We love fall with the spectacular colors, chunky cardis and roasted veggies… if only they didn’t come hand in hand with cold and flu season. The minute we start feeling a little run down, we have our go-to holistic preventative solutions like zinc and bone broth and vitamin D. But what happens when you’re past the point of prevention and just need to help your immune system fight off infection?

There’s a time and a place for medical intervention, for sure, but we wanted to learn a little more about conventional antibiotics and some natural alternatives, so we turned to Food Matters, one of our go-to educational resources. Here’s Food Matters with the scoop, plus their list of seven natural antibiotics to help combat the sniffles and help you sail through the season…

Since the 1940s antibiotics have been internally embedded as conventional medicine amongst the medical profession for a resolution to bacterial infections. Although antibiotics have had their place in society, we need to ask ourselves: Are antibiotics really worth the underlying risks?

Studies show that even short-term use of a course of antibiotics can effectively disrupt the body’s natural gut flora and potentially lead to a spread of antibiotic resistance. This is a concern because bacterial resistance cannot be controlled or killed by antibiotics. Studies show the organisms that are responsible for diarrhea, urinary infection and sepsis are resistant to older antibiotics.

So why should you care?

It is important to be aware of the effects antibiotics have on our bodies, as it has become a public health burden on us in more ways than one. It is not just the medical industry that capitalizes on the use of antibiotics, but our global food system as well.

Take the agricultural use: Antibiotics are injected into animals or animal feed and are then sold to us for consumption. Antibiotic residue can linger in these meat and dairy products. You can find out more on how to avoid exposure to these forms of harmful chemicals in our foods here.

Another common misuse of antibiotics is inadequate diagnostics. Have you ever gone to the doctors when you were unwell and have been prescribed antibiotics, despite not being given a diagnosis yet? According to the CDC, a comparative report on antibiotic prescribing revealed that some doctors were over-prescribing more so than others.

Due to such over-consumption, treating infections with antibiotics today unfortunately, leads to more damage than good, to our immunity and digestive systems.

Luckily, we have the choice for our health to be in our own hands, in Mother Nature’s hands. Here are 7 of our favorite natural antibiotics that have been around years, with no negative side-effects.