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Fourteen Low-Tech Ways to Stay Healthy (Besides Handwashing)
Fourteen Low-Tech Ways to Stay Healthy (Besides Handwashing)
Health is not just an absence of illness. At the very least health includes a well-functioning immune system, our bodies’ first defense against pathogens that cause disease. This includes COVID-19, the coronavirus.
We are all constantly exposed to bacteria, viruses, and parasites even if we wash our hands twenty times a day. If our immune system is working well, it creates a barrier that stops the antigens from entering the body altogether. This is the first line of defense. If this fails, the second line is for the immune system to produce white blood cells, chemicals and proteins that find, attack and destroy the antigens before they can reproduce. If that fails, the immune system destroys the antigens as they multiply. If the antigens are able to multiply a lot you will feel lousy as your body fights the disease in earnest. You will have unpleasant symptoms. A large part of your energy will go towards your immune system’s battle. You will be sick.
I don’t know about you, but I want to stay at defense levels one and two. And this is more than possible, even with the coronavirus. Don’t get me wrong—handwashing and not touching your face does reduce the amount of pathogens that make it to your immunity barrier, but it doesn’t eliminate them entirely unless you live in a special isolation bubble. To be healthy, you also need your immune system functioning robustly. The following suggestions (to do before you become sick) may strike you as common sense, but, to paraphrase Voltaire, in the middle of a pandemic common sense is sometimes not so common.
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Keeping warm with minimal heating: small-scale solutions
Keeping warm with minimal heating: small-scale solutions
The first two posts considered ways to keep our body’s internal heat in and near our body for as long as possible. In this post we’ll widen our gaze out to our residence. I’ll discuss relatively low-cost, small-scale solutions (some very cheap, others less so).
Now that we are looking more at your residence, a divide opens up between what a renter can do and what an owner can do. While renters will find some of these solutions cheap and easy enough and with a short enough payback time that it makes sense to implement them, others may be out of reach. However, what you can do may be more than you think depending on the details of your relationship with your landlord. If you do not expect to be where you are for long, only the cheapest, fastest-payback options make sense. I’ll note those as we go along.
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