The Easy Steps To OPTIMIZE HEALTH & End Inflammation! | Dr. Roger Seheult
Dr. Roger Seheult explains how lifestyle choices like sleep, sunlight, and stress reduction strengthen innate immunity against COVID-19. Heat exposure like saunas can boost interferon production tenfold at 39°C. During the 1918 flu, sanitariums using hot packs and fresh air had far lower pneumonia rates than army camps that suppressed fever with aspirin.
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Inflammation by itself is actually not that bad. It's useful when you need it. Exactly. The problem is when the inflammation goes out of control. I mean, when nature says that up to half of the people in this country are dying from inflammation, that might actually be a short sale. It may actually be larger than that. Inflammation is a How much does fear.
Play into contracting a virus or getting sick? So fear? Fear, anxiety, stress.
Fear, anxiety, stress.
Absolutely.
How much does that affect, I guess.
Maybe getting inflammation, which would then cause you to get sick? It's more likely.
It's huge. Really? Okay, so let me tell you about a study that they did. This was a study at a McMaster University. Heather Heiss did this. She's in charge of the FIT Lab at McMaster. And on her campus, six weeks before final exams, you can remember final exams, very stressful, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So six weeks before, she had three groups of people that she randomized. One group did nothing. They just went through the six weeks and they measured them at the end. The other group did moderate intensity exercise training. Moderate intensity. They had their heart rates up into the 140s, let's say, three times a week, 20 minutes a day. Third group had their heart rates up into the 170s for 20 minutes a day. She wanted to know how does this mitigate how we go to the end of the term? Your question was about fear and anxiety. This is the time of the year where students have a lot of fear and anxiety because their careers depend on how they perform here at the end on these exams. One of the striking things that they found in the control group, this is a group that did no exercise, was that compared to their baseline six weeks before the end of the term, when they got to the end of the term, their depression scale was significantly higher and they used a validated Beck Inventory Depression Scale. It was significantly elevated.
Because they did zero working out.
They didn't do any working out. They were the control group. They lived their life.
Yeah, they just lived their life, studied.
Really hard, and took their exams. They had more depression. More depression. And higher levels of anxiety, both on a scale that was measured objectively and.
Also self-reported stress, both.
So very high.
They said they were stressed and the.
Markers showed they were stressed. Correct. Then she went ahead and she measured the amount of Interleukin-6. What is Interleukin-6? Interleukin-6 is a surrogate marker for inflammation in the body. And tumor necrosis factor-alpha, those were increased as well. Now, in the moderate to severe, I think you'll find this interesting if you're interested in exercise. Who did better? Who did better, the moderate exercise or the high intensity exercise? In terms of stress, depression, perceived stress, and inflammatory markers. Oh man.
So one group did three times a week.
Three times a week.
Moderate.
Moderate.
The other one did three times a week intense.
Correct.
Gosh, I feel like this is a trick question. Part of me wants to say the intense was better off, but for some reason I feel like you're gonna say.
The moderate was better off. You're smart. This is something that they describe in the literature as the J curve. Here's the point for everybody listening, is that you don't have to be an athlete to get the benefit of exercise.
You don't have to go super hard every day.
Just enough to get your heart rate up actually did better than pushing it. Because the people that pushed it, so first of all, let's back up here. Remember I said that the control people had higher higher levels of depression, higher levels of depression. Not only was moderate intensity exercise able to eliminate that increase, it actually went down.
Wow.
It actually felt happier.
They felt happier.
Now that happened in both. The depression went down in both the moderate and in the intense groups. So they both did well.
Gotcha.
But when they asked them about stress and perceived stress, the moderate did much better than the active.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Then when they measured interleukin-6, same situation, the moderate intensity exercise training went down. So what does this all tell us? There is a relationship between the body, the mind, and that is connected through the immune system. It's connected through the hormone system. It's connected through exercise, all of those sorts of things. Things that we learn about in textbooks that are in different chapters actually underneath the surface are connected.
Mm.
You talk about stress and fear. Here's another study that they did. So people in Japan, they took these CEOs, high stress people that are the tops of their companies, and they took them out into the forest, okay?
Into the forest.
And this was a-- Forest bathing. For this forest bathing. This was hanoki tree, hanoki oil, sorry, hanoki cypress trees. And they basically spent To make a long story short, they spent about two nights there. And they measured everything. They measured the white blood cells, they measured the amount of granules in the white blood cells. And to make a long story short, at the end of the three days when they measured everything and also the phytocides in the air that were coming off these trees, their innate immune system was much better at the end. And it lasted for at least seven days. So a walk in the park every weekend, in other words, could do one, it's another one of those Swiss cheese slices that goes in there.
Nature.
Now, when they did the same experiment, okay, but they put them, they checked them into a hotel in Tokyo, not going up to the big mountain. They checked them into the hotel in Tokyo, and instead of having them walk around for three days in a forest, they infused this hinoki oil into the room. Huh. Okay.
What happened?
Same effect.
Really?
The oil.
The oil.
So what is this oil? I gotta get this.
Hanoki Cypress oil.
Do you use this or no?
You know what? Here's the good news. It's not just with Hanoki Cypress. This happens with just about all of the oils that comes from these trees. Eucalyptus, another one that they studied. Eucalyptus oil has, it's been shown to improve the innate immune system. where they actually in vitro dropped eucalyptus oil on these cells and they basically turned into these cells that were activated and ready to do what they needed to do. By the way, in the pandemic in 1912, Australia's eucalyptus trees were almost completely cut down because of the essence of that eucalyptus oil. Have you ever had Vicks? Yes. You know what the major ingredient is in Vicks? Eucalyptus oil. So if you ever smell eucalyptus oil, you say, oh, this is Vicks. that's what it is. That's why they use it. So now I told you though that the people in the Japanese forest and those people in the hotel room, they both had the same effect. I didn't completely finish because there was one difference. And the difference was, is they measured urine cortisol levels. So cortisol is a stress hormone that goes up when you have fear, anxiety, and stress. So where do you think the urine cortisol levels were the highest? In the people in the hotel room or in the people up in the forest actually naturally getting their Hinoki oil from the trees themselves? People in the hotel room. Unless there was like, they were afraid.
Of like a bear or something. It's like, I don't know, like, it's like hearing sounds every night in the woods and maybe you'd be more afraid, but yeah.
No, you're absolutely right. So here's the difference is that you're not getting the full benefit when you're out in nature. And there was a study that showed that the more green, that you're exposed to. Just the green coming in.
Looking at it.
Looking at scenes of greenery and nature. It has a calming effect on the body. The cortisol levels plummet. And cortisol is a major problem in terms of your immune system. It's been shown over, over and over again that cortisol inhibits your immune system. And so to get those levels down, it's really important. So yeah, they got half the benefit in the hotel room. they got the Hinoki oil, but they didn't get the full benefit because those cortisol levels were still elevated. So here's the point is try to figure out as many slices of Swiss cheese that you can find and try to line those up. So I approach this in a very different way than a lot of people might think that I would. A lot of people try to find things that work so they don't have to do other things. I try to find as many things and just try to line them up.
Do them all.
Do them all. And what you'll find is that the slices that work to cut down on coronavirus are the same slices that work for just about every other disease.
And just living longer, healthier, happier.
Exactly.
If you could only do five things yourself, five natural, you know, organic activities, whether that's sleep a certain amount of hours, have oil in your bed, you know, whatever these things are. Non-medical related things.
Non-medical related things.
What would be the five things that you would do on a daily basis?
That's a great question.
To prevent disease, to prevent inflammation, to prevent COVID, and optimize your body.
Okay, number one is sleep on the list. And I'll tell you why that is. We talk about antibody levels and vaccines and these sorts of things. And we get all hung up about how much antibody levels are there. Here's a study that was done. The night before or somebody was vaccinated with the flu vaccine. This was a study out of Pittsburgh. If they had greater than eight hours of sleep, their antibody response was twice that than if they didn't get enough eight hours of sleep. Twice. So sleep is really important. I'll tell you another reason why sleep is important. I'll take a little detour as to why. When you look at how you sleep. You go to bed, let's just say you go to bed at 11 o'clock at night, 10 or 11 o'clock, and you get up about 6 or 7 in the morning. Those hours of sleep are not equal. There are different stages of sleep. There's deep sleep, which usually occurs at the beginning of the night, and then there's REM sleep, which occurs at the end of the night. Deep sleep is extremely important for physical, mental, restorative sleep. It's also tied to growth hormone. So when we talk about growth hormone, you know what I'm talking about. This used to be known as the the holy grail of the fountain of youth.
Exactly.
Delta wave or slow wave sleep is directly tied to secretion of growth hormone from the pituitary gland.
Okay.
Once you pass a few hours of sleep, you've lost that ability that night to get that growth hormone secretion. So in other words, let's put it this way. The hours of sleep before midnight are worth twice than the hours of sleep after midnight.
Wow.
Okay. Yeah, okay. Go to sleep before midnight. And by the way, it's also redundant there because guess when your melatonin starts to come on, right before, right as you're going to sleep. Wow. Okay. And we didn't talk about this, but melatonin is a very, very powerful antioxidant. Even to the point where we were actually giving melatonin to patients in the intensive care unit who were on COVID, who had COVID. Wow. Yeah, okay.
Sleep.
So if there was one thing that I would say is try to get at least seven hours of sleep and try to make sure that those hours of sleep are before midnight. I mean, not all of them after midnight, that'd be hard to do. But get two hours of sleep, maybe go to bed at 10 o'clock and try to get as much of that as possible. It's not to say that at the stroke of midnight you're not gonna get any more, but it starts to decrease after that. Okay, wow, interesting. Okay, that's number one. Okay, that's number one. Number two, We talked about diet. Okay, so for reasons that we've already enumerated, whether it's sialic acid, whether it's inflammation, start to look at diet and to look at that. Now, I would say this, here is the temptation. The temptation is to look at your diet and say, I don't want to do that anymore, and then look at the new diet and say, I'm going to switch to that. Don't do that. It's hard.
It's hard to make a huge switch.
It is.
It is.
Because the problem is it's not sustainable. It's not sustainable. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna throw the baby out with the bath water. So what I would do is look at your diet and find the worst thing about your diet and say, that's what I'm gonna work on eliminating and do it for a month. Then figure out the next thing and.
Do that for a month.
That's smart. What you will find, and I've done this because I used to eat meat, I used to do these things and I started to, it wasn't an overnight change. It was something that gradually changed. So I went to University of California, Riverside and I was a chemistry major and there was a Carl's Jr. in the cafeteria. And that's, I mean it was so easy, just go in there and get the burger, right?
Yeah, of course.
Exactly. Nothing against Carl's Jr. They're good burgers. And they tasted good. But then after a while I started to go away from it. Well, it wasn't an absolute for me. So when I went back to it two or three months later, to try it out because I was in a situation where I was there on campus, I didn't have any food, I'll just go get a burger or whatever. It didn't taste the same. You would be very surprised at how your brain and your tongue, it's actually a two-way communication. It goes back and forth, taste. Things that if you stop eating something for three months and then go back to it, it will taste different. And the point is that the satisfaction that you're getting from it now, you won't get from it later when you stop eating it. It'll be different. You'll get satisfaction from different things. your tastes actually change. We don't think about it, but it actually happens. So I know that this whole issue about diet is very, very personal.
