What Supplements Can Support My Immune Health?

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Transcript: What Supplements Can Support My Immune Health?

Season 11, Episode 25  | October 21, 2025

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Welcome back to another episode of Life Time Talks. I’m David Freeman.

And I’m Jamie Martin.

In today’s topic, we’re going to be talking about supplement support for immune health. Obviously, when we get sick, we think of I hope my immune system can fight this thing off, and the good news is they’re going to be things that we can do in our everyday life to help our immune system and challenge it when that time comes, so in today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about those things, including the role of supplementation that can play in supporting a healthy, resilient immune system and we’ve got a guest back that you’ve probably seen here before. Who we got, Jamie?

Yes, Paul Kriegler, one of our go tos is back. Paul is a Registered Dietitian, and the Senior Director of Product Development for LTH Supplements at Life Time. Been with Life Time for a long time now. Paul, it’s good to see you again.

Thanks for inviting me back.

Awesome.

Welcome back.

This is a big topic. We’re going to delve into it today. Before we get into the conversation, we do want to caveat that if our listeners are interested in making a change in their health plan based on anything they hear today, really, it’s always a good idea to consult with a health care provider. We always want to start there, but we want to delve into this.

Immune health is a big topic. As we go into the fall when a lot of sicknesses start to come back into. We’re seeing it — kids are back in school, or it’s just getting colder. We’re not feeling as well. We often get sick, so we’re going to delve into that. Do you want to kick us off with that?

Yeah, so two major components in the immune system. You have innate immunity and you got adaptive immunity. Can you break down each one of those and what they mean?

Yeah, they’re two major branches of the immune system, or a way to think of how to support the immune system or immune function. The innate or humoral immunity is think of it. It’s all the physical structures, all the barriers that your body builds and maintains to keep invading pathogens or irritants out of the system.

And then the adaptive or cell mediated immunity, that arm of it is more of the learned immunity, so when you are exposed to a pathogen or an invading compound that your body has to mount a response to, you end up learning how to respond to it the next time you’re exposed, so one is can you stop some exposure? And the other is, because it’s inevitable you’re going to get exposed to something in your environment, how do you respond in a healthy way?

Yep, so give us some examples of when that adaptive immunity is working? Is it the common cold that might be able to help prevent or adapt next time, or what are some of those other things we might catch?

Yeah, both are always working in the background. It’s just a matter of how loud is the signal from that learned immunity or how vigorous is the response at that moment, so the adaptive immunity, the common symptoms that people complain about like stuffiness, watery eyes, congestion in their nasal passage or in their chest, or fever. All those are signs that your adaptive immunity is working on something.

Got it, so let’s talk about the role that both innate and adaptive immunity. They’re really dependent on lifestyle and nutrition. We know this. What we do in our day-to-day life. Our habits matter in terms of how do we respond to different things? So why is that important?

Well, the first one, it’s all the physical structures and all the enzymes that line those physical interfaces between ourselves and our environment, and literally every protein in our body gets turned over three or four times a year. So that’s why you hear catchphrases like are what you eat, digest, and absorb, because you become the food and nutrients that you eat.

And that’s the clearest example of why it’s so important to pay attention to nutrition first and foremost —

Got it.

—because without solid nutrition, you can’t build the most robust structures and systems of defense to keep your body protected from threats in the environment.

And there was a quote that you shared with us from Hippocrates as far as it’s far more important to know what a person the disease has than what disease the person has. Let us know exactly what that means.

It’s a old, deep wisdom, but it’s easy to realize that’s true. Your baseline level of health determines a lot about what course your body and your immune system take when you’re exposed to a threat or a pathogen.

So, your everyday baseline health is so much more in your control than everything else that could be a threat in your environment, so it’s like pay attention to what you can control or influence every day, meal to meal. What’s on the end of your fork? How your thoughts are helping you navigate through your day more so than just being afraid of your environment.

Well, let’s get into some of those controllable factors. We want to talk about the nutrition and lifestyle things that are important for strong immune resilience. We’re going to keep this part brief, because we got a lot of things on supplementation we want to get into, but why are they important to this conversation? We already said, nutrition helps set the foundation, but what are some of those specific things, nutrition wise and lifestyle wise, that can really help to boost our immunity?

