I think our grandmothers were right all along.

While I consider myself a skeptic, someone who tries to be rational and objective and who likes to rely on scientific studies to come to new conclusions (or harden up old ones!) I do thin that our grandmother’s were onto something. Well, many somethings.

The first is that I can remember my grandmother telling me to gargle salt water when I start to feel sick. And in my youth-fueled ego I dismissed her and went along with my life. Now more than ten years after she has passed away I find myself returning to her adage.

Here’s what happened, thanks to my kiddo who is currently in daycare, (for those of you not associated with daycares, they are cesspools of germs) so I have been getting sick consistently sick my kiddo started going. Especially in the winter. And honestly, I’ve been dreading this winter for a long time, even considering pulling him out of daycare to wait out the flu season (yes, we’re vaccinated thank you very much!). But I think that thought was driven by fear and I do not like to make decisions out of fear if I can help it.

So last week Thursday I woke up with a scratchy throat. Nothing major, but I felt some discomfort way back there. Resigned to the sickness I laid in bed for a second. But then I figured I would try something different, I would go try gargling some salt water to see if it helped. And I’m not sure why this thought came to me all of a sudden, probably because it’s coming up to a year since my grandfather died and I’ve been thinking about them a lot.

So, I dragged my ass out of bed and gargled.

Then I proceeded to gargle every hour for the rest of the day. I even did some nasal rinsing with saline, again every hour. And I shit you not I did not get sick. Not really. I was aggressively cleaning out my sinuses for a day and while I felt tired and maybe a bit more rundown that following weekend, I didn’t get sick.

This will be my new approach to surviving the winter from now till my own death. I will also try to implement it with my kiddo…we’ll see how that goes.

Since then I’ve been thinking about more things that she would say to me, and one of them was about moving my body for brain health.

Now that doesn’t seem too outrageous, obviously exercising is going to be good for your body and by extension your brain. But I recently found a video on NYT…let me see if I can find it…here it is. The studies that they reference state that those who exercise more tend to have less amyloid built up in their brains.

Now why does this matter to me. Unironically, she ended up passing away from Alzheimer’s. It sucked watching her slowly fade away long before her body gave up. And it’s tragic because she never really exercised. She was a stay at home mom, but when her kiddos grew up, she continues to stay at home. Yes she moved her body around, cleaning and gardening. But she never joined a gym. Never joined a running club, never expanded her social circle. Beyond the lack of exercise I wonder if that’s why (at least in part) she suffered like she did. And maybe that’s a hidden benefit, expanding your social circle, getting out of the house, and moving your body… maybe that’s the foundation of youth.

So I’ve found a gym here. Maybe between the saltwater gargling and the sweat I’ll get more out of life that she was able to.