Yes.
People have very personal habits. It's not only just personal habits about what they eat, it's also ingrained in their family. For a lot of people, they're not the ones making the food. It's somebody else making the food. It's very complicated. But what I would say is that despite all of those barriers, that I believe a lot can be gained by looking at some of these things and trying to make some changes.
Nutrition, okay. Number three.
Should I group it together or not? Sunshine and fresh air, they come together. Yeah, they sort of getting outside.
Nature.
Nature. So we had on our MedCram channel a guy by the name of Dr. Joseph Allen. out of the Harvard Medical School and talking about ventilation and sick buildings and the things that, and the air turnover. And he talks extensively, very good, very educational for me to listen to him, about how built, when buildings were designed, buildings were designed so that they were energy efficient. So a lot of the data that came out and a lot of the stuff that has, has kind of influenced how we build buildings came out of the 70s. And what do we have in the 70s? We had the energy crisis. How can we make buildings so that they are extremely efficient? And so antithetical to efficiency is high turnover of air because you've got to heat and cool that air. So it's a real problem.
So that's when we started to see.
In the literature, Dr. Allen says, is when we started to see this whole thing about sick buildings.
People who work in sick buildings.
Who get sick. Correct. In these buildings. The buildings aren't sick yet. The people in our buildings, right. So, and why is that?
He says, you,'ll notice this.
And when he brought it up, I started to think about this. You'll be in a room, it's kind of stagnant, not a lot of air flow, and you have a hard time. And as soon as somebody opens the.
Door, it's kind of like, ah.
You know, it's interesting, right? And so this idea of air flow, he's like cracking some windows open. It could be as simple as just cracking a window open. He showed us in his video about how you can buy a meter that can actually measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. and it's a surrogate for measuring how much ventilation is going on. So that's really, really important, is getting outside. What else is about getting outside? Vitamin D. Yes. There's ultraviolet radiation. There's a study that came out that showed, and this is really fascinating, is that there was a connection between how much light somebody got and their COVID-19. It was either infection or mortality. I can't remember what it was. Yeah. And so the thought was that this was vitamin D mediated. But it wasn't. They controlled for vitamin D. There was another effect above and beyond vitamin D that people were getting from being outside in the sun.
What's that?
We don't know.
Happiness.
Could be.
Joy.
Yeah, well, peace of mind. Right?
Less stress.
Exactly. Well, we know that there's something called SAD. It's aptly named seasonal affective disorder. This is where people become very depressed in the winter months. Why? There's not a lot of sunlight. Mm-. And again, it's this idea of the mind, the body, and the spirit being connected. And so that leads us to the last one. I don't know, am I on number three or four?
Number four.
Oh, you're gonna push it out of me here. Okay. Yes. I've got one more that I can definitely think of. I don't know if I can come up with five. It's the spiritual aspect. And this kind of comes from my, it's informed from my upbringing. You mentioned that I lived at Loma Linda, which is a blue zone. what's a blue zone? It's where people live longer. And so this has been, this kind of the secret sauce, I think. So Dan Buettner, who worked with National Geographic, came up with these blue zones. He went to Sardinia, he went to Okinawa, and he went to these places. Why? Because these people live, like they've got people in their hundreds, which is very, very unusual. The one thing that Loma Linda, and Loma Linda was the other place. The one thing that Loma Linda was different in is that the people in Loma Linda were not of the same genetic genetics.
All different genetics. All different genetics.
So, Okinawa.
Immigrants and this, yeah.
Exactly, and in Southern California of all places, like where the air, like I remember people telling me when they got to Loma Linda in July to start school, they didn't even know there were mountains until December. Right, right. Okay, I mean, because it was just this haze of fog, of smog. So, the one thing that was really unique to Loma Linda as a blue zone that the others did not have, is that it wasn't a genetically homogeneous population. There was Caucasian folks, African-American folks, Hispanic folks, and they all sort of... Interesting. And the short of it is basically, yes, there is community. Yes, they do follow a diet, but there's other populations that do that too. And so the question, what was the real special sauce? Here's the real special sauce, I think. that's that last one out of the group. And that is having a connection and resting.
Resting.
Resting. So, you know, we have, we sleep. We talked about how important sleep is. We talked about how important sleep is. Sleep is something that we do every day to recharge ourself. But is that all that's needed? And I would submit to you that the answer is no, there's something else. When you go through a week, you know, we have a work week of five days and most people rest for two days or they have a break. But the question is, do we ever stop what we're doing and relax and relax and sort of remit ourselves to a higher power? Okay, so there's a lot of literature on faith and the faith literature in terms of believing in a higher power and taking those things that give us stress and giving it over to something else.
Right.
Not carrying the weight.
Exactly.
The spiritual or emotional weight.
Exactly.
Interesting.
Now that can cut both ways because some people can get into faith-based things where it can cause more stress. So you've got to make sure that that is not the case. But in being in a situation like that, where you can truly kind of get off the roller coaster, you know, as the rat wheel is spinning, have a chance to get off, recharge, think about other things, spend time with your family, spend time, you know, with your God, whatever it is. These are things that I believe that benefit us. There is some evidence to believe that inside of our bodies, and I'm not prepared to talk about some of the research, but I know there is research that says that not only is there a circadian rhythm, circadian means is Latin for about a day, but there's also a seven day cycle. And it kind of goes back to this thing with these guys walking in the forest. That effect of them walking in the forest lasted about seven days.
After the fact. So connecting to nature, connecting to something greater, letting go.
Correct.
Lasted for seven days.
Yeah, and let's look at the French Revolution. In the French Revolution, they wanted to get rid of everything that they had known. And they had a seven day week. And they said, We are not having a seven day week. We're going to go to a ten day week. It didn't last. They couldn't do it.
It didn't make sense.
It did not. So they went back to the seven day week. We are programmed as individuals to have a seven day week. If you think about it, we know.
Why we have a year.
We have a year. because it takes a year for the Earth to go around the Sun. We have a month. Why do we have a month? Because it takes a month for the Moon to go around the Earth. We have a day. Why do we have a day? Because it takes one day for the Earth to spin around on its axis. We don't have anything for a week. We have no astronomical sign that gives us a week. And yet, every single culture in the world is on a seven-day week.
Why is that? There you go, something higher.
Think about that.
Interesting, yeah.
Every single culture in the world operates on a seven day week. And there's nothing that guides that. If you were to ask me why that is, it's because I believe the Judeo-Biblical historical record on why there's a seven day week, it was instituted from the very beginning. But I think it's interesting evidence. And if that is fact the case, then maybe the instruction manual should be followed.
Right, interesting.
Or maybe let's put it this way, there's benefits to be derived if the instruction manual is followed. Right, right.
Speaking of the spiritual aspect, someone who's been practicing for over 20 years now, can you think of one or two instances in your practice where people have healed themselves that they shouldn't have been able to? Medically, you're like, this doesn't make any sense.
As soon as you said that, I know exactly who I'm going to talk about.
Go ahead.
So, there's a condition in medicine where if not enough blood is getting to the brain, because the brain needs oxygen continuously, after about four minutes, there's irreversible brain damage.
You might still survive, correct. But you could have, you know, you just want to be able to function.
Correct.
Memory loss, speech loss, motor function, all that stuff.
Exactly. So, there was a young gentleman this.
Was when I was in training.
This must have been in the early 2000s and he had testicular cancer, unfortunately. But at that age, testicular cancer is pretty curable in most cases with chemotherapy and surgery and that nature. So he went to surgery and there was a problem in surgery. The patient didn't do well. The blood pressure went, he may have coded, I can't remember exactly what it was, but he came back up to the floor up to the intensive care unit, which is where I was training in the intensive care unit. And when we picked him up, he was, you know, we lifted the sedation and he was just not there.
He was dead, he was.
He was alive. But he was not responding to our commands.
Wow.
He was not acting appropriately. And we could see that there was twitching, maybe even seizures going on. And this was a young Hispanic gentleman who had just been married.
In his 20s.
In his 20s, yeah. And so he was there for the better part of the month. By the time I got on service.
In that process.
In that process, correct.
Not responding.
Just there. Yep.
Just on like a ventilator.
Yeah, it was on a ventilator.
It was pretty much going brain dead, correct.
But he wasn't brain dead. He was still alive technically, but he was just not there.
He didn't move, correct. Was he in a coma?
Essentially, yeah. We would today, at the time we called it persistent vegetative state. Wow.
Yeah.
Where there's pretty much no coming out of that.
Generally speaking, no. And that's exactly what we told the family. And we even had a neurologist come in. And the neurologist did some special things with MRI. They were able to look at choline levels in the brain and all that. all this sort of stuff that was hopeful in predicting whether or not these people would get better or not. Now, the one thing that he had going for him was that he was young. Generally speaking, people over his age, they really wouldn't have a chance of coming back. So, yeah, I mean, we would meet in rounds and we'd like, what are we gonna tell his wife? His wife is, she's like, she's there every day. She would come in and she would say, can I put, I made We would feed the patients with tube feeding. So there was a tube that went down and it would be like a milkshake basically that would go down. She would blend the stuff up and she would ask, can I put this in? Oh my gosh. And she would bring some energy drinks or not energy drinks but healthy things. Healthy things, yeah. To put it down there to help him. And we would just shake our heads. I was like, what do we get? I mean, she doesn't get it. Every day for a month. Yeah, for at least a month. And so one day she came in and she said to us.
She was.
Right at his bedside. And she wasn't, I wouldn't say that she was an unhappy person, but she obviously understood the situation and she would have tears and things. One day she came in and she said she looked very happy. She had a smile on her face and we're like, well, why are you so happy? What's going on? And of course he's kind of shaken like this. doing this sort of stuff. And she said, I had a dream last night. I had a dream that he got up, shut up, that he was going to get better and he was going to walk out of here. No way. That's what she said. And she was so, she was so sure, certain, certain that she, her countenance changed. That's what she looked like.
Yeah.
Her energy, she, like, younger. She, like, everything.
And we, and, and, and. And okay, so remember, I'm in training, okay? So I'm looking at the attendings. I haven't seen this kind of stuff before. It's 20 years ago. This is 20 years ago. And so I'm looking at this and.
They'Re like, oh man, she just doesn't get it, right?
Because they know there's no coming out of this. Well, and I'm looking to them because they've been doing this a lot longer than I have. I'm like my first or second year of training. Yeah, yeah. And so we said, okay, you know, I think at this point he'd been trached. So the tube normally goes down into the mouth, now it's through the throat. Yes, because he's there for long term, right? So we're working in a circle. The hospital rooms are round in a circle, and in the center is the central nursing station. And this is up on one of the high floors, and this is the intensive care, and we're rounding around. So you can kind of be in the center of the circle where you're rounding and you can kind of look through the door and see the patients in the room. And one day, you know, I just started, there was a little bit of a change in him, something different. And he would kind of shake like this, you know, doing this kind of a thing. And I could see his eyes were kind of open, but we didn't know if anyone was there. And this had been going on for some time. And we looked through, I remember one day, I remember this distinctly. I was looking through the door and I saw him there and I just saw him come through and I just I don't know what what I did why I did this, but I just kind of put my hand up like this and I kind of waved and I'm not kidding you he put his hand up and did this and put it back down and I Was flabbergasted. Wow, I'll make a long story short three months later He walks into our unit and to gives us flowers to thank the staff. Shut up. To thank the staff.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah.
