This is the section for health questions that do not belong to one age group or one part of the body — the everyday ones about immunity, prevention and risk. It also holds our pandemic-era coverage, which we have kept rather than quietly deleted. Those pieces are a record of what the guidance was at the time, and they are labelled as such throughout.
Where to start
Why prevention is the highest-leverage health habit is the one piece here that changes how you read everything else. Follow it with what actually supports your immune system, which cuts through a category that attracts more marketing than almost any other.
Immunity and prevention
"Immune support" is one of the least regulated claims in the supplement aisle, and what genuinely supports immune function is mostly unglamorous: sleep, nutrition and not being run down. Prevention makes the broader case — that the highest-return health decisions are the ones taken before anything is wrong, which is exactly why they are the easiest to postpone.
On the more curious end, mushrooms have a longer and better-documented medical history than most people expect, spanning culinary, medicinal and psychoactive uses that are often confused with one another.
What did the pandemic actually teach us?
These pieces were written during COVID-19 and reflect what was known at the time rather than current public-health guidance. For anything current — vaccination, isolation, treatment — check your national health service rather than an article from 2020.
What holds up is the reasoning rather than the specifics. How KN95 masks differ from the alternatives is a useful primer on filtration and fit that outlasts any particular outbreak. The case for masking during the second wave and where transmission risk concentrated document how risk was understood as it was still being worked out. Hokkaido's second outbreak was an early signal that reopening was not a one-way door, and lockdown fatigue looked at the behavioural side, which turned out to matter as much as the epidemiological one.
Common questions
Can you actually boost your immune system?
Not in the way the word "boost" implies — an immune system running hotter is not a healthier one. What you can do is avoid degrading it, which is mostly sleep, nutrition and stress. Our guide to immune support covers what that looks like in practice.
Is the COVID-era advice on this site still current?
No, and it is not intended to be. Those articles are kept as a record of the guidance at the time and are labelled accordingly. For anything you plan to act on, use your national health service.
What is the highest-value health habit?
The preventive ones, because they act on risk before it becomes a condition — and they are consistently the easiest to defer. This piece makes the argument.
