It's been known for centuries that whole foods have beneficial and protective properties on people’s health and immune system. That is why Sneakz is dedicated to using whole food ingredients to get our customers the best nutrition possible. Sneakz Meal2Grow features many ingredients with these properties to help boost your child’s immune system to keep your little ones active, healthy, and happy. A combination of Vitamin C, D, Zinc, Probiotics and a full serving of vegetables all from whole foods use their beneficial features to help boost immune function and keep your little ones on the go!
Vitamin C, D, Zinc, Probiotics, and Vegetables are extremely important for the immune system. While most of these are vitamins and minerals would be micronutrients that you would receive from a well-balanced diet, today we may not have the time or energy to eat a well-balanced diet every day, or you may have a picky eater that might despise some food that would be the source of these nutrients. This is one of the major benefits of taking a nutritional supplement like Meal2Grow every day. A nutritional supplement can help fill in gaps in your diet by providing a full complement of micronutrients. This is especially important in cold and flu season when you may be naturally burning more energy than usual, under high stress, or maybe not as inclined to be eating a fully rounded diet. They can be especially helpful with children since you no longer need to worry about whether your little one is trading his healthy kale salad full of vitamins and nutrients for a bag of potato chips full of oil and salt. They would have already gotten most of the nutrient’s kale would have covered from the Meal2Grow. And a bonus with Meal2Grow versus a conventional multivitamin is that all of the vitamins and minerals in Meal2Grow are sourced from whole food ingredients, with phytonutrients and co-factors intact. Or in other words, your body is intaking those vitamins just like they would from whole foods, with all of the less known and understood, but just as important, pseduovitamins right along with them.
Vitamin C is the vitamin most people think about when they are thinking about nutrients and immune health. It is also the most widely and best researched. While research is still varied and inconsistent there is solid evidence that vitamin C supplementation is extremely beneficial to the immune system. Studies have shown that vitamin C intake reduces the duration of the cold by up to 15% and that this reduction is larger in children than in adults. Studies have also shown that the incidence of the common cold can be decreased by up to 30% with increased Vitamin C intake and that the incidence of pneumonia can reduce by almost 80%! Vitamin C is also a powerful antioxidant, so it helps keep your body healthy by reducing damage from free radicals and reactive oxygen species.
Vitamin D, also known as “the sunshine vitamin”, has always been known to be crucial for bone health and general bone strength, but did you know it is also crucial for a high functioning immune system? According to the National Institute of Health, there is a very strong link between low vitamin D and the risk for respiratory tract infections, such as you see with the Flu and Colds. This is especially important when considering that Flu season coincides with when we are receiving the least amount of sunlight in the year. There has also been some research showing that consuming enough vitamin D when young is one of the most crucial times to be intaking vitamin D. When taken at a young age Vitamin D may protect against not only weak bones later in life but also autoimmune disease!
Zinc has been known to be crucial for development in plants and animals for decades but was only recently recognized as crucial for human immunity recently. Zinc is critical for several immune functions, from the barrier of the skin to gene regulation within lymphocytes to the normal development of nonspecific immunity such as neutrophils and natural killer cells. Zinc deficiency also affects the development of acquired immunity by preventing certain functions of T Lymphocytes. Essentially this means that your immune cells do a worse job of remembering colds and flu that your body encounters making you more susceptible to those strains of flu or cold making you sick again.
Probiotics have long been known to be crucial for general health, but did you know they are also crucial in maintaining and optimizing your immune system? It becomes much less surprising when you learn the shocking fact that your gut wall houses 70% of the cells that make up your immune system! That is why it is so crucial to make sure you are eating foods with probiotics daily to maintain a healthy gut biome. On top of making sure you are ingesting probiotics, you also want to make sure you are digesting enough prebiotics (such as fiber) to keep the probiotics in your digestive system happy, as prebiotics are what the probiotics in your digestive system eat. Studies have shown that the probiotic used in Sneakz Meal2Grow (Bacillus coagulans GBI-30 6086), used alongside an adequate amount of fiber (prebiotics), showed a significant decrease in incidences and symptoms of upper respiratory and digestive infections of up to 50%!
Vegetables have long been the bane of every child’s existence. More like to end up in the trash, floor, or in the dog’s mouth then in the mouths of most kids. Unfortunately, this has been at the detriment of their immune system. It seems that while science has yet to find the exact causes of the immunological improvements of increased vegetable consumption, it does appear the immune responses have been improved and anti-inflammatory markers go down in people that consume a diet high in vegetables. This only enhances the importance of consuming a diet rich in whole foods, as we have a way to go in discovering the interactions between the vitamins, phytonutrients, and other factors that lead to the health benefits and drawbacks of what we consume.
As we have seen a diet full of whole foods with a diverse set of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients can be very beneficial to your immune system and protect you from the Flu and Cold, especially in the winter when you are under a lot of stress both mentally and physically. While some vitamins have robust science-based evidence that they are beneficial, others may only have coincidental evidence that they specifically help. This only helps illustrate the importance of a diet rich in whole foods. That is why Meal2Grow, and all Sneakz products, are made primarily with whole foods to make sure you are getting the benefit of the whole food, and not just the synthesized vitamins. We believe this is the best way to improve the nutrition, health, and overall wellbeing of all our customers, and hopefully the world.