Deepen Into Winter with Nourishing Building Foods 

Before you go down the rabbit hole of diets, there are some pieces that you should consider first and foremost. The foundation of nourishing your family. Generally speaking, a balanced diet from whole natural foods, organic and local as much as possible, is a good place to start. You can deepen your learning about nutrition by downloading my free Real Food Nutrition Guide here. 

After you understand the fundamentals, then you can get down to the nitty gritty and learn about how you can optimize your diet with the seasonal cycles. With less sunshine and more time spent cooped up indoors comes a higher probability of illness and winter blue, but there are ways to stay well during winter, by nourishing the body with real foods that act to build the body, during a time of the year that we need specific nutrients to help keep our body warm, build our immune system and minimize mental and emotional struggles that may come along with the darkest, coldest season. 

Beyond Western medicine’s expertise in treating illness, we also have traditional practices in other parts of the world that approach health in a more holistic way. Traditional Chinese Medicine, India’s Ayurvedic Medicine, and Traditional Indigenous Healing are three such examples. 

At this time of year, the water turns to ice, and plants store their energy in their roots. Winter is considered a time of reflection, deep receptivity, and a time of building potency. The season of winter asks us to slow down and store up. 

According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, this season is related to the water element and Kidney energy. Kidney energy can become depleted with stress, overstimulation, and overwork. So during this time of year, it’s especially important to rest, rejuvenate, and nourish new seeds of potential. This is also a wonderful time of year to focus on internal practices like meditation, and contemplation.

Download my free Family Winter Coping Guide HERE to learn more nutrition, lifestyle, and mindset tips to flow through the winter feeling healthy and happy.

Nature Knows What We Need in Each Season

Seasonal foods are nutritional miracles. When we are in sync with our environment and we eat locally, nature provides us with just the right food to match our body’s needs during the particular season.

When the colder months come around, we lose more than just a few hours of daylight—all the fresh fruits and vegetables of summer disappear as well. But the good news is the cold season is also full of nourishing seasonal foods that pack a serious nutritional punch and waiting to be worked into your favourite cold-weather recipes.

For most of us, living through a global pandemic has heightened our attention to health. As a lifelong holistic health practitioner, I look at nutrition as a major pillar of health. The food we eat every day is the fuel used not only for energy, but for building healthy immune cells, muscles, bones, and tissue. If we eat the food that coincides best with our body’s needs in each season, we may be less vulnerable to colds, flu, and viruses. 

Winter is a time of building, warming, and deep nourishment. Include more oily, moistening, and fatty foods. Use foods like hearty soups, stews, steamed winter greens, and one-pot meals, to nourish and warm the body. This is also the best time of year to eat more animal protein. Eat root vegetables such as turnips, potatoes, pumpkin, beetroot. Cook things slowly. Things like soup, bone broth (download my free Comprehensive Guide to Bone Broth here) and stews are really good to keep yourself grounded, warm, and nourished during this coldest season.

Winter Building Foods

These types of foods are deeply nourishing and related to building resistance to illness and improving well-being. If you live in a climate with months of colder weather and less light, check out this list of foods that can best optimize your health:

• garlic and onion – often described as medicinal foods, garlic is a strong immune builder while onions contain strong antioxidants and can quiet inflammation.
• squash, sweet potato and pumpkin – these yellow/orange vegetables contain up to 750% of your daily requirement of Vitamin A, and have high levels of magnesium (think sleep, mood and calcium absorption). They are also high in fiber.
• beets and turnip – known as root vegetables, both are filled with vitamins, antioxidants and minerals.
• carrots and parsnips – also root vegetables, they contain nutrients and antioxidants that may improve immunity, enhance digestive health, and aid weight loss.
• Warming spices – like cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and nutmeg are great, but avoid super spicy foods as they’ll make you sweat and actually cool you down. Think of foods and spices that warm your core.

By making these foods a part of our diet in the fall and winter months, our family avoids many illnesses, and our immune systems are stronger and healthier. 

From this list, think of garlic, onion and spices as the flavour enhancers and medicinal foods with the rest being foundational to a solid winter plate. They can be prepared in multiple ways – roasting, sautéing, steaming or juicing.

There are small differences in the flavours suggested for this time of year according to Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda, but you’ll definitely want to increase the natural flavours of sweet, and a little salty and sour. Use foods like root veggies, squash, seaweeds, and miso soup.

Be Prepared with Remedies

Once deep in the heart of winter, and in the peak of cold and flu season, it’s important to have remedies on hand and to load up on immune supportive foods and herbs. Ideally, I try to make some of my favourite kitchen remedies well in advance, as usually when we’re in need of them, we may be too ill or drained to make them. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the old saying goes! 

Taking remedies at the onset of a cold or flu may improve the outcome. Prevention with healthy lifestyle practices goes a long way in staying well, but also in easing recovery!

As we approach the fall and winter seasons of colds and flu, I start to think about how to boost my family’s immune system in natural ways, so that we will be prepared to weather any storm that may come our way.

I like to source or make some of the following remedies in advance and have them on hand for their immune-boosting power: 

•   Kid-Friendly Fire Cider
•   Sauerkraut 
•   Healing Ginger Tea (fresh ginger, lemon, raw honey + warm water) 
•   Bone Broth (download my free Comprehensive Guide to Bone Broth here)
•   Immune Boosting Miso Soup
•   Natto
•   Elderberry Syrup
•   Garlic Lemonade (garlic, lemon, raw honey + warm water) 

Foods with Vitamin C (tree medicine, like wild-foraged herbal tea from pine, fir, spruce, and cedar as well as vegetables and fruits like cauliflower, bell pepper, dark leafy greens, citrus, acerola cherry powder, wild blueberries, local apples) and probiotics (such as fermented foods) will also help to boost the immune system and keep your gut healthy. Since about 70% of the immune system lives in the gut, good digestion is crucial to healthy immunity.

