If you were to think about the major pillars of remaining healthy, especially when one is exposed to colds and flus from kids, in your case, also in the intensive care unit where people are coming in specifically because they're sick, often with infections like colds and flus or worse, you need to take specific precautions to avoid getting sick.

What do you think of as the fundamental layer of keeping a healthy immune system to avoid getting sick? And then we'll talk about how to get over and move through being sick more quickly. Yes. Well, the question is, how do you avoid getting sick in terms of infectious diseases?

And as it turns out, the answer to that is actually the same in terms of avoiding getting sick for anything. And it sort of goes to the pillars, as you call it. In my mind, there's actually a physician that I know very well, just outside of Stanford, actually, in a place called Weimar, Weimar University, Dr.

Neil Nedley. And he's actually coined this mnemonic called "New Start." And each of those letters, to me, in my mind, is something that I go to when I want to improve health in people in general. So "N" starts for nutrition. We can talk about nutrition and what that does to the human body, obviously, as natural as possible, staying away from processed foods.

That's something there. Exercise is "E." And when I'm talking about exercise, I'm talking about the understanding that we have regarding exercise, not to build muscle, necessarily be stronger. I'm talking about exercise in terms of health. And that has more of a J-hook type of picture. What I mean by J-hook is if you're not doing any exercise, you're going to have higher levels of inflammation.

As soon as you start to do some exercise, even mild to moderate exercise, the amount of inflammation in your body starts to come down. But as you start to do more and more exercise, you do have to be careful in terms of your general health. This is exactly what happens with athletes.

They have to be very careful that when they're doing that type of elite athletic exercise, that they're not sick on the day of performance. And so that's an issue. So I'm referring to just mild to moderate exercise is good. The next one would be "W," water. So this is something that's really interesting.

Obviously, it seems pretty obvious. But not only the use of internal water, but external water. So in that area, we can talk about sauna, cold plunge, things of that nature that can actually help with our immune system. That's a whole interesting area of discussion. It involves the innate immune system.

It involves interferon. There's a lot of history and data that goes back over 100 years on how that's been used. "START," S-T-A-R-T. So S is sunlight. I've been a real proponent of getting people outside into the sun, and we can talk a lot about that. There's a lot of interesting research, not only in terms of sunlight, in terms of influenza, but also COVID, and just about any natural disease, a lot of interesting information there.

"T," stands for the old term called "temperance," which you may recall is a term that we use to prevent us from taking in toxins into our body. That's a whole other discussion. So staying away from things that would make you sick. "A" is air. And when I talk about air, it's not just what we focus on, which is keeping bad things out of the air.

So having fresh air. But there's a whole discussion to be had in terms of air that has good qualities in it. So there's a whole area of research that looks at, for instance, phytoncides, which are chemicals that come off of trees. You may have heard of forest bathing. They've done a lot of research in Japan on this.

And getting out into nature, there are actual chemicals that are in the air that you can breathe that actually have an impact on your innate immune system. Finally, "R," and we'll get into "R" and "T" at the end, "R" is rest. Now this goes without saying, but people who have good sleep habits are going to have much better immune systems, whether you're talking about the antibody response after a vaccine versus just the number of times per year you're sick.

There's very good data, very good research that shows that getting seven, eight hours of sleep a night is going to be very beneficial for your immune system. It has to do with cortisol and beta receptors and all sorts of things. And the last "T," which is trust. And for some, it is trust in a higher power, trust in God.

These are the sorts of things that can help us relieve stress. If someone else is helping you, if someone else is there, "T" would also include community, people that are around you. These are some of the less tangible ways of measuring it. But when someone asks me a question, "What can I do to avoid getting sick?" And as you just asked me in terms of influenza, there's a lot of specific things we can talk about, but that's where I start out with the pillars of health.