Like healthier, like speak five.
He's walking on his own, speaking, talking the whole thing. Wow. With his wife. And I am so glad that that happened early in my career because it changed my thinking. Whenever I was in a similar situation, I wanted to make sure, I realized that that was either a miracle or something very, very rare. Okay, it's one of those two. I believe in miracles. And so I know that these things can happen. We don't, I missed the day in school where they told us how long someone was gonna live. Have you ever heard this? The doctor said I was gonna live 31 days. I missed that day. I have no idea.
I don't know where this comes from.
But I am now very cognizant to know that when I have a patient who's not doing well in the hospital and I'm talking to family and they want to know what are his chances, I've seen miracles happen. Wow. So, it's, I think about those. Every day I think about that gentleman.
So, with vitamin D, it changes the behavior of your cells, enhancing the behavior of your cells, making it healthier, stronger, you know, indestructible in a sense.
It depends, yeah, it depends on the cell function. So sometimes the vitamin D will inhibit transcription of proteins, sometimes it will enhance the transcription of proteins and depending on what you want or what you need that could have different effects.
Vitamin D in general, is it good for people or am I hearing you say that sometimes vitamin D may not be good in certain cases?
No, it's good to have it when you have it and in other words, Sometimes you don't want to be transcribing proteins. For instance, if you're in a cytokine storm and what is a cytokine storm that causes pneumonia and COVID-19? It's where you have too much cytokines. Cytokines are proteins and where those proteins coming from? They're coming from cells that are producing them. And so vitamin D modulates this. It's the person with the lever that's saying this is what we need at this moment.
This is not what we need at this moment.
Wow.
Okay. So what else have you been finding in the research on vitamin D on how it actually can prevent COVID?
Yeah, so vitamin D is kind of like the cry wolf, the boy that cries wolf, because for years medicine has been looking at vitamin D and saying, oh man, it's good for rickets, but it's probably good for a whole bunch of other things. And they've done studies on it, and sometimes it comes up blank, sometimes it comes up so it's kind of like, yeah, when a lot of scientists heard that vitamin D might be beneficial in COVID-19, they said, yeah, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me type of thing. So that's why there's been a lot of resistance to saying that vitamin D is, is, is working. But if you go back to a study called, called a meta analysis, this is where they take tons of studies and they pool it together so that the, the the robustness of the data is huge and they can find things better. There was a study, a landmark study that was published in the British Medical Journal just a few years ago by a scientist named Martinet who did a meta-analysis looking at vitamin D supplementation. And he found pretty significantly that vitamin D supplementation on a regular basis, taking it either daily or weekly, decreased the incidence of acute chest infections. and this has been borne out multiple times. There's an Irish study that looked at this called Tilda and they reported it recently as well. This is for acute chest infections, so generally viruses, viruses that affect the chest, so influenza, rhinovirus, probably coronavirus is in there too. All of this done before COVID-19. So we knew from a medical standpoint that vitamin D supplementation, especially in in patients, this was done in Northern Europe where vitamin D deficiency is quite plentiful. So to see that that worked there, now let's take it and apply it to COVID-19 to see if it also works in COVID-19. Of course, the studies take a long time to do and we didn't have those studies early on. So that's where things started.
And what are the studies shown you or are you doing some of these studies yourself in your labs or are you seeing research that's being done and applying the science?
No, so I'm not actually doing the research but you almost need somebody to do this type of work where you basically look across the spectrum, see the data that's coming out and put it together and make sense of it.
Yeah, so what have you seen with this?
Yeah, so okay, so you've got to remember before we get started in the research is that there are certain types of research that tell you certain things. There are large observational studies where you just kind of look and see what's going on and you'll see things that are associated with each other. It doesn't tell you that one is necessarily causing the other. You just see them showing up together. And that sort of gives you a hypothesis like maybe these are connected. For instance, if you saw that a lot of people with lung cancer also carried cigarette lighters in their pocket.
Right?
You couldn't say that the cigarette lighter is causing the cancer, but they're showing up together. So maybe there's either something else that they're both causing or caused by each other. So that's what we started seeing in the first part of 2020 is observational studies. What did we see? We saw that people who were showing up to the hospital with COVID-19 were deficient in vitamin D. That people who did worse in COVID-19 were deficient in vitamin D. We started seeing that people who are older, people who have darker skin are the people that also are deficient in vitamin D and they also have worse COVID. And so we started to see this connection, but the words that go through any graduate of medical school or any biostatistician will tell you that association does not necessarily mean causation. And so that's where we were for the most of 2020 until just the last few months was these studies over and over again. Yes, we can predict how well they're going to do based on their vitamin D levels. Yes, if they're lower, they're probably going to have a worse course. But the part that we couldn't say based on that data was if we give vitamin D, is that going to change something? Because maybe the disease is making the vitamin D go down and make them sick. And it's just like, if I take a cigarette lighter out of someone's pocket, is it going to make their lung cancer go away or prevent, right? So that's the kind of thing. So now enter randomized controlled trials. And this is what we do. We say, okay, we're going to start off, we're going to randomize people, we're going to blind ourselves to it, blind them to it. For one, we're going to give vitamin.
D, for the other we're not. And then we're going to see what happens.
Yeah.
And so how many of these trials have been going on and what are the findings from these blind tests?
So there's a lot of trials going on right now looking at this. There's one where they're actually going to look at about 5,000 people. It's being conducted in Great Britain and we don't have that data yet. The data that we do have are on a few. Let's talk about those. So there's one called the SHADE study. This was done in India on just about 100 or so people where they gave mega doses of vitamin D in people coming into the hospital with COVID-19. 60,000 units.
They give Is it injected? Is this orally?
Is this...
This is oral medication. So 60,000, I mean, generally speaking, when you buy over-the-counter tablets... Take 5,000, 500, right?
You're like...
Exactly, exactly. So this is 60,000 units daily for seven days.
That's a lot of vitamin D. It.
Is a lot of vitamin D. So for seven days, they did this. And what they found was that the inflammatory markers in those patients were lower. and they found that as opposed to only 20% of the patients clearing the virus after three weeks, 60% of the patients cleared the virus in three weeks. So it wasn't powered to look at survival and these sorts of things. They didn't notice any difference there in terms of that, but that was a study that was done. There was another study that was done in Brazil where they gave 250,000 units times one. They just gave them a whopping, I mean, it was like, you,'re drinking vitamin.
D in supplement form.
Exactly.
It was incredible. They didn't see any difference there, although they did measure that vitamin D levels went up inside, so it worked. They did not notice any improvement. The problem there, though, of course, is there was some problem with the randomization in that study where the intervention group the vitamin D group actually had sicker patients, more diabetes. And so it wasn't clear whether or not that was just a bad randomization or whether there was no effect. The one that has the most promise, and this is the thing you gotta understand about vitamin D, is vitamin D. So let's back up a little bit and talk about vitamin D. So people say, well, should I take vitamin D3, D2? What is vitamin D? So this is how it works. you have cholesterol in your body and it's hanging around. And when ultraviolet B radiation comes from the sun, it comes through the epidermis, which is the top layer of your skin, and then it penetrates down into the dermis and it comes with just enough energy to do a conformational change on one of the carbon bonds, which flips it to be kind of nerdy here. but it actually converts the ultraviolet radiation converts the cholesterol structure into vitamin D.
When you get sunlight, is there a certain amount of sunlight on a daily basis we should be consuming on the skin?
So you typically want to—and there's people that have gone into the details of this and I can never remember—but you need about 15, 20, 30 minutes of sunlight a day. And since we're on the topic, there's different types of ultraviolet light. UVA, UVB, and UVC. So let's dispense with UVC because it doesn't have much to do with the conversation, although there is some data that UVC can kill coronavirus, but that's another topic. UVA can penetrate pretty far. And unfortunately, UVA has no role in the production of vitamin D. What is UVA? It's not useful. UVA is ultraviolet radiation that causes skin aging. It can cause cancers on your skin. melanoma, so it's not something that you really want to have and it can and sometimes it can actually even penetrate through glass. Unfortunately, UVB does not penetrate glass, so sitting in front of a window with the sun coming in is not going to help you in terms of vitamin D. You actually have to be exposed.
With no blockage, nothing in between.
Absolutely, yeah.
So that's UVA.
So UVA will not penetrate glass, sorry, will penetrate glass, UVB will not penetrate glass. and it's the UVB that we need. So how do you get UVB?
That's just sitting out in the sun.
You gotta go in the sun.
And what about people who say, you know what? I don't want to look older with my skin. I don't want to get skin disease or cancer. So I want to lather up with all this sunscreen to protect my skin. Should we use sunscreen or is it more be in the sun for 15 minutes, then put sunscreen on?
Yeah, so that's exactly right. B is not going to penetrate sunscreen very well either. So it's really, it boils down to this risk benefit. So you've got to look at the risk.
Do I want to look good and not have wrinkles or do I want to be healthy?
So there are some solutions to this. So fish oil is rich in vitamin D. There are certain mushrooms that are rich in vitamin D. And of course, look, we live in 2021. We've got supplementation. So you can take that and not get the the risk there. So that's, that's a good benefit.
So is supplementation, if I'm taking a vitamin D vitamins, 500 to 5, 000, whatever vitamins, is that as powerful as 15 minutes of sunlight or is it not as going to be as beneficial?
Yeah, it depends. It depends on too many things. It depends on your skin color. So unfortunately, what you have, if you're interested in getting a lot of vitamin D, the darker your skin, that's melanin that's blocking that ultraviolet radiation. And so you've got to stay out in the sun longer to get the.
Same amount of vitamin D. It's natural sunblock.
That's correct.
So you need to stay out longer than if you're more fair skinned or lighter skinned, then you'd only need 10-15 minutes.
That's correct. And that is the reason why it was sold. It was thought that why are we seeing so many people of skin color coming into the hospital with COVID-19 particularly. Those are the ones with the lower vitamin D levels historically.
Is this what you're seeing in your hospital in California?
Absolutely, absolutely.
Really, wow.
So to go back, yeah, so you go through, you get vitamin D, but you're still not done yet because now the liver has to convert that into something called 25-hydroxy vitamin D. The liver takes a little hydroxyl group puts it onto the carbon, and now it's ready to be used. This is the form, by the way, that we measure when you go to the doctor and you get a blood test. We're going to measure the 25 hydroxy vitamin D. So, all of these studies that we've talked about, we're measuring 25 hydroxy vitamin D levels. But, the studies that we were describing, for instance, the SHADE study and the Brazilian study, these are given vitamin D. So, they still have to go through the liver, they still have to get hydroxylated, and that can take several days. So in this last study that was done in Cordoba, Spain, they jumped right ahead and they supplemented these patients. They gave them pretty high doses of the 25 hydroxy vitamin D to start off with. And the results in that pilot study were pretty astounding. In the intervention group, they went from 50% of patients needing intensive care unit to just 2%, and that's a massive reduction. in terms of the need for intensive care.