It’s simple but not easy, so I don’t want to downplay the complicated nature of nutrition and individualized health choices, but we have to get adequate protein. I call it ample protein.

So if you’re somebody that exercises regularly, or you have a goal in your life to build or maintain lean tissue throughout your lifespan, you have to eat more protein than the baseline recommendation or the RDA, and we’ve got whole episodes on that, tons of articles, but it’s basically a gram of protein per pound of lean body mass per day is a good starting point. Some people need more than that depending on their specific situation.

Good hydration, and what we mean by that is drink more water than anything else. Probably about a half of an ounce per pound of body weight per day, and if you’re someone who’s sweats or takes prescription or over-the-counter medications regularly, you probably need to supplement with electrolytes as part of your hydration strategy, because simply drinking water isn’t enough to maximize hydration and keep all those tissues of your immune system and the rest of your body well lubricated and sufficiently hydrated.

Eat ample produce, so this is like colorful vegetables and fruits. That can actually play into your hydration strategy, but aside from protein, it should be the main feature of every meal. Something plant-based that’s got bright colors and lots of phytochemicals and good hydration.

And then minimizing consumption of ultra processed foods and alcohol. Those are the four basic pillars that’s oversimplifying that complicated conversation about nutrition as a whole, though.

I started to smile a bit when you mentioned how produce can be part of your hydration strategy. It just threw me back to my grandparents will go on this long road trip — I’m just going to tell this story. I’m going to sideline us for a second, but they would go on this long road trip every year when they would go to Florida, and my grandpa would always say, we got to pack our grapes because they’re a great source of hydration and water.

And we would always laugh and giggle like, oh, make sure you got your grapes whenever you go anywhere, but it’s so true. Just those little things that can supplement that. So that’s good advice.

Same vein as far as nutrition. Now let’s talk about lifestyle factors. What things can we do in that space to help supplement the immunity system?

You just have to support. It’s getting fresh air and sunlight every day is very important, so getting outside time.

Yep, time in nature.

Adequate sleep, so both in quantity and quality. We want to make sure that we’ve got a good sleep rhythm going. Regular exercise, because that’s how you build and maintain strength of your total body and your mind.

And then have effective means of managing the stress you encounter. You can’t get away from your stress. You just have to figure out ways to bolster your resilience in the face of whatever stress you have to encounter.

Yep. OK, so we’ve got through all of those. We’ve got the lifestyle. Let’s get into the specific nutrients and supplements, so let’s just start. What role can supplementation play in supporting your immune health?

The main role is to fill nutrient gaps that we know exist. Even in the most careful diets out there in modern times, what we’re seeing more and more is there’s a lot of modern lifestyle factors that actively deplete nutrients from our body.

And then it’s more challenging than ever to get those nutrients back through our diet, because our soil quality and food nutrient density in the foods available to us have been depleted over the last several decades, so it’s kind of a two-pronged reason we need to fill nutrition nutrient gaps.

Got it.

So when we talk about optimal immune function, I know that we’re going to end up providing a comprehensive list for the people who are listening and watching, but if you were to pick some of the vitamins and minerals out that stand out the most, what would be your top five?

Top five —

No particular order. You don’t have to force rank.

I know. You asked me to do this. I put together some notes to organize my thoughts, and I gave you two dozen nutrient types or supplement categories.

Yes, we’re going to put these all online in the show notes for everybody.

Literally, I could not narrow it down.

Oh, no.

Three of the top ones are vitamin A, vitamin C and vitamin D. Vitamin A, because modern diets don’t have great sources of vitamin A, so you’ve got to get it from somewhere else.

And what I mean by not great sources is most of the vitamin A we consume in our diets today in the typical North American diet is their vitamin A precursors. They’re not active forms of vitamin A, so for active forms, you have to go consume like beef liver.

Oh, which is —

Egg yolks or a lot of foods that they’re just not popular, or people have actively avoided them for one reason or another, but eating orange foods, carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, butternut squash, those will give you a lot of those precursors.

And even some dark, leafy green vegetables will give you some of that vitamin A, but vitamin A is important for both the humoral immunity, so the structures, the barrier function, as well as your immune response, so all the immune cells that get organized and coordinate their efforts to fight a pathogen once it’s gotten into your system.

