while leaving the protective good bacteria alone, which is the whole reason I reach for it rather than a sanitiser. The particles are small enough to be absorbed through the skin, and through the tissues of the mouth, eyes, ears and nose. The zinc supports immunity and healing, so if there is broken skin it is doing something there too.

In practice it is very simple. When the children come in from school they spray their mouth, face, eyes, ears and nose, at the door, before bags and hands go anywhere else. It takes ten seconds. It comes as a nasal bottle in a larger family size, and in small bottles for a handbag.

All the supplements I use are uber clean. That is not a slogan — it is the first thing I check, and it is why the list at the bottom of this post is short.

2. Gut — around 70% of your immune system is in there

Roughly 70% of the immune system is in the gut. What makes that up is the friendly bacteria living in the gut and in the gut membrane, and the physical gut wall itself — a barrier strong enough to stop bad bacteria and invaders getting into the system. So supporting immunity really means two jobs: feed those bacteria, and look after that wall.

Good bacteria are fed by probiotics and prebiotics, and the two are not the same thing. Probiotics are the live cultures themselves — cultured foods, live yoghurt, or a supplement. Prebiotics are what you feed them with. At this time of year I give my own children a three-month course of Biome Kids by Activated Probiotics, which I order through Natural Dispensary.

The prebiotic side is mostly polyphenols and fibre. Polyphenols are the purple and red fruits, and the ideal is to get them in at breakfast, or in a lunchbox. One rule with fruit: pair it with a fat or a protein. A yoghurt, a square of dark chocolate, peanut butter at home. That slows the breakdown of the sugars, which otherwise gives them a spike in mood and winds them up.

Then fibre, and when I say fibre I mean raw veg. The less cooked the better. Salad, if you can get it in. Think of it plainly — the more fibre a food has, the harder it is to eat, and you want them chewing. Chewing is not a side issue either, because it increases digestive enzymes, and the enzymes and the stomach are the first thing that deals with bad bacteria coming in.

There is one more group worth feeding on purpose: the butyrate-producing bacteria, which are part of looking after the gut wall. Cook with ghee. Get cabbage into meals. Drink bone broth, or stir it through something else so nobody notices.

• Live yoghurt or cultured foods most days.
• Purple and red fruit in the morning or the lunchbox — always with a fat or a protein.
• More raw veg and salad; the more chewing it takes, the better.
• Ghee, cabbage and bone broth for the butyrate producers.
• A children's probiotic course running through the autumn term, not for a fortnight.

3. Sleep — a broken bedtime shows up as a cold

Sleep is when we recover, repair, digest our food properly and organise our thoughts. Take it away and healing suffers, learning suffers, and the nervous system becomes dysregulated. That last one matters more than people expect, because the nervous system and the immune system run in parallel.

Someone who is not sleeping well is holding more cortisol. The body reads that as high alert, and while it is on high alert it is not making the calming hormones that let the immune system get on with surveying for bugs. So they get poorly more easily. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why I would fix bedtime before I would buy another supplement.

What actually shifts it, in the order I would try:

1. Blue-light-blocking glasses in the evening for anyone on a device — adults included.
2. Grey shade on the phone after tea, so there is less blue light and rather less pull.
3. A regular bedtime. The body likes routine more than it likes any single intervention.
4. A magnesium salt bath — two cups of salts in the bath, twenty minutes' soak.

Use magnesium salts rather than Epsom salts. They are cheap and easy to buy, and 10kg tubs from Amazon are the sensible way to do it. The skin is the biggest organ we have, so use it: magnesium absorbed that way calms the nervous system and encourages a deeper, more restorative sleep.

4. Stress — where all the magnesium goes

September is a reset for everybody. New schedule, new environment, new teachers to please, work picking back up, training to fit in somewhere. Every one of those is a stimulus, and every thought, feeling and action spends magnesium — every metabolic reaction in the body requires it. So the most stimulating month of the year is also the month you deplete fastest.

Which is why magnesium appears twice in five points. My first port of call is the cheapest one, and it is a ritual rather than a supplement: the nightly salt bath. If you have not got a bath, pour the salts onto the floor and stand on them, and the feet will take it up.

