Aaron Hartman, MD presents the final video in a three-part series on COVID (Dec 22, 2020), shifting focus to building resilience and immune health through lifestyle and nutrition. He shares an 83-year-old male patient case who lost 25 pounds, removed gluten and dairy, corrected multiple nutritional deficiencies (low zinc, vitamins D, A, E), and experienced only a brief, mild (2–3 day) COVID illness when an outbreak hit his care facility. The video cites several numeric claims linking low vitamin D to COVID deaths (87%), low zinc to a 50% higher hospitalization risk, and reports that famotidine (Pepcid) and some antihistamines appear to lower risk of severe COVID by up to ~50%. The speaker invites viewers to join an online community about inflammation, gut health, and resilience.
All right everybody, this is the last video in this three part series about COVID and I'm going to change it a little bit. I've been talking previously about long COVID patients, but the question is for everybody out there who hasn't been sick yet, how do you increase your resilience, how do you improve your immune system, how do you decrease inflammation? And for that I want to talk about one of my prior patients who was an 83 year old male. Now I started seeing him and actually his wife about two years ago. The reason I actually started seeing the couple was the wife had Alzheimer's and was a part of my Bredinson protocol clinic where we deal with people with brain inflammation. How does inflammation affect your brain and how can we work on that? And so they were living in a long term care facility and they didn't really have a whole lot of control their food or environment. But so we started working with a couple and what happened was the husband ended up getting most of the benefit from it. He ended up losing 25 pounds, stopped eating gluten and dairy and a lot of inflammatory foods. We found out he had a lot of nutritional deficiencies. Like a year and a half ago we found zinc was low, his D was low, his A was low, his E was low, he had a lot of markers for inflammatory fats, his gut testing showed he had a lot of inflammation. So he's kind of worked through all these things. And after about a year working with him and his wife, they decided to stop working with me, mainly because the goal was the wife and it just, things weren't working out due to her medical conditions. So he kind of thanked me for helping him and it enabled him, just the way he looked at it was, it was enabling him to care for his wife better. And we were actually all happy with that. And the wife was happy for me to stop asking her to stop eating ice cream, which she loved. So I got an email from him this past summer and the long term care facility he was living at got hit with COVID and a lot of people there got sick, several died and he got Covid as well. And he was ill for maybe two or three days and got better. He had a minor respiratory tract infection, like a regular upper respiratory tract cold. And the email he sent me was very, was very encouraging. He talked about his health before starting working with us, how he did have gut issues and didn't always have. He wasn't as sharp as he wanted to be. He was very educated, well educated individual. And he'd gotten back a lot of his cognition while working with us. And he credited the work he did changing his diet, losing weight, addressing his nutritional status for the fact that when he, at 83, when he got Covid, it was a relatively mild case. And it's really interesting what we know about COVID We know that today that 87% of people who die with COVID 19 have a low vitamin D level. So that means 9 out of 10 people who die with it have low D. We know that if your zinc is low, you have a 50% increased chance of hospitalization from, from it. We know that if you're taking things like famotidine or you're taking, if you're someone with, who takes a lot of anti histamine allergy issues, that that actually lowers your risk of severe Covid because we now know Covid has mast cell issues and up to, up to, to it lowers your risk for hospitalization up to 50%. And it was really interesting that Pepcid is one of the things that the local hospitals are now using with patients on the COVID ward that's being used here at the local medical college. It's one of the things as well that Walter Weeg, that the President of the United States received when he was admitted to the hospital. Well, my patient was able to address these nutritional issues, address them as allergy issues he had as well. And he was really super thankful that he had a chance to work with us. And so resilience, how do you build resilience? How do you build your immune system? Ultimately it's a lifestyle, whole person, science based approach where you deal with yourself individually. So again, you know, share your ideas, share your thoughts below in this, in this video. I want to. One of the things we're trying to do is create a online community where we can have talks about inflammation, gut health, resilience, and create an educational community where people can share ideas, but we can also guide people through their health. And so hopefully we'll be launching that in January. But you know, as we kind of prepare for that, I want people to be aware that you can take charge of your health, you can improve your immune system, you can thrive, you don't have to just survive. And these are messages we want to give people to encourage them, empower them and educate them. So anyway, take care, be well, have a great, great holiday season and we will talk to you all soon.