Okay, so what did they do? When they came into the hospital, they gave them this dosage right away.
They gave them a high dose of this medication called 25-hydroxyvitamin D, otherwise known as calcifediol. That's the medical name for 25-hydroxyvitamin D. They gave it to them on day one, day three, and on day seven.
And it reduced to 2% eliminating it.
Or what?
It went from 50% of the patients in the placebo group needing ICU to 2% of the patients in the intervention group, in the calcifediol group needing intensive care. That's a dramatic reduction.
So intensive care, meaning being on a ventilator, being taken care of the whole time. And the others, only 2% being in there. And then what? Their symptoms went away eventually after.
Yeah, nobody died in the intervention group. 7.7% of those in the placebo group died. So, there was also some issues with randomization there, except in the opposite direction, that there seemed to be sicker people in the placebo group, so the randomization wasn't perfect. But they're planning on doing a much bigger study, so we'll get some data probably here in the next few months.
So this is a drug or this is a supplement?
This is a drug. So you required a prescription for this, and it's not cheap. It's actually currently used by kidney doctors to treat problems with the parathyroid gland, which is responsible for calcium in patients with kidney disease. So it's not readily available, but it is available if you need to use it in the hospital. And we've been doing it recently, just started recently. And so I don't have a lot of data on our patients that we're seeing, but obviously some people are getting better, some people or not.
What are you recommending to people in terms of a daily prescription for natural remedies? Is it go out into the sun at 8:00 a.m. for 15 minutes? Does it take vitamin D supplements? Does it eat mushrooms? What are you suggesting to your patients?
So, for people who have not contacted COVID-19, we actually did a video on this on MedCram. It was update 59. We recently just did the top 10 tips for, for, you know, if you actually have positive COVID. And so what I'm recommending is based on a lot of it's based on data in other viruses, some of it's based on data in COVID-19, but we can just go down the list. Number one, vitamin D. So let's talk about vitamin D. How much should you be taking the, you know, there's been some studies that show that if people who are at risk for vitamin D deficiency, so people who are darker color, living at higher latitudes, specifically above the 35th parallel, which is around the southern border of Tennessee. If you're in California, it's kind of just south of Santa Barbara, that area. Then taking vitamin D supplementation is a good idea. So how much is too much? We actually probably overestimate the toxicity of vitamin D. It's probably one of the safest fat-soluble vitamins. That being said, it's not completely risk-free. But the Society, Endocrinology Society, says this. They say that what is the maximum dose that you can take without supervision from a physician and for someone who is at risk for vitamin D deficiency? The answer is 4,000 international units daily.
4,000 daily.
Yeah.
Okay.
And so what would I do if someone asked me, I take 5,000 international units daily just because I have my levels checked. I think the right answer is if you can get your levels checked.
Got it.
And where would you want to be? It's measured in nanograms per milliliter. I would say based on the data that we've seen, the retrospective data in the United States, we see that there is an increase in SARS-CoV-2 positivity once you start going below 50 nanograms per milliliter. So if you're not above 50, you might want to bump it up at least over the winter season. And wouldn't you know it, that what are we seeing? We're seeing a rebound in SARS-CoV-2 in the winter season. So this is not rocket science. It's because we're not getting enough sunlight. The days are short, people don't have enough vitamin D. And so this is what the theory is. So that's vitamin D. Number three? So the other thing that I would talk about is NAC, that's one of the things that we've been talking about. NAC is N-acetyl cysteine. There's some pretty good data that shows that SARS-CoV-2, when it infects your cell, it knocks out the receptor called the ACE2 receptor. This ACE2 receptor is very important in regulating oxidative stress in your body. We could talk for an hour about oxidative stress and hydroxy radicals and things that are very high in people who get COVID-19. So diabetes, obesity, oxidative stress is very high. So you get this viral hit and it tips you over the edge. So one of the things that may be beneficial is consuming products that are antioxidants. So berries, strawberries, raspberries, elderberries, blackberries, all of those are excellent things to do. But if you want to increase even more than taking 600 milligrams of NAC twice daily was shown in a previous study to reduce the symptoms of the flu virus in a winter season when it was done prospectively. So, in other words, they randomized people to placebo versus 600 milligrams of NAC twice daily. And they did not see a difference in the incidence of the flu in those people. But They did notice a significant reduction in the severity of the illness that the people suffered when they were on NAC.
So instead of being on your couch for a week, you're able to walk around and just feel less like this.
Exactly. Exactly.
Is NAC over the counter?
Yes.
And how do you spell that?
N, so that's N and then a dash, acetyl-A-C, and you're asking somebody here to spell this. But if you actually, it's actually marketed under NAC. If you just go and type in N-A-C, You'll have NAC.
NAC, got it.
Okay, cool.
N-acetyl cysteine.
Take twice daily. Twice daily, 600 milligrams. I wouldn't do it forever, but maybe over a winter season for three or.
Four months while we're in the pandemic.
That's probably a wise choice.
What else do you recommend?
I think zinc is really important, too. I would not take more than 40 milligrams of elemental zinc a day because as you increase your zinc, zinc intake, you can reduce your copper in your body. And that's not a good thing. You want to have enough copper. So zinc and copper are kind of like on a seesaw. But if you want to maximize your zinc intake, 40 milligrams of elemental zinc. I say that because when you pick up a zinc supplement, it could be zinc picolinate, it could be zinc sulfate. All of those have a different molecular weight. And so the milligram is just going to be different. But if the bottle is worth anything, to put the pills in, it'll tell you how much elemental zinc is in there. 40 milligrams is the maximum daily dose.
Okay. And, you're doing all these steps yourself, too, right?
Oh, yeah. I'm smart because I basically tell my wife what to do and every morning the pills are there, I don't even have to worry about remembering it because if I did, I would not do it.
Yeah, you've got to plan and put it out in front of time and make sure you have it all set up to win. Okay, what's next?
So, this is where it gets a little bit less in terms of evidence. So, there is some evidence that zinc can help stop viral replication. The protein that the virus uses inside your cells to make more of those viruses is called replicase. And, there is some evidence in vitro data, albeit, that zinc shuts that down. The problem is that when you take zinc, you need to get that zinc inside the cell. And one of the things that has been looked at and has had some promise in Ebola, for instance, and was being studied in this virus is quercetin. Quercetin is a natural product. It's over the counter. It's high in concentration in capers, in onions, in vegetables, roots basically. And so I don't see a lot of downside with taking quercetin. And so I do that as well.
Okay, you'll add that in your daily practice.
Yes. And then the last thing, I left the last thing for the end. And that's something that you're probably like, what are you doing with this? And it's a long story that we can break into. But contrast showers.
Oh, yes. You're speaking my language.
Yeah.
You're speaking my, so hot and cold or cold only.
I do hot for five minutes. And then I do cold for one minute and then I do five for hot again and then one for cold and then finish it up with three for hot and one for cold. And the one that clued me onto that formula was a Dr. Neil Nedley who is out of Weimar, California who's actually done a lot of research and it actually has a clinic up there called NuStart that's doing this sort of stuff and with amazing results.
According to a report in the Journal of Nature Medicine that inflammation is the root cause of disease and it contributes to 50% of deaths in the US. I'm curious, why do so many people suffer from inflammation and how is it contributing to so much loss that's happening right now?
That's a great question, Louis. Right now we're talking about coronavirus and COVID-19 and that's a whole section by itself. Yes. But as you may know, people get into the hospital because they can't breathe. And the reason why they can't breathe is because their lungs aren't able to get oxygen into them. So if you were to actually take someone's lungs and spread it out so it was paper thin, okay, because that's exactly what we're talking about. It's about paper thin. It would be about the size of a tennis court. Wow. So think about a tennis court being wrapped up. That's the kind of layer that oxygen's got to diffuse through. So you know what happens if you hit your finger in the door? It swells up. Yes. So that's basically inflammation. And you know, the Romans had a way of describing this. Everything in medicine is described in the Latin language. There's calor, which is hot. It feels hot. There's rubor, which it appears red. It's swollen, that's two more, and there's the last thing, dolor. And if you speak Spanish, you know what dolor is. That's pain.
So those are the four cardinal things.
That you see with inflammation. So imagine that happening to this paper-thin thing that you're trying to get. It starts to swell, fluid goes in it, and now instead of oxygen being able to pass right through this paper-thin sheet, it's now thickened, it's now inflamed, and you can't get the oxygen. That's why people are dying. because of inflammation in the lung. But it's not just the lung. The number one killer in the United States is heart disease, or it used to be. We're becoming very good at treating heart disease. We'll talk about that. Heart disease and cardiovascular disease is a disease almost completely from inflammation.
Really?
It is. So if you were to see angiograms of an angiogram is where they shoot contrast into the blood vessels of your body. And the ones that we're particularly concerned about are the blood vessels that actually supply the heart muscle. They have to beat continuously every day for the rest of your life. And so they need a good supply of oxygen which they get from the blood. If those blood vessels become diseased because of inflammation, they start getting ratty. Cholesterol starts to break and they get clots forming. And that's what happens when you get a heart attack is those blood vessels close off and that heart muscle, which still needs to beat, is now being strangled to death. And that's tremendously painful. People, that's why they get that painful feeling when they have a heart attack. So we just talked about COVID-19. We just talked about heart disease. Let's go down and talk about cancer. A lot of the risks with cancer come as a result of inflammation.
Really?
So yeah, people who have reflux or heartburn, there's cancers that can come as a result of that if you have that for very long called Barrett's esophagus. It's not very common, but it can happen. Hepatitis. Hepatitis is an inflammatory condition of the liver. People can develop liver cancer that can come from viruses. So, yeah, I mean, when nature says that up to half of the people in this country are dying from inflammation, that might actually be a short sale. It may actually be larger than that.
Inflammation is a big so how do we eliminate inflammation? What are the main factors that support us?
Yeah, so inflammation by itself is actually not that bad. It's useful when you need it.
Exactly.
Well, it's useful when you need it. So for instance, how does the body get rid of a virus? It gets rid of it by finding those cells that are infected with the virus and calling all their friends in to destroy that cell. and part of that is inflammation. The problem is when the inflammation goes out of control. And we talked about last week.
Chronic inflammation.
Chronic inflammation. Yeah. So we talked about in our last interview, vitamin D. Vitamin D is one of those substances that looks, if you just look at, just Google the structure of vitamin D and you'll find out very, very shortly that it looks like cortisol, it looks like a lot of the steroid hormones. And these steroid hormones go into the cell, go into the nucleus, and they go down to the actual DNA and they can manipulate and they can regulate. That's probably a better term, regulate, the transcription of messenger RNA and tell the cells to be more inflamed, to be less inflamed.
Vitamin D can do that.
Vitamin D. And so that's part of the thought process about how vitamin D might be helping people with these inflammatory viral infections. We don't know for sure at this point how vitamin D, if vitamin D works in COVID-19, but we certainly have good evidence from going back to 2018, published in the British Medical Journal, that steady supplementation on a daily basis or a weekly basis with vitamin D can reduce the incidence of acute chest infections. That came out of Ireland, that came out of the UK. Big meta-analysis, 25 different randomized controlled trials.