Got it. So the second one you mentioned is vitamin C. Let’s dig into it.

Vitamin C, this supports a lot of different cellular functions related to the immune system. It’s also an antioxidant, but it also has vitamin A. It plays roles in both sides of the immune system.

Vitamin C is crucial for supporting or the process of building physical structures, especially collagen-based structures, so a lot of the linings of your airway and skin and all that, so vitamin C is super important for that physical integrity, as well as coordinating the immune response and quelling the inflammation that your immune system creates.

Got it.

So some inflammation is good. You want an inflammatory response generated by your immune system, but then you want the nutrients you need to quiet it back down when the issue has been dealt with, so to speak. Vitamin C has a super important role in that.

I feel like whenever it gets to that time of year when people are getting sick, it’s always make sure you get your vitamin C, eat more oranges. Those are the things that we’re recommending. Get those in that time of year to help boost that in your body.

And the evidence is pretty strong for vitamin C in helping either reduce the frequency or the severity of a variety of illnesses, especially respiratory illnesses, but it seems to only work if you’re taking it consistently for four to 12 weeks and it seems to work better in people who exercise.

Interesting.

So it’s you can’t really take the supplement idea and plug it into a bad system. That’s why we started with the conversation around like baseline general health and lifestyle. You have to take the whole system into consideration, otherwise none of it’s going to work.

All right, vitamin D.

Vitamin D — most people are inadequate or insufficient or flat out deficient in vitamin D for a variety of reasons we’ve covered on other episodes, but basically, if you’re indoors most of the time, or when you are outside, you’re putting sunscreen on, you’re not generating enough vitamin D through your natural means to have optimal levels of vitamin D to support your immune function.

And supplementing is the next best thing, because there’s not great food sources of it. You’d have to drink so much fortified milk. You’d have to eat so much beef liver and fatty fish that it’s just not likely going to happen in most people’s diets, so getting sunlight and eating a healthy diet is often still not enough in taking 2,000 to 5,000 IUs of vitamin D per day — vitamin D3.

Ideally, with vitamin K2 as well and with enough magnesium, is kind of what generates the powerful effect of vitamin D support of your immune system.

Let’s talk about the benefit of the K2. I know you said that. Is it transporting? What exactly is the K2 doing?

So what we know about vitamin D is it’s a prohormone. One of its functions is helping your body absorb calcium, and we get way more exposure to calcium through our diet than we do to the counterpart to calcium is magnesium. And if you overload your body with vitamin D and calcium, it can encourage calcification of soft tissues, including your artery walls, so you don’t want that stiffening of your artery walls.

Vitamin K2 taken along with vitamin D3, the K2 helps direct that calcium into the bony structures — your teeth, your bones, instead of and away from the soft tissues that you don’t want the calcium to get deposited in.

All right, so that was three. Are there any another one or two you want to talk about? I’ve heard quercetin get mentioned a little bit. I’m just going to throw that one out there for you.

I put that one on my honorable mention list.

Oh.

The other three I identified after much prodding and pressure by you two were magnesium, zinc, and omega 3s. So magnesium is just not very present in our food supply anymore, and you have to go out of your way and supplement magnesium, otherwise you’re not going to have sufficient levels to do everything you need to do, especially if you sweat regularly, consume alcohol, or caffeine.

Those things actively deplete magnesium, along with a few other over-the-counter and prescription medications, so it’s safe to say most people are just playing from way behind on magnesium, so adding it as a supplement in your stack is super important.

Not only is it necessary for immune cell development, like proper formation of the blood cells and the white blood cells that mount your immune response. It also helps with inflammation response, so it’s part of this symphony of nutrients that when your body needs to mount a response to an illness or a pathogen, you need it there to get that process started and also it needs to be there in sufficient levels to help resolve that process and bring you back to baseline.

Got it.

And the food supply is just stripped of magnesium.

All right, zinc.

Zinc — again, zinc intake is pretty low across the board in the standard American or North American diet. A lot of the forms of zinc that get highlighted like nuts and seeds, legumes, while they have zinc present, it’s not easy to absorb the zinc from them, so this is one like you need to consume oysters once in a while. You need to consume meat probably, shellfish that are more bioavailable sources of zinc, and, again, they’re not super popular foods.

