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Why Kids Get Sick More in Winter: 5 Real Reasons and 5 Drug-Free Solutions

Episode 48, Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: November 1, 2024 | Duration: ~48 min

Key Takeaways

• Winter illness is not caused by germ migration or viral exposure, it’s caused by lowered resistance. The hygiene hypothesis, confirmed even by Louis Pasteur at the end of his life, shows that exposure to germs doesn’t make you sick; compromised defenses do.
• The five real reasons immunity drops in winter are: reduced sun exposure and vitamin D levels, increased stress and schedule overload, holiday sugar and chemical-laden food, reduced outdoor movement and dehydration, and nervous system stress from temperature and pressure changes.
• Sympathetic dominance, the fight-or-flight state triggered by packed schedules and sleep deprivation, directly suppresses immune function by creating a pro-inflammatory state, making children significantly more vulnerable to illness.
• Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care is Dr. Tony Ebel’s primary strategy for winter immune resilience, because the autonomic nervous system controls every other system in the body, including immune modulation and inflammatory response.
• Sleep outperforms infrared saunas, meditation, and magnesium supplements combined as an immune-protective offset, making it the single highest-priority strategy for busy winter schedules.

Why Don’t Kids Actually Get Sick More in Winter?

The short answer: they don’t get sick because of the cold, and they don’t get sick because there are more germs. They get sick because their defenses go lower. The hygiene hypothesis, one of the most well-established frameworks in immunology, makes this clear: it is not exposure to viruses and bacteria that causes illness. It is lowered resistance.

Viruses don’t migrate. There is no seasonal movement of pathogens from warmer climates to the Northern hemisphere in October. What does change in winter is everything that governs how well your child’s immune system can mount a defense: vitamin D levels drop, schedules get packed, sugar consumption spikes, outdoor activity decreases, and the autonomic nervous system works overtime to regulate against constant temperature swings. Each of those five factors suppresses immune function through a well-understood biological pathway, sympathetic dominance pushes the body into a pro-inflammatory state, and immune modulation suffers.

For parents, this reframe matters enormously. If winter sickness is about lowered resistance rather than unavoidable germ exposure, it’s actionable. Dr. Tony Ebel walks through the five causes and the five corresponding strategies that his family deploys every year, and explains why the basics (adjusted nervous system, sunlight, movement, sleep, clean food) cover roughly 80% of what it takes to stay healthy through winter.

Calling BS on Cold and Flu Season: The Hygiene Hypothesis [00:00:00 – 00:10:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP: The inspiration for this episode came during a board meeting at my kids’ school. It was a group prayer, and as winter was coming up, the conversation turned to, “Oh no, here comes cold and flu season. Our kids are going to get sick. Our teachers are going to get sick. Everybody’s going to get sick.”

If you just leave it at that surface level, which most people still do, it’s mystifying, because the science behind this is obvious. We’ve known it forever. God didn’t design weak immune systems. He didn’t design us to be victims.

The truth is this: the only thing winter means is you need a hat and gloves. Winter is not about viruses or bacteria. Viruses don’t migrate south in summer and return north in October. There’s no V-formation of pathogens flying north ready to get your family sick. That’s not how any of this works.

“It is not the exposure to germs that gets us sick. It is lowered resistance, lowered defenses.”

Even Louis Pasteur, who gets both the credit and the blame for germ theory, said at the end of his life that he had it wrong. Totally wrong. It is lowered resistance, not germ exposure, that causes illness. This is the hygiene hypothesis, and it has been around for a very long time.

Here’s my real-life proof: I’m a pediatric chiropractor who specializes in chronically sick kids. For 20 years, I’ve put my hands on sick children every single day. One-on-one contact. If germ theory were true, I should be the sickest person you know. I’m not. I haven’t been sick in years. My team members will tell you I don’t even get congested. That’s not luck, those are the five strategies at work.

The more you use antibiotics, antibacterial products, antimicrobial soaps, and avoidance, everything that starts with “A”, the sicker those kids and families actually get. This is well-established in the science. The children who are most lathered up in hand sanitizer, most avoidant of other kids, most medicated preemptively, those are frequently the sickest kids in the room.

My prayer shifted from frustration to motivation, and that’s why this episode exists.

Reason 1: Low Vitamin D and Reduced Sun Exposure [00:11:00 – 00:15:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: The first reason people get sick more in winter is that vitamin D levels drop, and for most families, they were already too low heading into fall.