And that was before COVID Consistent vitamin D supplementation reduces chest infections.
Chest infections.
And what happens when you have a chest infection?
Chest infection is like a viral, it's like a cold and it goes down and becomes a bronchitis. And this is what causes a lot of mortality.
Death.
Pneumonia used to be known as the old man's friend because it would just put him out of his misery. Really? That's what it was. Yeah. Look it up, old man's friend, pneumonia. You can Google that and you'll see. So this idea that vitamin D, lacking vitamin D, especially in those northern latitudes, may be contributing to that. That's why a lot of countries in the northern latitudes have introduced programs to supplement vitamin D in the dietary. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Wow.
Okay. So would you recommend vitamin D for everyone then? Or if you're in sunlight, you're outside a lot, you don't need extra supplementation?
So who are the people that are susceptible to vitamin D deficiency? It would be people who are older because as you get older, it's harder to make vitamin D in your skin. Number two, people who have darker skin. This vitamin D is made literally from the ultraviolet B light from the sun and it's made deep, deep, deep in the sun. So if you've got a lot of pigmentation above that, it's going to be harder. You're going to have to spend more time out in the sun. People who live in northern latitudes, people living in northern Europe, people living in Canada, the Northwest, actually anybody living above what we call the 35th parallel, which is sort of the southern border of Tennessee, is not really able to get enough vitamin D. And Luz, we can talk about where we have come as a culture in the last 100 years. So think about this. just to sort of set up the rest of the talk. A hundred years ago, we spent a lot more time outside in the sun.
All day.
Than we do. Absolutely. The other thing that's really important is we spend a lot more time sleeping.
A lot of time.
Back a hundred years ago.
Absolutely.
What have we done in the last hundred years? Just look at a nighttime satellite image of the United States.
Lights are on.
We have basically turned night into the day. And that has tremendous implications for us as human beings, as our culture, our health. I mean, let's just take off the table the fact that we have severely cut back the amount of time we've allowed for sleep. That's number one. Number two, the socio culture in this country that if you need to get some sleep, you're somehow weaker.
Right.
Right? So there's that stigma. Let's just put that off to the side. There's a whole other aspect to it, and that is that light, especially at those very sensitive times before you go to bed, stimulates receptors in the back of your eye to shut down melatonin production, which is essential and it's a very powerful anti-inflammatory. So you mix all of that together. So think about all of the socioeconomic things that have happened in the last 100 years. Think about cities. Think about commute times. Think about how early you've got to get up in the morning to get to work. and then how long you've got to work. And then when you get home, what do we do? We want to relax. We turn on the.
The lights.
The TV.
The TV. Or the iPhone.
And this is hitting our eyes. There's a recent study that showed that.
The blue light filters don't do a thing.
That's what I heard.
Yeah.
You mean like the blue blockers. Blue light filters. Because it's the blue light particularly. We know this from academia that seem to respond to those receptors the most.
Or stimulate those receptors.
The blue light filters don't work.
So you're saying wearing sunglasses or some type of glass blockers and watching your iPhone here isn't that effective?
It could work at a certain point.
The sunglasses, what I was referring to was the actual machine itself has a switch in it that will make the light a little bit more redder. But it still doesn't work.
Doesn't work. Gotcha. So sunglasses might work. Might help out, but not gotcha.
Okay, cool. And then, okay, now on top of all that from 100 years ago, we're very agrarian culture. We weren't as rich as we are today. And so as a result of that, we couldn't afford to eat a lot of the substances that we eat today, processed foods. Let's just talk about vegetarian versus meat. That's a hot topic.
Back 100 years ago, it was every.
Piece of square footage of land was very valuable even though we had lots of it. It was hard to farm and we didn't have the big industries with the big machines, right? So we didn't have a lot of that money. So anything that if we grew this off of this part of land, we had a choice to make at that point. Do we feed it to the cow or us? Or do we feed it to us, right? Much easier to do the former than the latter. Nowadays, since we have so much grain, so much machinery, we actually have vast amounts of acreage in this country that are used to to feed cattle. And so we are able to probably more than any other time in our life eat meat more in today than we were able to before. Abundantly. Whereas 100 years ago was probably maybe.
Once a week or something. If you look at per capita meat.
Consumption in the United States, it has never stopped. It's continued to go up. Really?
Yeah.
We're eating more meat today per capita than we've ever eaten before. Per capita.
Yeah.
I was just interviewing Dr. Matthew Walker who's like the sleep expert. in Northern California, I think in Berkeley, and he had saying a lot of same things that you're talking about. Like even if you take down one hour less of one night of sleep, how it impacts the immune system is exponential. And if you do it every night, you sleep less and less. So you have one hour less sleep or two hours less sleep or you miss a few hours, it really impacts the brain and impacts the immune system and all these things.
Yeah.
So, sleep is a massive factor for having a healthy immune system as well. Absolutely, no question about it.
I mean, they did this study once on some college students. Okay, college students are our favorite. They'll do anything. Yes.
Pull an all-nighter.
Got you. I'll just put it this way. There's a way to determine where the circadian rhythm is and it's to find the coldest temperature in the 24-hour period in your core body temperature. And the way that the scientists like to do that is to put something up the backside. Really?
Yeah, that's part of the study.
So college students will do anything. But the interesting thing about this study was they had them do an all-nighter. How many times as a college student.
Did you do a pull an all-nighter? I probably did once a quarter when.
It'S finals, you know, something like that.
Yeah.
So the next day they checked hundreds of different proteins and they found all sorts of derangements. Things that were supposed to be high were low, things that were supposed to be low were high. And these are really important substances that regulate immune system function, looking for cancer cells. Some of them have to do with diabetes, have to do with hunger. So all of these things were manipulated just with one night. One night.
One all-nighter.
One all-nighter.
Man, okay. So sleep is a big thing to help prevent disease, it sounds like, but also inflammation. Having inflammation. what are some other factors on how we can prevent inflammation? So get a great night of sleep. What is the research you've shown?
Seven to nine hours?
Yeah, so actually the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's come up with some really good recommendations. Once you get out of high school, generally speaking, it's seven to nine hours of sleep, seven being the bare minimum. And who gets seven hours of sleep? I mean, I'm preaching, right? I should be preaching to a mayor because I need to get more than that. But when you are school age, teenagers, if anyone is watching, it's 8-9, 10.
Really?
Yeah.
It's like elementary kids, like 9-10.
So what are some of the main things to help us prevent inflammation so that if we attract a virus, it doesn't hurt us, or it helps us minimize the pain or the side effects or anything that could hurt us?
Yeah, so we have known for a long time that there are certain risk factors that increase the risk of death in viral infections, let's say COVID-19 in this case. So BMI is one of those things. Body mass index. Age is another one. Obviously older people get into the hospital and don't do as well. Diabetes, hypertension, all of these things may sound familiar as to who is having the problem. And very early on we knew that the ACE2 receptor, this is this receptor on the cells, was the focal point for where the SARS-CoV-2 virus came in. The spike protein that we've all heard about interacts with the ACE2 receptor. Now that ACE2 receptor, that ACE2 is not just a receptor to the entrance of the cell, it actually has a very important function in all of the cells, in the respiratory cells, in the GI cells. What it does is it reduces the amount of oxidative components, oxidative stress, pro-oxidative stress components, and it reduces that and it increases the amount of antioxidants. So ACE2 is like this humming engine in each of your cells that is regulating the amount of oxidative stress that's going on. And when that virus binds to it, it shuts it down. So now all of your, so your oxidative stress goes up in that cell, and your antioxidants go down. Okay. So if you can imagine you're on the edge of a cliff, you are balanced, you are just sort of, and there's, imagine this cliff, and there's people standing in different places. Okay? There's some people that their oxidative stress balance is right on the edge. Right. And you could probably tell who these people are. They're older, they have some diabetes, hypertension, they're on a lot of blood pressure medications, maybe have some renal problems. They're standing right on the edge. And then there's the younger people who don't have these medical problems. They're far away from the edge, okay? And then this massive gust of wind comes called coronavirus. Knocking people off the edge. And who are the people that are gonna knock them? Exactly. It's the ones that are on the edge. And so it's kind of like a stress test. This spike protein comes in, binds ACE2 receptor, and it causes problems. And remember now that when the virus comes into your body, it replicates. and replicates and replicates up to some studies have shown a billion to a trillion copies of itself inside one human being.
That's crazy.
And it spreads everywhere. It goes through, it goes to the brain. They've done autopsies. I've looked at the autopsies. They go to the brain. I've seen slides in the bladder, in the bone marrow, in the heart, in the lungs. It's everywhere. And each one of these trillions of viral particles have spike proteins all over it. So you can imagine the load of spike protein and the complete shutdown of the ACE2 receptor, among other things.
Okay.
So that is one of the things that we talk about in terms of inflammation. So how do you prevent that from happening? How are you getting away from the.
Edge of the cliff?
Exactly, because you know there's a big gust of wind coming. Some of the things you can do for a long time time, it takes a long time for it to work. Other things sometimes you have to implement, you don't have time to do it. Somebody comes in, someone's sick, their diet is their diet or whatever it is that they've had.
Right?
So one of the interesting things that's come up in that there's a guy named Dr. Varki in San Diego that's been studying this thing called sialic acids. This is the newest thing and it's actually very interesting.
Sialic acids.
Sialic acids. So I won't even talk about the fact that some people believe that the virus actually uses sialic acids to enter into the cell. That's a whole other topic. What I will mention though is we're all used to seeing the outside of cells on these animations that they see on the TV, and they've got proteins coming out.
Yes.
So imagine my arms are the proteins. And imagine I don't have a hand. That's kind of how they've been describing it, but that's actually not reality. Reality is that you've got proteins and then my hand, think of my hand as glycoproteins. Glycoprotein, that's a sugar and a protein put together. And then my fingers are the sialic acids.
Okay.
Okay? Yeah. So really it's the part of the cell that is the first thing that gets touched. Sialic acids are really important.
Okay.
Okay? It's a nine-carbon sugar and Actually, if you were to go to, let's just say, a HIV vaccine convention, almost the entire convention would be on sialic acids. Why? Because the HIV virus masquerades itself with sialic acids. That's why we haven't been able to get a vaccine for HIV. Because sialic acids are sort of like, put it this way, the Christmas tree is the protein, the decorations, sialic acids. That's what we're talking about. Gotcha. So here's the problem. The problem is with sialic acids is that the human body can only make one type of sialic acid. Let's call that Neu5Ac. I'm going to get a little wonky here, okay? But people want to look this up. So I'm just going to call that AC. So a human being makes a certain type of sialic acid on its glycoproteins, on its proteins, on its cells that is called AC. and that is self. Now, we used to have a gene apparently. We used to have a gene, it's non-functional now.
Really?
That used to make a different kind of sialic acid called Neu5Gc. Okay. But we don't make it anymore.
Okay, why don't we make it? When did we stop making it?
Good question. The biologists have their theories millions of.
Years ago and all that sort of stuff.
But we don't know, right? We don't know for sure because we weren't there. What we do know is that animals makes both AC and GC.