The richest sources of zinc are not very popular, and they’re not consumed very often. So that’s why it belongs probably in a consistent supplement stack.

Got it.

And then omega 3s. Am I jumping ahead?

No, you’re perfect, and then we got to get to quercetin.

Same reason.

You can come back to it.

When you think about why would someone even consider supplementing, I always think through the dietician lenses like how likely are they to get it through their diet? And omega 3s is just super unlikely.

People don’t eat 8 ounces of wild salmon a couple times a week to get their omega 3 levels sufficiently high enough to be in the optimal range for, once again, maintaining proper, robust structures as defenses for your humoral immunity, and then also having enough omega 3s around at a baseline level to resolve inflammation after that inflammatory impact.

Got it. OK, I want that honorable mention one. We got to talk quercetin just for a second, and then we’re moving on. We’re talking about some of these other ones.

Yeah, so quercetin, the one that you brought up, is also an antioxidant. It’s found in lots of, I would say, fruit and vegetable skins like apple skins, grape skins, onions, but it’s not absorbed very well, so you’d have to eat so much of that stuff, and it’s the rate of absorption makes the therapeutic amount pretty impossible to get from your diet, so yes, go eat a lot of those foods, fresh produce, but it’s unlikely it’s going to help you from a therapeutic standpoint.

So taking it in a supplement form, it does a couple unique things. It helps zinc get to where it needs to go to disrupt viral replication in your cells, so zinc needs an ionophore to get from your circulation into the cells, where it can start to disrupt basically the immune insult, and quercetin is a perfect partner for zinc to do that.

Great. I’ve heard certain times of year, like, hey, start your quercetin in October, for instance, if you’re in the Northern hemisphere when some of these illnesses are happening or even before allergy season starts for some people.

Yeah, quercetin can also have some relief for seasonal allergies. Kind of that histamine response, and it’s not super clear why it does that. Probably some of its anti-inflammatory benefits or functions, and we got to be careful. Quercetin as a nutrient is anti-inflammatory. Quercetin as a supplement, we can’t say it’s anti-inflammatory, so they’re two separate things, but you can take it as a supplement to get enough of the nutrient to have that impact.

To create that nutrient level that can ideally support that down the road.

Exactly.

Got it.

Now, yeah, with the top five, I got to ask the question. When we look at something that can probably encapsulate all of this, would a good multivitamin like our performance multivitamin capture a lot of the things that you just mentioned?

Yeah, a well formulated multivitamin checks a lot of these boxes. For example, all the multivitamins that I recommend and I help formulate the vitamin A comes in both preformed and precursor form.

The vitamin C is a highly absorbable form. It’s a little bit more than the RDA, so it helps as a nice baseline for an active individual, has higher nutrient demands. Vitamin D, we have way more than the RDA in there in all of the multivitamins and even our nourish multi greens. That was built as kind of a drinkable multivitamin with added antioxidants and adaptogens and fiber and probiotics, and you could frame that as a very immune supportive option. It’s a way to supplement with a lot of these nutrients that would bolster your immune resilience.

So yeah, a multivitamin is a great start. It’s not very sexy, but that’s literally why I encourage people to consider supplementation and use a multivitamin fish oil first and foremost.

And that would probably cover, I’m assuming, some of these other nutrients, which we’re not going to get into depth here, but will be in the show notes that we’ll have for you so you’ll be able to have some of that coverage there for these other things that are good for immune health as well.

And there’s pretty robust evidence that says, if you put a population on a multivitamin or a placebo, generally the people that are getting the treatment, even a low quality multivitamin, end up having fewer sick days, faster resolution of a variety of seasonal illnesses, including colds and flus, so there’s pretty robust evidence that says, hey, if you just nourish people better, they’re more resilient.

And we got another one too we’ve seen. I’ve actually taken the colostrum and that has benefits as far as around immunity too, so can you break down some of the benefits that come from colostrum?

Yeah, colostrum, we have a whole episode on that too, but it’s the most rich source of immune globulin proteins that we know of, and it’s purposely made, in this case, for cows. It’s for the baby cows who are born without any immune system really to start building their immune system, so it’s the first milk they get, and there is a way for us to capture some of the leftover and preserve it and prepare it in a way that we can consume it and it does turn out to have some immune benefits for humans, too.

