What Does Food Have To Do With COVID-19?

One of the most important things, you know, for really thinking about COVID long term, because this is going to be with us for some time, many years, is the incredible relationship between poor metabolic health, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, obesity, and poor outcomes with COVID Hi, I'm Kasia.

Perowietz, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy Podcast. In every infection, there are two factors at play. The Microbe and the Host. While we can't control the microbe, we have extraordinary control over us, the host. Unfortunately, in the United States, only 12% of us are metabolically healthy, putting us at a higher risk of worse outcomes from COVID-19. Fortunately, by improving our diets, we can make incredible improvements to our metabolic health in just a matter of weeks. Earlier this year, Dr. Hyman spoke to Dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, Dariush.

Mozaffarian, about this topic. You wrote an article with the former Secretary of Agriculture, Dan Glickman, that was posted on CNN entitled, Can Diet Flatten the Curve for COVID-19? And it's sort of like, how does that even make sense? So we've heard all about these ideas of flattening the curve with social distancing and hand washing and contact tracing and isolation and testing. But your article presented a very different view about how we can use food and nutrition and specific nutrients to actually help us address this pandemic. So can you tell us why you wrote this article and why this is more important now than ever to address these issues?

There's so many ways that COVID-19 influences food and nutrition and food and nutrition influence COVID-19 back. I'll just go through them quickly and we can talk about each of them. So, you know, one is immunity, the actual immune response to COVID, and then, you know, actually the blunting of the excessive inflammatory response to COVID. We can talk about nutrition and actually the immune response. Two is, you know, hunger and food insecurity, which of course cause incredible human suffering with this economic shutdown and lost wages and schools being closed. but also malnourishment, we know from long clinical experience, malnourishment further predisposes people to infections. And then I think one of the most important things for really thinking about COVID long term, because this is going to be with us for some time, many years, is the incredible relationship between poor metabolic health, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, obesity, and poor outcomes with COVID It's very plausible that if we had a metabolically healthy population, COVID would be much, much less severe. We have almost three in four American adults who are overweight or obese, and about half of American adults have diabetes or pre-diabetes. When you start saying that the healthy population is the small minority of the population, that's not okay. It should be that people with disease are the minority and we generally have a healthy population. We've completely flipped that on its head and we have a tiny, tiny proportion of the population that's actually healthy and everybody else has disease. And most of that disease, not all of it, most of that disease is strongly diet related.

Yeah.

So we have- you- wrote in your.

CNN article that before COVID-19 that poor diet kills 530,000 Americans every year, about 15, 100 deaths every day. That was before COVID-19.

Yeah, so you know, COVID-19 is tragic and these 50,000 deaths already in the United States are tragic and we need to be doing everything we can to reduce this. And at the same time, before COVID-19, around 40,000 Americans were dying every month directly from diet-related diseases that we've estimated that would not have happened if they had a healthy diet. And so, And we weren't going up in arms and saying, we have to stop this. This is causing catastrophe. But it was. It's causing billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars in preventable health care costs, which burdens our American businesses, which burdens our federal governments and state government budgets. It's causing incredible disparities, big differences between the haves and the have-nots in our society. And it's causing a lot of suffering and it's overwhelming our healthcare systems. We're evolved biologically to respond to acute risk. This is gonna kill me today. We're not biologically evolved to understand in the same way risks that might kill us over months to years because back in the day when we were out on the savannah, we cared about that saber-toothed tiger right in front of us, not something that was gonna happen a year later. And so something like COVID, a true crisis, that we think, oh my God, I could die, changes everything. And yet diabetes, obesity, hypertension, cancers, autoimmune disease, allergies, chronic kidney disease, you know, all these things that are diet related that are still killing our population in.

Incredible numbers, we're sort of assuming is normal. At the beginning of the pandemic, Dr. Hyman spoke with his colleague at the Ultra Wellness Center, Dr. Elizabeth Boham. She shared how to eat to support your immune function and why healing your.

Microbiome is critical at this time, given that 60% of our immune system is in our gut. Liz, I'd love you to share a little bit about what we know about food as medicine and food in particular around how we can use it to bolster our immune system and what things we should be focused on. What are the kinds of special medicinal foods we should really be focusing on?

Yeah. Oh, thank you, Mark. It's so great to be with you and to be with everyone out there. Thanks for having and putting this all together. And I love talking about food and the immune system and how we can use food as medicine to build a better immune system. And there's so much we can do. I mean, there's so much we can do. You know, I think that what we, I also find that this time, you know, people are saying, like you said, this is a time to take care of myself. And a lot of people are getting motivated. I was just talking to a patient just last week, and she's always struggled with sugar. and sugar addiction and having a hard time changing her diet and staying on that new, better eating plan. And she said to me, you know what? Now I feel really motivated because I recognize how important this is for my health and how important this is for my immune system and also for not spreading this to other people. How important it is for me to start to adapt and really stick with these recommendations you've been making. And so I think this can be a really motivating time for a lot of people to say, okay, Now it's time for me to really implement some of these things I've been wanting to do. I've been wanting to start cooking more. I've been wanting to start get rid of the sugar. Because we know it makes a huge difference. When you look at the immune system, we know malnutrition is one of the leading causes of immune deficiency and death because of immune illnesses and infections worldwide. We know issues with zinc, vitamin A, iron, vitamin C, you know, that is such important nutrients for the immune system. And people think, oh, well, yeah, that's a problem in developing countries. And here in the US, we are fine. But we know that's really not the case. And unfortunately, I think we've gotten a little lazy with our nutrition and we've become so reliant on processed and refined foods, we're seeing more and more people, like you mentioned, that are getting deficient in a lot of nutrients. We know 40% or more of Americans are not getting the recommended dietary intake, which is just a minimal amount of zinc and vitamin A and vitamin C. And those are critical nutrients for the immune system to work properly. We know those nutrients help the innate immune system, right? That part of the immune system that is really important for fighting off new and new viruses that your body sees. So I think that's really, really important that we recognize that a lot of us are not getting enough even in this country. And as you mentioned, obesity malnutrition is a real thing. In our head, we think malnutrition and we think of somebody who's really underweight, but we know that there can be a lot of malnutrition in people who are overweight as well. So the first thing we recommend, and you even mentioned this, Mark, right, was getting off of the sugar and refined and processed foods.