Okay.
Cows make AC and GC. Any mammal makes AC and GC. Okay, okay. So here's the problem. When you consume those animals that make AC and GC, okay?
What happens?
What happens is it goes into your digestive tract and it breaks it down and the body absorbs the AC and the GC. It can't tell the difference between the two. And then it gets absorbed whole in the body and the AC and the GC gets put onto your cells.
Okay.
Okay.
So we're getting animal GC now?
Yes.
What does that mean to us?
The problem is that you have antibodies against GC. Ah. Because it's not self.
It's not self.
It's not us. It's not us. We have antibodies in our system. It's not hardwired, but almost all humans develop antibodies against GC by the age of one. Okay. Okay.
So, if we're consuming GC, what does that mean?
That means that now that GC gets put onto our cells and our cells start to look to our immune system as foreign.
So, our cells are what? Defending themselves against it then?
The antibodies start to react against the cells with the GC on it. And what they get, what they call it is a sialitis. Sialitis, anything in medicine with anitis at the end is inflammation.
Okay.
Pancreatitis, appendicitis, meningitis, just inflammation. So, you get the sialitis and that they believe is one of the potential reasons for low-grade inflammation. Consuming meat. Yeah, so they always wondered, okay, how come people who eat white meat, chicken, fish, how come they don't get the levels of heart disease?
Why is that?
This is what they think may actually be the reason. They could never figure that out. They did studies, huge epidemiological studies in the United States and in Europe. and they found that in some of the studies that it was only processed meats that were associated with cardiovascular disease and regular meat was not.
And what's the difference between processed and regular?
Good question. So processed meats would be like sausage. Yes. It would be like cold cuts. It would be like those, yeah, right. So those are, but red meat's just like the pure red meat that you'd buy at the supermarket. Okay, so that's the difference. But newer studies are now starting to show that it doesn't matter if it's processed or not processed, that you still.
Get- Red meat you're talking about?
Correct.
So white meat doesn't have the GC?
It does not.
Interesting. Okay.
Fish does not.
Fish does not chicken?
Yeah.
So here's a study that was done and they said, okay, so let's connect this together. So here was an interesting study that they did. they got a bunch of people and they said, Give us exactly your dietary habits for like 30 days. And so they wrote down every, it was meticulous. And then what they did was they went out and they looked at the food and they figured out in that particular food item how much GC was there. And you should see this list. It was a French study. I'm glad it was a French study. And I'll tell you why. because they listed every type of cheese you could possibly ever imagine. Wow. So, 'cause cheese is part of it. So, you had, you know, mozzarella at the bottom and you had hard cheese at the, I mean, and so they listed it because there's a big spread. Some cheeses have hardly any GC in it. Really? Other cheeses are just packed. Certain meats have a lot of, pork has a lot of GC, other meats don't have as much. And what they did was they stratified it and they weighted it. And then they looked at the diet and they tried to figure out, okay, how much anti-GC antibodies did they have? And they matched it up. And it was this perfect correlation. So the more you ate of high GC foods...
The more information you had.
The more antibodies you had, and they linked it to colorectal cancer risk.
Oh man, so the antibodies, the more GC you have, your body's creating antibodies.
Correct.
And those antibodies cause inflammation.
That's correct.
Okay.
This is an immune system so when that antibody attaches to that antigen, that triggers an immune response because it's a foreign substance. And that's what causes inflammation. So what you have then is inflammation in the blood vessels, inflammation in the colon that can cause colon cancer. So again, getting back to that Nature article, inflammation probably causes more than 50% of deaths in the United States.
Now you are practicing near the Loma Linda area, right? You're not in Loma Linda, are you?
I'm not in Loma Linda, but I.
Practice close to it, yeah. Very close to what, 10 minutes, 20 minutes away? Yeah, something like that. Exactly, yeah. And so some people might say, well, is he influenced by the Blue Zones and by being in this region where it's primarily vegan in Loma Linda? I think that's right, it's mostly vegans.
So, is that play any influence into you? It sort of gets me interested in that topic.
Interesting. But here's, do you eat meat yourself?
I used to.
Not anymore.
No.
Because you saw the data or because of other reasons?
Because I saw the data. I stopped eating meat in college. Really?
Yeah.
And I didn't start getting into this until like a year ago. Starting looking into this.
So why did you stop eating meat then?
I think it was the influence of me being in Loma Linda.
Really?
Yeah.
And just being around those people.
But here's the interesting thing. So if you look at the Adventist Health Study 2, Adventist Health Study 2. Which is Loma Linda Adventist Health Study 2. Pretty much, actually basically California. Southern California. 50% of the people involved in that study, which were Adventists, 50% of them were not vegetarian. Really? And this was the interesting thing about the study was because a lot of times when they do these epidemiological studies on diet, there's a lot of confounders.
Right.
Okay? So here you had a unique opportunity to take a very narrow set of people, people living in Southern California, subject to the same air quality, had the same values, went to the same kind of churches, but because it's not a strict religious requirement in the Adventist Church to be vegetarian, it's a dietary lifestyle. They were able to eliminate a lot of those confounders and compare the vegetarians with the non-vegetarians with the Pesco-vegetarians, vegans, oh yeah.
So what do they find in this study?
Well, if you line up, let's say you got vegans right here. Okay?
There's some unhealthy vegans. I've seen some really unhealthy vegans who eat potato chips, potato chips, potato chips, sugar, sugar, you can eat sugar all.
Day and bread and create a lot.
Of information still, right?
You're absolutely right. Okay, but I would say in the Adventist Church, people who are vegan tend to be that way because they're health conscious. And that's the argument that a lot of people used, was that, yeah, vegetarians and vegans have a better mortality rate because they tend to be health conscious people. And it's their health conscious activities, like smoking in general, that's doing it. But here you see, now you've got the ability to eliminate those confounders, because generally nobody in the adventurist smokes. So you see what I'm saying? Yes. So if you've got the vegans here on the right, or on the left to you, I guess. And then the vegetarians, and then the, what they call the Pescovegetarians.
Fish only.
Exactly. And then you have basically the non-vegetarians.
It was a step- Any type of meat.
Any type of meat.
Okay.
Any diet, yeah. You have this stepwise approach in terms of BMI and the same stepwise approach in terms of diabetes and the stepwise approach in terms of hypertension.
Really?
Absolutely.
I'm curious about this comorbidities idea. What do you think or what is the research proving and showing is one of the main comorbidities when someone has this, whether it's obesity or diabetes or something else, is also impacting it at a high level that if they decreased that thing, they should have a greater chance of defending themselves and having a stronger immune system for not getting COVID.
It's the chicken and the egg, unfortunately, because we see that stress, oxidative stress causes obesity and then obesity causes oxidative stress. And then when you have a lot of fat, you store a lot of fat soluble things and make it not available. So like vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin. So it's hard to tease out exactly what it is, but we do know this. Here are the comorbid things. Here are the things that make people more susceptible to dying from COVID-19. Kidney disease. Kidney disease is a big thing. Number two, diabetes. And so those are very big things. So why would that be? When you get infected with the virus, the virus is binding to this protein called ACE2. ACE2 is part of a huge complex system of enzymes that regulate your oxidative stress. And so imagine that you are obese, imagine that you have kidney disease, diabetes, your body is literally sitting on the.
Edge of a cliff.
Not literally, figuratively sitting on the edge of a cliff.
Okay?
All right? And it's basically getting by. It's getting by. You're not in any kind of, I mean, it's compensating for the Now imagine that you completely remove this enzyme, by the way, ACE2 is responsible for cutting down on oxidative stress and increasing proteins that cause reduction, antioxidants essentially. So now you basically pull the mat from under the whole thing, you tip it over the edge and you can see very clearly how this type of a hit cannot be compensated for. It's, I mean, there's so many different analogies I can use, but the virus basically causes everything to start unraveling. And once things start to unravel, things become compounded and you reach that point of no return. And unfortunately for some of the patients, by the time they reach the hospital, we have already reached the point of no return in a lot of those cases.
No return, meaning death.
Yeah.
And kidney disease and diabetes are two major factors that will increase the likelihood of this. Is that right?
Absolutely.
And.
How do we prevent diabetes and kidney disease?
Well, I think a lot of it has to do with diet and activity. These are things that we as a culture, as a society, have placed more emphasis on commercialism, advertising, taste, short-term benefits, and not really the long-term benefits. it's kind of like we've been in class and we've been cramming for quizzes all along and now we're sitting down for the final exam and we got nothing.
That was my whole life in school.
Yeah.
I mean, I could talk to you about so many different things. We know for instance that high fructose corn syrup is a big inhibitor of vitamin D. We know that. We know that the scientists when they When they induce, yeah, when they induce oxidative stress models in their mice, how do they do that? By feeding them high fructose corn syrup. There's one country on this planet that consumes more high fructose corn syrup than any other country. In fact, number two is less than half of that consumption.
Oh my gosh.
What is number two?
Mexico? It's some country in Europe, I think. I have to look. I was surprised because Europe is really, really against high fructose corn corn syrup. If you go to Europe and buy a can of Coca-Cola and see what they use to sweeten the Coca-Cola, it's cane sugar.
It's not corn syrup.
It's not corn syrup.
Man, this is interesting. I'm going to say something very unpopular. And I want to talk about this for a minute about the movement of loving your body for where it's at and loving yourself no matter how obese you might become. And I think what I'm hearing you say is diet and exercise and taking care of your health is actually preventing these things to happen. Kidney disease, diabetes, which is also another cause of dying if you contract the virus. How can we I guess, again, talk about this in a way that gives people the facts that helps them improve their health, the overall quality of their health, but doesn't hurt their mental health or make them shame themselves for where they're at as well. What would you suggest as a medical professional?
It's the thing that's absolutely very important and that is realizing that accepting somebody for what they are doesn't mean that you want to keep them the way they are, that you're willing to work with them and move them to a place where they should be. What's the absolute wrong way to do it is to go into somebody who has a particular diet and say, Here's the diet goal that I want you to be at. I want you to stop your diet right now and I want you to adopt this diet. That's the worst thing that you could possibly do because number one, Nobody can do that. Number two, unless you're extremely highly motivated, I'm certainly not that person. And then number two is that if they try to do it and they fail, they're going to just throw the whole thing out.
And eat more of the bad stuff, yeah.
Exactly. So, I mean.
I used to eat meat.
I used to go to the hamburger place in college the same time I was doing that vitamin D research. you know, my girlfriend and I would go and eat out. So what I started to do is I started to find the things in my life that I felt was the most egregious. And I say, I'm gonna focus on one thing and that's the thing I'm gonna cut out. So I cut out beef, for instance. And you know what was weird is that after not having it for three months, I said, you know what? It's been a long time. Let's just try it, you know? And when I went back to trying it, it just didn't do it for me. It didn't hit the same receptors that I thought it would. And what I realized and what a lot of people have said is that your tastes change after about two or three months.
And it's true.
You don't think it could happen, but it actually happens. You actually start to like the things that you have changed to.
And you live in a blue zone. Are you vegan or plant-based?
Yes. So I am plant-based. You say a blue zone. You know what that means then, I guess.