Yeah, similar, there’s amino acids as well, and that’s kind of tied back to protein, which we’ve talked about already.

What I like about essential amino acid supplements for people who are constantly getting sick it’s more likely than not that their gut function is not where it needs to be, so loading them up on protein that needs to be broken down and digested and then absorbed is that’s a tall ask, so if anyone’s gut function is disrupted or kind out of balance, the fastest way to replete them with the amino acids they need to build back that resilience is to give them the amino acids in their individual form, and that’s what essential amino acids are.

So that’s one of my favorites for people who have trouble digesting, and they need more protein, because they don’t have to digest it. They can just absorb the amino acids and then immediately start to use them to rebuild healthier structures.

OK, while we’re on the topic of gut health for a second, because we’re talking about gut health and immune system. There’s a lot talk about how much of your immune system is in your gut. Can you speak to that for a second?

Yeah, it’s thought most of the immune reactions start from the gut-associated lymphoid tissue, which is part of your gut function, and a lot of the signaling that kicks that off is generated by the microbiome, so the healthy or unhealthy bugs in your gut can have massive downstream influence on how your body reacts and then resolves any immune response, so gut function is vitally important.

Consuming enough fiber, that goes back to the lots of healthy produce as a baseline of your diet. That fiber is going to feed the right types of bacteria in your gut. Sometimes people need to replenish that bacterial population with a probiotic supplement. Sometimes they just need to supplement with fiber, or at least feed enough fiber to make sure that population stays robust and is sending the right signals throughout the rest of your body.

Got it.

And I know you just said probiotic, but there’s another thing called prebiotics, so can you navigate us between the two and the benefits between them?

Yeah, probiotics are the actual organisms, so it’s the bacteria that end up living in, kind of setting up shop in your colon, and the prebiotics are the energy for those organisms and it turns out a lot of types of fiber are the energy that those bugs need.

So if you get the fiber, gets in there?

Yes.

Hopefully.

Yes.

Hopefully, that’s the goal. We’ve talked on other episodes too, a lot about sleep, but what role do sleep supportive supplements play here? Because we know sleep is a time of rest and repair. If we’re not sleeping well, there’s a lot of different things that can happen — a cascade effect.

Yeah, the clearest example I can paint for you is everyone’s had some sinus infection or upper respiratory tract infection, where I end up being plugged up here, your mouth breathing throughout the night. You know you’re not getting good sleep.

Well, the first thing I’d have people do in that instance is stop consuming any dairy, because dairy he is known to thicken the mucus in your airway and nasal cavity, so get off of dairy. Maybe do some nasal rinses to give yourself at least a fighting chance to get some good sleep.

And then my sleep cascade for supplement choices follows the lowest risk, highest reward, and then I move on to the next, so the first line is magnesium. Nothing really bad can happen if you take too much magnesium other than some loose stools, so I have people just dose up on magnesium to help their body relax into a deep sleep once they’re set up airway wise.

And then the next would be, OK, now you’re maybe overthinking sleep, so you need to calm down your mind from a neurotransmitter standpoint, so LTH has a supplement called Relax, and that’s really good at helping people get into a calmer mindset. It’s not a sedative, per se. There’s no melatonin in it, but it helps people relax from a neural and a physical standpoint, and you can stack it with magnesium.

The next thing, and this I personally use melatonin periodically. Research says you know older populations are often deficient in melatonin. I know it’s kind of a controversial topic, but melatonin is also a very potent antioxidant, especially in times of inflammatory immune response, so it can be used periodically when you’re sick.

So this is like, hey, if you know you’re going to get sick a couple times next winter, keep these supplements around. You should probably be on a good multivitamin year round, but then also keep around some good vitamin D in case you need to dose up for that little illness, vitamin C, extra zinc, maybe some quercetin, some others that are on this list like n-acetylcysteine that can help thin out mucus, but back to sleep.