The best vitamin D is the natural vitamin D your body makes through sun exposure. When skin is exposed to sunlight, the body generates vitamin D through a process God designed. The problem in winter is twofold: the days are shorter, and when you are outside, you’re bundled up. Your skin is covered. Even when it’s cold and you make it outside, your body can’t produce vitamin D efficiently.

Compounding this: we’ve been trained by the medical system to fear the sun. We’re afraid of germs, afraid of the sun, afraid of each other, and then we wonder why we’re not very healthy. Toxic sunscreen in summer, no sun at all in winter. This leaves vitamin D levels chronically depleted year-round.

10,000 IUs produced naturally by the body through sun exposure is not the same as 10,000 IUs from a supplement. The naturally generated form is superior. That said, supplementation during winter months is still absolutely worth doing, as long as you choose a legitimate, bioavailable product, not a cheap poser supplement.

Our family doesn’t supplement with vitamin D during summer months because we’re outside constantly. In winter, we do. We also fight hard to still get outside even in the cold. Roll up the sleeves when it’s 40 degrees and get a few minutes of what the sun can still offer. Don’t skip it just because it’s cold.

“Getting outside, being exposed to the sun, and even trying to do that in winter months is so essential. When that goes low and when we’re inside all day, it’s not that we’re exposed to more people, it’s that we’re inside, which is the same as saying not outside.”

Reason 2: Busy Schedules, Stress, and Sleep Deprivation [00:15:00 – 00:20:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: The second reason immunity drops in winter is stress, and not just emotional stress. Busy, overloaded schedules are physiologically stressful. And in winter, schedules get absolutely slammed.

There’s school, after-school sports, Christmas concerts, weekend tournaments. The pace picks up, not down. And when the pace picks up, sleep goes down. Those two things go hand in hand.

When we’re in a busy, overloaded state, the nervous system shifts into sympathetic dominance, fight-or-flight. The adrenals are working overtime. And here is the key neuro-immunological equation: significant sympathetic dominance leads directly to immune system suppression and a pro-inflammatory state. The body can’t regulate and defend simultaneously when it’s stuck in overdrive.

Sleep is the most powerful offset to this. If I were ranking an infrared sauna, a 10-minute meditation, and a magnesium supplement against sleep, sleep outperforms all three combined. Sleep is when the nervous system heals, repairs, and regulates.

Our family is high-drive. My wife Christina and I are busy people. Our kids are busy. We go hard. But the one thing we protect with more discipline than anything else is sleep schedules. From the time my kids were little, sleep has been non-negotiable. When you’re running a packed winter schedule, it’s the most important lever you have.

Reason 3: Holiday Sugar and Chemical-Laden Food [00:20:00 – 00:23:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: The third reason, and this one is an S word, is sugar. Halloween runs into Thanksgiving runs into Christmas, and all three happen within roughly 60 days. We are slamming cookies, slamming Reese’s, hitting Christmas parties, school parties, holiday treats. It is a sustained stretch of high-carb, high-sugar, high-preservative eating.

The level with which I despise Halloween is hard to put into words. Especially because our patient population skews toward kids with sensory sensitivities, kids who already don’t love chaos, bright lights, and cheap plastic costumes. And then we pile chemical-laden candy on top of it.

Here’s our family’s approach. Rule one: make it chemical-free. Even if the kids gather candy trick-or-treating, we donate it. We never have preservatives, food dyes, or artificial chemicals in our house, not for any season, not ever. Rule two: we make our own stuff. My daughter Addison loves to bake, so we’ll make cleaner versions of holiday treats together as a family. Rule three: make sure the good stuff is still getting in, healthy fats, healthy protein, whole foods, even when the holiday calendar is stacked.

The goal isn’t deprivation. It’s not letting the worst 60 days of nutritional input undo the immune resilience you’ve been building all year.

Reason 4: Less Movement and Dehydration [00:23:00 – 00:27:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Reason four is directly connected to reason one: when you stop going outside, you don’t just lose sunlight, you also stop moving.

If you’re inside, you’re moving less. If you’re moving less, you’re sweating less. If you’re sweating less, you need less hydration. If you’re less hydrated, your mucous membranes dry out. And when the internal environment of your body dries out, it becomes a far more hospitable place for pathogens to take hold.