Right?

Getting off of those things that are going to spike your blood sugar because we know that the immune system doesn't work as well when the blood sugar is high. You know, I think back to when I was working in the ICU and when you're working, you know, you're working in the ICU and you've got somebody on TPN and one of the main.

Things that we're-- Liz, what's TPN?

Ah, thank you. It's total parental nutrition. So it's IV nutrition. So if somebody is on a ventilator and they can't eat, you know, they're going to be getting nutrition through their IV. And what we're taught is, you know, one of the most important things for helping your patient in that setting is to keep their blood sugar balanced to make sure it doesn't go up too high. So because the immune system doesn't work as well, so patients aren't going to survive as well. They're not going to get better as well if their blood sugar is too high. So that's important for us as well, right? So one of the things I work with all my patients with is saying, okay, let's not let that blood sugar spike. because we know that your immune system won't work as well when your blood sugar is spiking. So the foods that cause that blood sugar to spike, right, are the refined and processed carbohydrates, the foods with added sugar in it, the processed foods. So this is a time to not go and grab that muffin or bagel or cookie, even though you might want to, or that soda or coffee drink, because all those added sugars are not doing your immune system any bit of good. So you want to be focusing on avoiding those refined and processed foods and making sure that at every meal you've got some good protein source. We know protein is really important for the functioning of the immune system. Protein is critical in that situation and a lot of high protein foods are also naturally rich in zinc. And we've heard so much about how zinc is really important for all those functionings of the immune system to work really well. So, you know, we always hear about oysters, right? Oysters are one of the most nutrient dense sources of zinc that we have. So per calorie, it's got one of the highest amounts of zinc, but lots of foods are rich in zinc. So a lot of our seafood, all of our animal protein, nuts and seeds, beans and legumes are all good sources of zinc. And you want to have some good sources of protein with zinc at every meal of the day. You want to, of course, be focusing on those vitamin C rich foods. Those are all of the citrus, right, but also the green leafy vegetables like spinach. And we know broccoli is rich in vitamin C. And we know that kiwi is really rich in vitamin C. So all of your plant foods. We know that plant foods are also contain a lot of really magical components in them. Those are those phytonutrients. Those are the components in your plant foods that actually help the plant survive in nature. But we're learning that these phytonutrients also to help our body. And they have a lot of antibacterial, antiviral properties in them as well. So reaching for, you know, getting those eight to 10 servings of plant foods, which are your vegetables, fruits, spices, and herbs, every day. Teas, coffees, really those have a lot of really good benefits for us. So really try to get a much, a lot of different fruits, vegetables, plant foods in your diet.

I want to also, before we go on to the next topic, I want you to talk about the need to supercharge your microbiome during this time and the role the microbiome has in our health and especially what prebiotic and probiotic foods we should be eating so that we actually make the most of our home to fix our gut and bolster our immune system.

Yeah, you know, that's a great question, Mark. You know, we know that our microbiome, right? Those are all the good bugs that line our skin, our nasal passageway, our our digestive system, that that microbiome is a really important part of our immune system. So we know that when we have the right amount of good bacteria, that they actually fight off viruses and other bacteria, preventing them from getting into our body. We've all seen this as physicians, somebody goes on an antibiotic, which kills off some of, you know, kills off the infection that they were getting the antibiotic for, but it also can kill off some of the good bacteria. And then we'll often see this another infection right afterwards. Then they'll get that viral infection or the flu afterwards. One of the reasons that happens is because the antibiotic gets rid of some of that good bacteria and it opens up our immune system to getting sick again. So So the good bacteria is really critical to keep healthy, right? We want to have a lot of good bacteria in our nasal passageways and in our skin. It's a really important part of the immune system. A lot of very interesting research here looking at probiotics and risk for all sorts of different infections, you know, sepsis in newborns, colds and flus, ear infections, very interesting research. So what can you do to protect your microbiome? I think, you know, avoiding antibiotics if you don't need them, of course, and then from a food perspective, we know fiber feeds the good bacteria. Fiber is food for those probiotics in the body. So really high fiber foods, ground flaxseed, your nuts and seeds, chia seeds, whole grains, those things feed that good bacteria. All your vegetables.

And there's specific foods, right? Things like dandelion greens and garlic and onion and asparagus and artichokes. hiccup, seaweed, and like you said, flax seeds. These are things we can start cooking with and include this in our diet. So it's actually a fun chance to start cooking, exploring new ingredients, and thinking about how when you're cooking, you're actually feeding yourself medicine that's going to bolster your health and your immune system.

Yep, absolutely. Absolutely.

And on the probiotic foods, what are the common probiotic foods?

Those are just like your fermented foods. You've got kimchi and sauerkraut and.

Miso and miso.

I was trying to get that one out. You know, lots of great pickles. Pickles, yeah. That can really help increase yogurts, you know, that can help increase the good bacteria in the body.

The best thing we can do for our bodies is to fix our metabolic health as fast as possible. A quick reset to help you get off sugar and starch painlessly, cut cravings and fix your metabolism quickly is a great way to jumpstart your health. Dr. Hyman designed his 10-day reset for this purpose. You can learn more by going to getpharmacy.com or get the free guide at.