Melatonin, if I don’t feel well, or if I have a client that doesn’t feel well and we’re trying to get them through this illness, I just tell them, clear your calendar. Plan to take melatonin early in the evening, as soon as the sun goes down, and maybe take a little more than you normally do, so if you’re a 1 milligram person, maybe take 3. If you’re a 3, maybe try double that, and then just plan to sleep for 12 or 14 hours.

Kick that thing out of your system. Kick that —

Because you need sleep. You need sleep. Your body is fighting so hard, spending so much energy and resource to mount that immune response and then resolve it. That’s the best thing you can do.

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve gone through a lot of different pieces, but let’s talk a little bit like why quality matters in this case, because we don’t want to just say go out and just go look at any random grocery store shelves and say, here, I’m going to pick these vitamins, minerals that you’ve talked about. Quality is really important when you’re selecting what you’re going to do, so speak to that for a little bit.

Yeah, obviously look for a third party certified brand. LTH, that I work on, we go through a third party called NSF for certification. And when a product carries the NSF content certified logo, what that means is every year the manufacturing facility has been visited and audited to make sure that they’re following good manufacturing practices as set forth by the FDA and the Code of Federal Regulations, so they’re being checked annually by an independent third party.

It also means that supplement has been submitted for that third party independent testing to make sure that what’s on the label is actually in the bottle, and it’s also screened for some various contaminants, so like agricultural herbicide, pesticide residues.

It’s screened for yeast, mold, mildew, kind of things you don’t want in your supplements as well as heavy metals, so it’s been independently verified that it’s made in the right way, and that the finished product is actually what it’s supposed to be and not anything else, so look for third party. NSF is one of the most recognizable, but there are a couple of other third parties that people can look for as well.

Awesome. Nice.

We hit on a lot. As far as when it comes down to the immune system and all the great benefits, as far as the things that we can help support. When I get into a mic drop moment, this is going to be the opposite of everything we just talked about, and I am curious to see what you say here.

I can’t wait to see what this is. What’s the opposite?

The role of sugar on the immune system. Go for it.

Excess sugar can create a more inflammatory environment throughout your entire body, and it can be disruptive, or throw your microbiome a little out of balance. The actual sugar in your bloodstream itself, your body radically tries to regulate that and bring your blood sugar back to normal, and some of that can be actually inflammatory.

The actual molecule of glucose, when there’s too much of it in your bloodstream, it can be a physical insult, especially if you have high blood pressure to the artery walls, so it can create some physical damage of those delicate, internal barriers, so excess sugar, not good. Highly suggest against it.

I like what you said as far as dairy. How it creates more mucus. I would assume probably not having any sugar while you’re sick as well would probably be a go to, right?

Absolutely.

Awesome.

Well, that’s no fun sometimes. I get it. I’m going with it. I know what I have to do, guys. I got it. Paul, anything that we missed or anything you want to make sure we cover, because we got through a lot of the nutrients, not all of them —

A lot of them.

—but we are going to make sure people have a full access to all the really amazing lists that you shared with us, and we’ll make sure that’s with show notes.

There’s an oldie, but goodie — an 8,000 word article that I did five years ago. Not the ultimate guide to supporting your immune system. It’s still available on Experience Life.

Nice.

And it’s still one of our most — people certain times of year is that baby rises to the top.

In the fall time or winter time.

Yeah, just no one’s Superman. You’re going to get sick. Be prepared for it. Know what to do. Have the right stuff in your cabinet. If it’s not part of your normal daily routine, at least have it available for when you or your family gets sick.

And what I’ve seen work time and time again is if people are focused on a more robust nutrient density in their total lifestyle, inclusive of food choices and supplements, they tend to have an easier time through cold and flu season.

They have fewer bad workouts. They have fewer days missed from school or work. They bounce back faster to their desired baseline after they do get sick, so it pays in so many ways to just work on your general health all year round.

Which goes back to what we’re talking about all the time those pillars. That nutrition, how does it connect with —

Sleep.

—movement, sleep, stress management? It’s all interconnected.

All of them.

All of those pieces.

Well, Paul, as always, we love having you on. We’ll want to make sure our listeners can find more from you. You have past episodes of the podcast, lots of articles at Experience Life. Anywhere else you want people to find you?

I think that’s the best place.

Best place. All right, thank you, Paul.

Thanks for having me.

Appreciate you coming on, brother.

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