Yeah, yeah. And you're in, because you're in Loma Linda, right? You're in that area.
Correct.
So that's a predominantly plant-based zone in the world.
And the thing about Loma Linda that's interesting is you look at the other blue zones like Okinawa, Japan, and these other places.
Sardinia.
Sardinia, right. These are these other blue zones, as great as they are, they are very homogeneously genetic. These are particular populations. that have maybe grown that way culturally. The interesting thing about the Loma Linda blue zone is that it's not at all homogenous. It's very heterogeneous. It's not even really a blue zone. I mean, if you go to other Adventist centers around the country like Kettering or Andrews University there in Michigan or PUC up there in Angwin, California, you'll see the same thing. It's the same sort of thing. What's nice about it is that you don't have to be of a certain genetic type to enjoy the blue zone. I mean, in Southern California, the air quality in Southern California is probably second to none in terms of being bad, especially now with the wildfires recently here. But still, you're able to get, according to Adventist Health Study 2, men seem to benefit actually more than women in terms of getting seven to 10 years of extra life. And why? It's because of not just diet, it's not a diet, it's a lifestyle. And part of that lifestyle is exercise. And there's been some really interesting emerging data coming out of Canada actually looking at exercise and depression and anxiety, especially in COVID-19.
How does depression and anxiety play in with weakening your immune system and attracting more coronavirus?
I'll have to be honest with you, this is not something that I was an expert in until recently. I'm not even an expert in it now, I'm just starting to learn about it. I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm not a neurologist, but I can tell you that depression and anxiety are two things that rev each other up. Anxiety causes depression and anxiety is something that you get when we're in this pandemic, we've been in this pandemic for about a year now. And people are very anxious, they're anxious about getting COVID-19. There's just a recent article that came out that showed that children, a recent study in children that have had distance learning and these sorts of things that anxiety is becoming more and more prevalent, suicides, et cetera. And what I found, there was an interesting research article that was published by Dr. Jennifer Heiss out of the FIT Lab in McMaster University in Ontario that I thought was excellent work. She looked at a randomized controlled trial and she took students right before exams. So, you remember what it was like before exams, right? Six weeks before exams. Yeah, six weeks before exams. They looked at them for six weeks and all of these students were going to go through exams. Very stressful time in their life. their careers are dependent on this. This was before COVID and they randomized them to three different tracks. Number one, do nothing, just keep doing what you're doing. That was the control group. Number two was a low intensity exercise regimen. So they did three times a week. So yeah, they did.
They walked, jogged, hiked.
In this case, they were very specific. They had to do it very scientifically. So they actually did a VO2 max test, which is if you don't know what that is, it's where they put a thing in your mouth, you pedal and they measure. So they made it a very specific percentage of their total max. It turned out to be, you know, getting their heart rate up to about 140 beats per minute for about 20 minutes. And they did it three times a week and they did it for six weeks. So 18 treatments.
Okay.
And then the third group was this high intensity group. So heart rate was like 180 beats per minute. okay? Really high intensity exercise, again, three times a week for six weeks. And what did they measure? They measured cytokines. So these inflammatory cytokines like IL-6, which has been implicated in COVID-19, they looked at depression scores, so validated depression scores, not just, you know, and they blinded the researchers to which students were getting.
What, I don't know how they did it, but that's what they did.
So they looked at blood tests, they looked at depression scores, they looked at a whole host of things. What did they find?
This is what they found.
First thing they found that was amazing was in the control group, in the control group, that depression scores at the beginning versus at the end of the six weeks, which ended just at the same time as finals, depression scores went up dramatically. So first thing that they found was number Number one, it doesn't take a long time of stress exposure to increase your risk of depression. That was six weeks. We're in it for a full year.
So six weeks in the control group, the depression went up across the board of all three groups?
No, just in the control group.
The control group, meaning the one that didn't do anything.
Didn't do any exercise.
Got it, got it, yep. They went up. So more and more stress and anxiety, what's happening, I don't know. or COVID, depression increased. And they did no exercise.
Exactly. And that's not exactly what you would expect. You would expect the depression score to be about the same, right? But what that shows is that stress over a period of time increases depression.
Wow. Okay.
But in the exercise, moderate and high intensity group, in the moderate intensity group, depression scores went down, anxiety scores went down, inflammatory marker scores went down in all of those. So in other words, there was no bad trade-off to doing moderate exercise. Now, in the high intensity group, the depression scores went down, but not as much as they did in the moderate group.
Mm-.
Anxiety levels, they still had actually the same amount of self-reported stress in the high intensity group and interferon levels went actually up in the, in, in the high intensity group.
So when your, when your body or your mind is under attack emotionally, mentally, uncertainty, it's not good to do no exercise. It's not good to go to destroy your body. It's good to have moderate types of consistent healthy movement is what I'm hearing you say.
Exactly, exactly. And so, and this is really, really important because with this, this data is not like picked out of being unique. There is a whole cadre of data that has shown this exact thing. It's called the J-curve. The J-curve meaning that you start off.
Here.
With a normal amount. And then as you start to do more moderate exercise, the risks go down. But as you do more exercise, the risks go up. And so this is a real problem in people like Olympic athletes. They have to be very, very cognizant when they are doing high intensity workouts that they're not getting sick because they're actually more susceptible to getting sick, more susceptible to getting, and imagine the stress that they're under, right? Their one shot at Olympic gold is coming up in 16 years.
They've been waiting 16 years.
Exactly, yeah. Exactly. And so, athletes and trainers are very well versed in this literature and this information. People like you and me are not, but I think it's very, very important that one of the things that I think would be very beneficial and I would add it to my list of things that I would recommend people do. Sleep. Sleep, obviously, because I'm a sleep physician. But exercise, and you know what? Exercise improves your ability to sleep.
It does. It does. And it makes you less anxious. When you're moving and you get that anxious energy out of you, out of your body through movement, you feel more relaxed, it increases dopamine, all those different things.
Right, so here's the key point is you don't have to be Wil Hof to get the benefit of myotherapy and you don't have to be, you know, a genius. Exactly, to get the benefit of exercise. And so I think that's the first thing that everyone needs to know. And here's the key is getting that heart rate up. So here's an extra benefit. When you're sick and sedentary, you don't have to do that much to get your heart rate up to 147. The more you do it, you might not take walking after a while, you might have to actually jog after you do it, but getting started on that routine, you would be, I mean, I've had patients, not a lot, but I've had those patients come back and tell me, Doc, I followed your advice. I got on a diet and exercise plan and man, I feel so much better. I mean, it's amazing.
Yeah, I mean, obviously exercise and diet won't automatically cure anxiety and depression necessarily, but it's been proven to show that it decreases depression and anxiety in the population. In the population, yes. So, if you feel overwhelmed, anxious, uncertain, depressed, again, you know, it's not the end all cure, but it could be, but it may not be, but it'll definitely support you in a massive way based on science.
The thing that I like to use is this. Look, when you go into the operating room, one of the things that we don't want you to get is a post-operative infection. So what do we do to make sure that that doesn't happen? The surgeon wears a mask. We make sure that the pressure in the room is under positive pressure so that air is coming out, not air coming in. We also use a solution on your skin to sterilize the skin. Do we do all of those things because we feel that one of those things is not working? We shouldn't. No, it's a multi-pronged approach. So everything that we've been talking about here is not in lieu of social distancing and wearing a mask. It's in addition to all of these things. So I've got the vaccine. Do I still wear a mask wherever I go? Absolutely. It's just another layer of protection. Do I still do all of these things to help? Yeah, because it doesn't just help my immune system, it also helps me in general in terms of health.
Now, can you explain more about the vaccine? And this is, again, gonna be controversial on different sides. We have people that are science-based and loves the science, and then we have a certain part of the population that is 100% against vaccines. We've had this conversation with doctors in the past. who, you know, I'll put out information about this and people, you know, want to unfollow and unsubscribe from everything that I've ever done. So based on scientific evidence and what we know so far with this new vaccine that's out there, what is in the vaccine, you know, what is your recommendation? And if people don't want to get the vaccine, do you feel like that's okay as well?
Good question. So the vaccine is like this big umbrella. and we will have to talk, I'll probably limit my talk to just the ones that are available because there are going to be so many different types made using different techniques and how they work. The question, well, first of all, the first thing that you have to understand is that nothing in life is without risk. Everything has risk. And the decisions that we make as medical doctors, as providers, is what I'm about to do going to have more risk than benefit or more benefit than risk. And that determines what we do. When you go to the supermarket, you could get in a head on collision. You could get, you know, all of.
These sorts of things could happen, but.
You in your mind make a mental calculation that getting food from the supermarket has a better benefit than the risk of you getting a head on collision. So you do it. Okay. So in other words, if we find that there are risks with something, it doesn't necessarily mean that we don't do it. We do things all the time in the hospital to patients that have risk. but we believe that we are correct in doing it because the benefit we're going to derive is greater than that risk. Sometimes we're right, sometimes we're wrong, but if we do it hundreds of times, sometimes you're going to have problems, sometimes you're not. Okay? So that's the first thing. Second thing is the decision to get vaccinated in a pandemic is not a decision to get vaccinated versus nothing. It's to get vaccinated versus getting the infection. that's the decision that you have to make. And so when you look at the risks of getting vaccinated, for instance, what is the long-term effects of getting the vaccine? We don't really know the long-term effects because it hasn't been a long time since we've gotten the vaccine. But if you look at other vaccines that we've done in the past, we can see that most of the long-term effects that have occurred on those vaccines usually pop up within the first two to three months. And so we can kind of get a sense about what the long term.
Side effects are going to be.
Now, let's look at the virus. We don't know the long term implications of being infected with coronavirus. Do people get diseases after viruses? Absolutely. Can people get post viral complications? Absolutely. People can get myocarditis, Guillain-Barre, this is a condition where you basically you can't move and you need to go on a ventilator just by getting the infection. There's a recent study that showed that over half of normal asymptomatic athletes still had signs of myocarditis, that's inflammation of the heart tissue, after either a mild or asymptomatic bout of COVID-19. Okay?
So.
