Chicken Soup - why, what, how

Hi, guys, my name's Bec. I'm one of the practitioners here at the Well Belly Health clinic. Today I'm jumping on to have a chat about supporting your immune system because we're coming into winter and this is really forefront in a lot of people's minds. It's definitely a focus for us this month too.

If you follow along on our social media we have been showing how we are supporting our immune system and you will have seen most of the photos were about soup!

I wanted to talk a little bit about soup and why that might help to support your immune system.

Keeping in mind soups a great thing to have on hand, it's easy to freeze, it's easy to cook, it tastes really good. And it's really easy to incorporate into our diets as well!

When I make soup, I use meat and vegetables, and I use meat stock as well. And there's a couple of reasons why I do this. Meat stock is wonderfully nourishing to our bodies and our digestive system in particular. It contains a lot of great amino acids, they're the little units that make up the protein, and different aspects of our immune system use proteins. So we need to be able to build them and having those building blocks is really important and for that reason it’s great to have meat in your soup as well.

Now meat is also a really good source of zinc. And zinc is one of those nutrients again, that's really important for the immune system.

Now we look at adding veggies into our soup, we can add in things like garlic and onions as they have antimicrobial properties that can help boost that nourishment in your soup when you're feeling a bit under the weather. Also, onions contain a lot of different nutrients including selenium. Selenium is a really important nutrient for our immune system.

So you can get a lot of benefit from having those in your soup. However, I know there's some people that can't tolerate that. So don't worry, there are other things you can have in there, you can look at adding in a range of different colors of vegetables into your soup. Things like carrots, and pumpkin, being orange, they often contain a nutrient called beta carotene, which is the precursor for vitamin A and Vitamin A is really important for our immune system health. You can also add in some greens, so things like spinach is a source of iron, you've got things like silverbeet, as well. So there's lots of seasonal vegetables that you can pop in there. And you can mix and match what you like and what you can tolerate to and basically what you're going to get is a whole bunch of vegetables and meat that is cooked in a in a very nourishing broth. This adds the nutrients in so it's a highly nutritive meal, which is fantastic.

Watch on IGTV here

I also know there's been some studies done on chicken vegetable soup, that say the very act of drinking a warm drink or drinking warm soup can actually help to open up the nasal passages a little bit more. So they may even help with that side of things too.

And lastly, if you want to supercharge your soup, you can also add things like sauerkraut on the top, although I'd wait for the soup to cool down a little bit because sauerkraut is full of our beneficial bacteria, which have to support our microbiome which is a really important part of our immune system and is also really high in vitamin C. Both of those are very sensitive to heat. So we want to have our soups cooled down a little bit before we add it. You can also add in your 24 hour sour cream as an added boost as well.

Enjoy and jump here to see my fav way to make chicken soup!