On Medscape, a recent featured article reviewed a study of the effectiveness of some commonly recommended vaccines. The subjects of the study were children with frequent earaches and runny noses. The study looked at whether those kids were protected after they were vaccinated — 4 times! — for H. flu B (HiB) and pneumococcus. (Pneumococcus is the most common cause of sinusitis and colds, and H flu B causes most of the rest.)
Only 13% of these kids were fully protected, and 40-55% were partially protected.
This article struck me very hard, because for me, and for my children in turn, colds, flus, sinusitis, bronchitis, and asthma were a common and miserable part of our lives for more years than I care to count. As a result, we were advised by our doctors to be sure to get flu vaccines every year. Which we did. And even so, we were sick many times every year. We always thought, “but we’d be sick even oftener if we didn’t get the vaccines!” We didn;t dae go without them, because we were so miserable.
Then, about 7 years ago, we started adding many, many fruits and vegetables to our diets, every single day. Colds and flus and sinusitis all pretty much disappeared from our lives. After a year or two, I dared to stop getting yearly flu vaccines. And never looked back.
I do believe in some vaccines — my mother had polio when she was 2! Luckily, she lived through it, but the rest of her life was very profoundly affected by the disease. I would never dream of letting my family avoid the Salk vaccine. I don’t care to go without tetanus vaccines or boosters either, thank you very much. And I was in one of the last cohorts to get smallpox vaccine, and I don’t regret that, either.
On the other hand, we all had pertussis vaccine at the recommended times, and my husband had whooping cough anyway when he was about 40 (before our fruit and veggie lifestyle change) and that was a very, very, very bad 2 months, believe me.
OK, so this is anecdotal — where’s the science?
The Wall Street Journal (all places) recently had a nice article about why eating right is more effective at actually preventing viral illnesses, like the flu.
Here’s a fascinating quote from that article: “To create immune cells to fight off a specific infection, the body has to rapidly draw nutrients from the bloodstream, says Anuraj Shankar, a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health. “If you don’t have an adequate intake of vitamins and minerals, you won’t be able to produce the number of immune cells you need, and the immune cells you do produce may be compromised,” Dr. Shankar says. That makes it impossible to mount an effective response to infection, he says.”
Of course, taking multivitamins doesn’t cut it, as numerous studies have shown. (For example, the WHI. You gotta eat those fruits and veggies!