I know this sounds basic, get outside, drink water, get vitamin D. I know. But here’s the thing: a lot of natural health families, including ours, sometimes get so sophisticated with health that we forget the basics. We know about peptides, the microbiome, infrared saunas, essential oils, homeopathic protocols. We can nerd out on all of it. But what I see all the time in my practice is families who complicate everything and skip the fundamentals.

About 70–80 percent of the patients in our office on any given day are there proactively, healthy kids whose families are just crushing the basics. Getting adjusted. Getting outside. Protecting sleep. Hydrating with minerals and electrolytes. Clean food.

When you really nail those fundamentals, you’ve covered roughly 80 percent of what it takes to stay healthy through winter. It’s not about taking 47 supplements. It’s about doing the basics exceptionally well.

“Sometimes we get so fancy with our health, we forget to do the basics. And the basics cover about 80 percent of what it takes to stay healthy.”

Reason 5: Temperature, Pressure, and Nervous System Stress [00:27:00 – 00:31:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: The fifth reason people get sicker in winter might sound like an old wives’ tale, but it is neurophysiology: changes in temperature, barometric pressure, and weather patterns place significant stress on the autonomic nervous system.

The autonomic nervous system is in charge of regulation and homeostasis for everything, blood pressure, heart rate, breathing, digestion, absorption, elimination, immune modulation, inflammatory response, the endocrine system, emotions, motor function. Every system in the body is regulated by the autonomic and central nervous system. Including the body’s internal temperature regulation.

The body fights every moment of every day to stay in balance, regulated, stable, homeostatic. That’s why subluxation and nervous system dysregulation matter so much. When a child has gone through The Perfect Storm and their nervous system is already stuck in sympathetic dominance, it’s already dysregulated at baseline. When you then add the extra burden of major temperature swings, seasonal storms, and pressure changes, that’s why kids have more seizures during weather events. That’s why PANDAS kids show more tics or anxiety during pressure changes. That’s why meltdowns spike. It is neurological.

The body in a dysregulated state doesn’t have the reserve capacity to absorb these additional stressors. When the weather swings, a dysregulated nervous system struggles. The immune system suffers as a result.

“The fifth reason places more stress on the body. When the body gets more stressed, the immune system gets suppressed, because the body is stuck in that sympathetic fight-or-flight state.”

Five Natural Defense Strategies for Winter [00:35:00 – 00:42:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Here are the five strategies I want your family to deploy during winter months. These map directly onto the five problems we just walked through.

Strategy 1: Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care. This is the top priority. Winter means more stress on the nervous system for every reason we discussed, more schedule stress, less light, more inflammatory food, bigger weather swings. Address that proactively with Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care. Nothing else taps into the nervous system’s regulation and restoration the way this kind of chiropractic does. Once the nervous system is functioning, every dependent system, immune, digestive, endocrine, comes online with it.

If you haven’t started yet, start now. You’ll likely need what we call a neurological restoration care plan. If you’re already under care and doing well, talk to your practitioner about boost adjustments in winter. For my own kids, if I’m adjusting them once a week in summer, I often move to twice a week through the winter months.

Strategy 2: Boost your vitamin D. Supplement with quality, bioavailable vitamin D through the winter months. Still fight to get outside. Even in cold weather, roll up the sleeves when the sun allows it. Take a warm-weather trip if you can. Sun exposure is always superior to supplementation.

Strategy 3: Stay active and get outside. Don’t let the kids Minecraft the whole winter. Stay active. Go outside. Sled, walk, move. When you move, you sweat. When you sweat, you hydrate. When you hydrate, your internal environment stays resilient. Add minerals and electrolytes to your water.

Strategy 4: Prioritize sleep. This is not optional. We are actually designed to slow down and sleep more in winter months. More rest. More recovery. More hearty, nourishing food. Honor that design rather than fighting it.

Strategy 5: Nutrient-dense whole foods. Get the slow cooker going. Prioritize healthy fats, clean protein, and real whole foods, especially during the holiday season when junk food is everywhere. Keep the good stuff coming in even when the chemical stuff is also showing up at the party.

The Ebel Family Protocol: What We Do When Kids Get Sick [00:38:00 – End]

Dr. Tony Ebel: When one of my kids comes home with congestion or early signs of an immune challenge, here’s the rapid-fire protocol we run.

First, and this is actually step zero, we work proactively year-round. By the time a kid shows symptoms, we’ve already spent months preparing. That’s the real foundation.

When they do need extra support:

Extra adjustments. We boost their adjustment frequency until they’re through it. The nervous system controls the immune system, the digestive system, the endocrine system, lymphatic drainage, and the body’s detox pathways. An adjustment alone gets our kids through about 90 percent of what comes up.