If you want a supplement alongside it, the one I use is the nano magnesium from The Health Factory, which I get through Noble Naturals. It is absorbed through the tissue of the mouth and it tastes of nothing, which is the entire reason it works with children.

5. Recovery — what to do once something has been caught

Something will still get through. The aim then is not to be flattened for three weeks afterwards, and recovery is the same list turned up rather than a different one.

Colour first. Brightly coloured foods are full of vitamin C, and vitamin C and zinc are the two you want for the immune system itself. Zinc comes from hemp seeds and pumpkin seeds, which scatter over anything. Selenium is the other mineral worth knowing about for immunity, and that is Brazil nuts and walnuts — a few of either, daily.

Then the gut again, because that is where the repair happens: fibre, ghee, cabbage, bone broth. Then sleep — outside in the morning, off the blue light in the evening, the same bedtime. Sleep is the key to recovery rather than something optional alongside it.

The last one is the one people miss. Toxic burden tires the system out, and if you reduce the toxic load the body simply functions better. Poorly or not, it feels better and it recovers better.

This is where I would use a clay bath. I have just launched one — Elemental Soak, from Alchemy Minerals — which contains four different clays working as binders to help draw toxins out through the skin. I have watched this many times with children: magnesium alone helps them sleep, and magnesium with the clay helps them sleep better again. My reading of it is that if the day's toxins come out through the skin, the liver is not working through them overnight, and the nervous system — which runs in parallel with the immune system — gets a quieter night for it.

The products I named, and where they come from

• ENT spray, nano zinc and nano silver — Noble Naturals. Discount code NCHA10.
• Biome Kids, by Activated Probiotics — Natural Dispensary. Discount code NCHA10.
• Nano magnesium, by The Health Factory — Noble Naturals. Discount code NCHA10.
• Magnesium salts — any decent supplier; 10kg tubs are the cheapest way to buy them.
• Elemental Soak, a four-clay bath soak — Alchemy Minerals.

Being straight with you about those. The codes are my practitioner codes and they reduce what you pay. I have a commercial interest in Elemental Soak, which launched this week — weigh that alongside everything else here. The other four are on the list because they are what is in my house, and the magnesium salts are the cheapest thing on it deliberately, because that is the one I would start with.

Who this is not for

None of this is a substitute for seeing a GP. If a child has a temperature that will not settle, is not drinking, is getting worse rather than better, or has a condition already being managed by a paediatric team, that is a medical conversation and it comes first. The food and the rituals come after, alongside, and never instead.

And please do not try to start all five in the first week of term. That is the surest way to be doing none of them by October. Pick one. Bedtime is usually the one that changes the most.

Common questions

Is hand washing bad, then?

No. Washing hands before food and after the loo is basic and it stays. What I am questioning is sanitiser reached for all day long on skin that is already stripped, when there is something that does the job without taking the protective bacteria with it.

Can adults do all of this too?

All of it. Nothing on the list is child-specific — the format changes, not the principle. The term that runs the children down does exactly the same thing to the adults driving them there.

How long before we notice anything?

I would not put a number on it, and I would be wary of anyone who does. What I will say is that sleep and the salt bath tend to be felt first, because they are the fastest to change. The gut work is the slow, cumulative one, which is why I run the children's probiotic as a three-month course across the term rather than a fortnight.

Where to start this week

• Tonight: a magnesium salt bath, twenty minutes, and the same bedtime as yesterday.
• Tomorrow morning: purple or red fruit with a yoghurt or a nut butter.
• At the school door: the ENT spray instead of the sanitiser bottle.
• This week's shop: ghee, cabbage, pumpkin and hemp seeds, Brazil nuts.
• This month: a three-month children's probiotic, and the blue light off after tea.

If you are reading this because something is not right — a child who is ill constantly, a gut that has never settled, or your own energy gone by three in the afternoon — that is a longer conversation than a blog post. You can read more about how I work with children and families, or bring it to me directly.

Fifteen minutes, no charge. Tell me what is going on for you or your child, and we will work out together whether this is something I can help with.

This article shares naturopathic and lifestyle guidance for general education and isn't a substitute for personalised medical advice. Always speak to your GP before changing any prescribed medication or if you have an existing health condition.