A good diet emphasizing local and seasonal foods that are building, warming, and nourishing, with lots of plant-based foods is one of your best defenses to get through the winter season feeling healthy and well. To clarify here, I don’t just mean eating healthy the moment you feel a cold coming on - I’m referring to a consistent, continual commitment to your health, on all levels, from drinking plenty of water (my family and I make our own water with this - use code 'beyondvitality' for a discount), eating a high-quality diet, avoiding excess sugar and processed food, and loading up on quality proteins (protein is an essential part of our antibodies, and they assist with healing and repair). As my gift to you, to deepen your foundational knowledge on eating well, don’t forget to download my free Real Food Nutrition Guide here. 

Get Your Vitamin D

Also, emphasize vitamin D-rich foods. When the daylight hours begin to wane and sunshine is in short supply, we need to make extra sure that we’re getting enough Vitamin D.  Vitamin D is crucial for the immune system, as well as avoiding depression and other serious diseases as well. A few “real food” sources of Vitamin D include:

• liver and cod liver oil – just like our great grandmothers used to give kids by the spoonful. It’s yucky, but oh so good for you. Follow it up with a slice of orange to counteract the taste, or take in capsule form.
• pastured eggs – especially the yolks. Eat eggs for breakfast, add them to baked goods, have an avocado toast topped with egg, or hard boil them for snacks. 
• wild seafood – shrimp, tuna, and salmon are all good sources. 
• mushrooms – especially wild-harvested mushrooms grown and dried in the sun. However, you can make your own supply of vitamin D-enriched mushrooms by simply exposing store-bought mushrooms to sunlight. Or dry some mushrooms (gills up) in the summer sun and you can capture vitamin D and have a ready source of this important vitamin through the fall, winter, and spring.

You may also consider taking a good vitamin D3 to keep your D levels up and endeavour to get some direct sunlight on your face each day, even if only for a couple of minutes. Vitamin D supplements are inexpensive and easy to take, and can be especially helpful during the winter months when we have less exposure to sunlight.

As a root-cause practitioner, I dig deep. So here, I would ask myself why there may be a deficiency in the first place? What is the mechanism of action? How did our ancestors survive for generations without supplements? Is there an absorption problem? Is there a physiological problem further down the line? What foods are lacking or being consumed in excess? How can I build my stores of vitamin D naturally? Were the sunnier months taken advantage of to stock up?

The sun is one of our leading sources of Vitamin D and it can be challenging to get enough in the winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Not only are there fewer hours of sunlight, but also we tend to cover up extensively when we’re outside due to the crappy weather. Vitamin D supplements are our best bet for increasing our dose of Vitamin D. While there are food sources of Vitamin D, you won’t get near the dose you’ll receive from a supplement.

The typical dosage recommendations on labels are often too low, especially if you’re starting out low. Ensure you are getting a good quality Vitamin D, make sure the form is cholecalciferol. Most people need about 5000 IUs to maintain optimal blood levels. Step one is to get your level checked and then you’ll want to consult with your health care practitioner.

Avoid Sugar and Alcohol

Winter is a time we want our immune system boosted and strong. Sugar and alcohol lead to the opposite. Sure an occasional healthy treat (like these gluten free chocolate chip cookies) won’t be detrimental, but the continuous consumption of these substances is a sure way to invite colds, flus, fatigue, and mental health challenges. So having a piece of candy, cookie, cake or alcohol with or after ever meal is not wise during the winter, or any season for that matter. Studies show that sugar dampens our immune systems, leaving us more susceptible to illnesses. Excess sugar is correlated to a wide variety of chronic, degenerative health challenges, including blood sugar imbalances, diabetes, obesity, tooth decay, and cancer.

Regular consumption of alcohol also compromises our immune system and leaves us more susceptible to infections. While the occasional glass of organic wine may have some associated benefits when consumed in limited amounts, this is often not the case. For the most part, alcohol consumption is excessive and hindering to our immune system and overall health. 

In this study, when subjects consumed 100g of either honey, fructose, glucose, or sucrose (table sugar), it was demonstrated that the activity of their immune cells decreased for 5 hours. So it’s fair to say that sugar or alcohol consumption slows down our immune system like a turtle!

Stay Hydrated

This is a very basic, yet often missed lifestyle factor that is greatly important! We may be more focused on hydration in the summertime, but it's more common than not for us to get dehydrated in the winter as well – and dehydration can impair our mood and cognition. Pure, fresh water (I love my home water distiller - use code 'beyondvitality' for a discount) is always my go-to source for hydration, and I make sure it’s readily available for my children as well - it’s important to rehydrate after an afternoon sliding. Keep in mind that various types of home and office heating systems are also very drying and dehydrating, so drink up, even if you’ve just been sitting at your desk. This will have great effects on your mood, cognition, and energy level, and promote circulation and detoxification. In the winter, I love having warm fluids to rehydrate, such as hot water, warm lemon water, herbal teas, soups, bone broth (download my free Comprehensive Bone Broth Guide here), and elixirs for hydration, and we can also get water from fruits and vegetables.

Download my free Family Winter Coping Guide HERE to learn more nutrition, lifestyle, and mindset tips to flow through the winter feeling healthy and happy.