Immune-boosting support. We make healthy tea, run a diffuser with essential oils at night, and add vitamin D, vitamin C, and elderberry. These are not meant to suppress the illness, they’re designed to boost the body’s function so it can do its own job faster.

Extra sleep. Non-negotiable when they’re fighting something.

Clean, nourishing food. We go into hearty meals, good old chicken noodle soup, slow-cooked whole foods. Old school farmer on both sides of our family.

I don’t use the word “preventative” in our house. Medicine has hijacked that word to sell interventions. We use “proactive” and “preparation.” We are a family who prepares for challenges, so when challenges come, we’re not scrambling. We handle it.

If you want the exact protocol, specific supplements, essential oils, and everything else, email us at support@pxdocs.com, or DM us on Instagram (@pxdocs) and just say “Send me the Kick the Sick guide.” Our team has put together a full PDF resource in partnership with Well Rooted Pediatrics and our local health food store. It covers everything we do.

“We boost the function of the body, not suppress the illness. When you do that, they come out stronger on the other side.”

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do kids get sick more in winter if it’s not about germs?

Kids get sick more in winter because their immune defenses go lower, not because there are more pathogens around. Vitamin D levels drop with reduced sun exposure, schedules get more stressful (suppressing immune function through sympathetic dominance), sugar consumption spikes during the holidays, outdoor activity decreases, and autonomic nervous system regulation is taxed by constant temperature and pressure changes. The hygiene hypothesis, confirmed by immunologists for decades, makes this clear: it’s lowered resistance, not germ exposure.

Can chiropractic care actually help with winter immune function?

According to Dr. Tony Ebel, yes, and it’s his top strategy. The autonomic nervous system controls immune modulation and inflammatory response. When the nervous system is stuck in sympathetic dominance due to subluxation, the immune system is functionally suppressed. Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care restores nervous system regulation, which allows the immune system, and every other dependent system, to function properly. Dr. Ebel adjusts his own children more frequently in winter months as a proactive measure.

How much does sleep actually matter for a child’s immune health?

Enormously. Dr. Tony Ebel ranks sleep above infrared saunas, meditation, and magnesium supplementation combined. Sleep is when the nervous system heals, repairs, and re-regulates. When kids are running packed winter schedules with reduced sleep, they move into sympathetic dominance, which creates a pro-inflammatory state that directly suppresses immune function. Protecting sleep schedules through the winter is the single most powerful offset to the immune-suppressing effects of a busy season.

Should we give our kids vitamin D supplements in winter?

Dr. Tony Ebel’s family supplements with vitamin D during winter months and stops during summer when they’re outside regularly. He notes that naturally generated vitamin D through sun exposure is superior to supplementation, even if lab values show the same number, but supplementation with a high-quality, bioavailable product is still worthwhile when sun exposure is limited. He recommends continuing to go outside in winter when possible, even briefly, to capture whatever natural production is available.

What does Dr. Tony do when his kids actually get sick?

The Ebel family protocol starts with preparation year-round. When a child shows symptoms, the response is: extra Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic adjustments (which handles about 90% of cases on its own), immune-supporting supplements (vitamin D, vitamin C, elderberry), essential oils in a diffuser, additional sleep, and nourishing whole food, including chicken noodle soup. No over-the-counter medications with dyes or chemicals. To get the full written protocol, email support@pxdocs.com or DM @pxdocs and ask for the “Kick the Sick” guide.

How do I find a PX Docs practitioner near me?

You can search the full directory of trained PX Docs practitioners at the PX Docs Directory. Each listed practitioner has completed neurologically-focused pediatric chiropractic training under Dr. Tony Ebel’s methodology.

Resources & Related Content

• The Perfect Storm Framework, Understanding the root cause of nervous system dysregulation in children
• Nervous System Dysregulation in Children, The autonomic nervous system’s role in childhood health
• Asthma and Immune Dysregulation, For families dealing with chronic respiratory and immune challenges
• Sensory Processing Disorder, Related to the nervous system dysregulation discussed in this episode
• Seizures and Neurological Function, Dr. Tony’s explanation of why weather/pressure changes trigger seizure activity
• Find a PX Docs Office Near You, PX Docs Practitioner Directory
• Next Episode: Your Teen’s Stress Isn’t ‘Normal’: Recognizing Hidden Nervous System Imbalances