You'Ve got to do this understanding really what your choices are. In both cases, the vaccine and the virus, what happens is a particle infects one of your cells, it releases a messenger RNA, which is an information packet that tells your cell what kind of protein to make. In the case of the virus, the ribosome, which is part of the cell, is going to make more viral particles. And those viral particles are going to spread to other cells and make more viral particles. and that's exactly what's happening in the first phase of COVID-19. In the case of the vaccine, the vaccine is much more attenuated. It's just a little component, a little information packet on just the protein. It's just making a little portion of the protein, the spike protein. And so your cell, when this information packet goes in, the cell is going to make a lot of these proteins and put them on the surface and maybe present them outside. so that your immune system can kind of look at what's coming down the pike potentially and be ready for it with antibodies so when that virus really comes in, the antibodies can cover it, can prevent it from spreading and you can basically suppress the infection. And apparently according to the studies, it's 95% effective at doing that. This messenger RNA is like a sticky note. it's like a, you know, those 3M yellow sticky things you can put on. Yeah, yeah. So I think it like your DNA is like your social security card. You don't laminate it, you put it in your filing cabinet, you never take it out. That number can do a lot of good things. You can apply for a loan, you pay your taxes with it. If you're, you know, I have my number memorized, some people don't, but if you ever had to use it, you would take it out, you'd look at it, you'd write it down on a sticky note, you put it down, you put the security card back 'cause it's very important. And then you'd use that sticky note and then after you're done with it, you'd rip it up and you'd throw it away. The messenger RNA is the sticky note. It's there one day, it's gone the next. Messenger RNA doesn't stick around, it doesn't last. No, no, it's there, that messenger RNA is telling the cell, I want you to make this protein now. And then it goes away. Right, you don't want the cells to be making that protein for the rest of their lives. You want the protein to be made when it needs to be made. And that's why it's so important that these proteins that go into the nucleus to tell what type of messenger RNA needs to be made have to be turned on and turned off. That's what vitamin D, as we discussed, does in many different senses. But the messenger RNA is there when you want the protein. It's gone when you don't want the protein. So the cell has a way of breaking down this messenger RNA so it doesn't exist. In fact, the scientists have to go above and beyond to try to keep this messenger RNA intact long enough to get it into the cell so that it can actually make the protein. Because after a day or so, it gets degraded and it gets broken down. So the DNA is like the Social Security card. The RNA is like the little sticky note that you write and it gets thrown away.
There's so many people that are not going to like this conversation that that swear by this carnivore, you know, lion meat eating diet.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
That say I had all these inflammations, diseases, you know, physical ailments, pain when I was only eating vegetarian, only eating these certain types of food, raw vegan, vegetarian, whatever it may be.
Yeah.
And then when I went on the steak only diet or this diet, it went away.
Yeah.
And I lost the fat and I felt healthier and I felt clearer.
Yeah.
I've heard that by many people over and over again. What would be the cause of that? Do you know? Or is it just certain body types, maybe?
There's a Gaussian distribution of people. And so, all we can really say is look at the data. In terms of that data, though, there was an interesting article that came out, we're talking about Paleo, basically. Paleo diets. Atkins diet, what was referred to the Atkins diets before. I'm sure there's differences between the Keto diet. Keto diet. So there was a study that I found that was really interesting. This was a study that just came out. It was published. I have it here in front of me here. And my eyesight is going bad. I don't know.
You won't eat enough meat.
You need some meat.
So the name of the study was Plant-Based Diets, Pescatarian Diets, and COVID-19 varity, a population-based case control study in six countries.
Plant-based diets.
This is plant-based diets versus pescetarian versus and other diets. So there was this, there was this network of healthcare providers in Spain, Italy, France, Germany, UK, and the United States. Okay? Pretty Western.
Yes.
And most of these were healthcare providers. Basically it was this network talking about what are you what are you doing for COVID? What are you seeing over there? What should we be doing here? They used this network to send out a very detailed dietary questionnaire where they had at least 18 different meals that had been surveyed detailed. Okay, so it was very good. And these are all, most of these were male physicians. I'll just put it out there. I think it was like 70% male, 30% female. There were some nurses involved in this study. Sure, sure. But all of these were healthcare providers. They were all, I mean, you can imagine we're not talking about low socioeconomic versus high socioeconomic. So again, we're narrowing the field here. We're trying to get rid of these confounders. And they asked them, what kind of diet do you have? And then the reason why they went for this is because these were the people that were highest at risk for getting COVID.
They're in the hospital.
The healthcare providers.
Exactly.
They're treating patients. How many people were in the study? This was a 3,000. So they said here that, 2,884 frontline healthcare workers from six countries. With these different? Yeah. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK and USA. Individuals who reported following plant-based diets and plant-based diets or pescatarian diets that were higher in vegetables, legumes, nuts and lower in poultry and then red and processed meats. Okay, so those. And they, what they were able to do is divide these people into the plant-based diet versus, and specifically said this, high protein, low carbohydrates.
Keto, paleo, type of diet. Exactly.
So because a lot of times people say, you know what, in those studies where people had high fat diets, high protein diets, did they ask them were they eating a lot of carbs? Because it's the carbs that cause the inflammation, at least as the saying goes, right?
Right, the bread and the pastas.
So here you have physicians. ostensibly, and most physicians that I know that would say, yeah, I eat a high protein, low carb diet. They're doing that because they want to be healthy.
Right.
Right?
So they're not probably engaging in other health risky behavior. So when they actually looked at all of these and they checked them out for where they worked in the hospital, right, because that's important. The pulmonologist is probably going to get a higher chance of getting COVID than a radiologist, right? It's not going to come through the screen, right?
Right, right.
When they did that, it was astounding because what they found was that those physicians and healthcare workers that said that they had a high protein, low carbohydrate diet had four times the risk of moderate to severe COVID-19.
Really? Four times the risk? That means they were getting it.
They were contracting it. They were contracting it. So they said here that how many actually contracted it?
There was.
There were 568 COVID-19 cases and 2,316 controls. Got it. And they said here that- I'm assuming.
They'Re all wearing their masks. They all are all, are they all vaccinated or non-vaccinated? This is before the vaccine.
Gotcha.
So they're all wearing their masks. Who knows if we don't know how many more people they're in contact with.
Who had it, but you'd assume that they're all wearing their mask and- Right, so this is not a causation study up front. This is an association, and we all know that association does not mean causation.
So all we can say is that.
It was associated so we can say that.
It's not the cause, but it's associated.
Well, we don't know that it's the cause.
It could be the cause, but we don't know. It's kind of like, you know, having a cigarette lighter in your pocket and then saying it's associated with lung cancer, but is the cigarette lighter actually causing the lung cancer or is it associated with the smoking that's exactly. So that's the same thing. So the question really boils down to what are those doctors doing that say they're on a high protein, low carb diet that's causing them to have four times the risk of severe COVID-19. Is it the diet or is it something else they're doing? The study can't answer that.
But those people were eating a different diet.
They were eating a different diet. Whether that's the cause or not, we don't know. But it's associated with it.
Did they have a lighter in their pocket? We don't know.
But when you put that together with what we were just talking about with that cliff, and the fact that that kind of a diet It's probably going to have higher sialic acid and new 5GC. Is that what's pushing them to the edge and causing them to fall over, or at least getting them to the.
Point where they're almost falling over?
Right.
So essentially we want to eliminate every factor that could be closer to the edge.
Right.
And this GC is one of the factors. And this is what- that is associated with meat.
Correct.
But not fish.
Is that right? Not fish. Not fish or chicken.
Right.
And so not fish or chicken. And so that's the interesting thing there is that they mentioned I mentioned pescatarian or vegetarian. So pescatarian was grouped in with that. Interesting.
Yeah.
It's really interesting. So it's this kind of the Swiss cheese model of how I look. Explain the Swiss cheese model. Yeah. So people say, are you pro-vaccine? Are you anti-vaccine? Are you pro-vitamin D? Are you anti-vitamin D? And I look at it and say, look, people hear me talk about vitamin D and hydrotherapy and all these great things that we can do to treat COVID that have nothing to do with the vaccine. And they automatically think that well he's saying that because he doesn't want to take the vaccine. And then I talk about the vaccine and the things that it does and people say, well you're just talking about the vaccine, you're not talking about, no, it's the Swiss cheese model. So what's the Swiss cheese model? So imagine a big block of Swiss cheese with all the holes in it, you know, like you see on Tom and Jerry. Yes. And you chop it up and if you were to pull out any one of those slices, you would see that there's a hole in it somewhere and you pull out a different slice and maybe there's a hole somewhere else. But the point is, is that when the bullets start flying, hopefully the Swiss cheese stops it, but when the bullets start flying, the holes are in different places. So if you were to wear it like a bulletproof vest, if you just wore one sheet, you could get hit. But the more sheets you put on, because each intervention works in a different way, the advantages of one intervention are going to help out where maybe there's disadvantages of another intervention. And so the whole Swiss cheese model helps. It's kind of like in the operating room. We don't want to have post-operative infections. It's really important that we don't have post-operative infections because they can be lethal. So think about all the things that.
We do in the operating room to prevent that.
Surgeons wear masks. Wash your hands. We wash our hands.
Exactly.
Gloves. We put on sterile gowns. We have positive pressure ventilation in the room. Then we have a scrub nurse who monitors everything. We sterilize the equipment, right? So if we say that sterilizing the equipment works, we don't say, well, sterilizing the equipment works.
Why are you wearing masks?
We don't say that, right?
You fill all the holes.
Exactly.
We want to make sure that we approach 100%, and the best way to approach 100% is answering the test question all of the above. And that's the method I take.
So what are all the above ways to prevent Contracting this or any type of virus?
You know what? It's redundant. The good news is that if you, the evidence shows that if you line up your lifestyle to prevent diseases in general, they're gonna do great against COVID-19 and any variant that comes along with it. Okay? So you really need to set yourself up. And that is really, there was another study that showed that another study, this is not this different study that showed that a vegetarian diet reduced the risk of severe COVID-19 by 73%.
A vegetarian diet?
Yes.
Wow.
A history of a vegetarian diet. Interesting.
Yeah.
So that's just one. Okay. So what are the other things? Sleep. We could talk about fresh air. We could talk about sunlight. We could talk about stress. We could talk about so all of those things. But you know what? I have seen people. And I'm in the intensive care unit. I work in intensive care unit and it's a one unit hospital. What I mean to say is that if anything happens on the campus of that hospital, whether it's a surgery, whether it's a hangnail, whether it's a delivery and it goes wrong, it shows up in my unit. So nobody dies in that hospital without coming through my unit first. Sometimes I'm the last person they see.
They get sent to you if there's something really bad.
That's correct. We don't have a surgical ICU and a medical ICU and a cardiac ICU.
One ICU.
One ICU.
And it comes.
If it's a baby, if it's a grandparent. Well, the baby goes to the NICU. They would go to a different hospital. Gotcha. Because I'm not a pediatrician. But yeah, other than the mother. The mother would come. If she was in danger, she would come to our unit. Absolutely. So the point is, is that I see all of this stuff and I can tell you that I have seen people with COVID-19 in my unit that didn't have risk factors and they were pretty young.
They didn't have risk factors.
No.
Really?
Yeah. They ate. They ate well. They seemed to be, they weren't obese, let's put it that way. And I didn't ask them if they had a vegetarian or non-vegetarian. And that was back when we didn't have the Delta variant. We are seeing now with the Delta variant that it is hitting younger people, it's hitting people without comorbidities. harder than the non-Delta. Oh yeah, absolutely. So what I am saying is that...
Are the younger generation that you're seeing in this unit, are they recovering, are they passing away? How's that?
It's been so recent. Here in Southern California, we're talking here, what, April, sorry, August 17th, right? Yeah, yeah. So we're talking, this is early August. We're just starting to see a couple weeks and they're still on the ventilators.
Really?
Yeah.
How young are we talking?
30S?
Really?
Yeah. Late 30s. Wow.
So they come in because they're at home quarantining, they can't breathe and they're like, I need to come in.
That's right. Gotcha.
Yeah.
And there are, so we've talked about lifestyle and obviously you can't do lifestyle changes when you get COVID-19. You can do it, but the effects are not gonna kick in. right away. So the question is what things can we do? We know what we can do in the hospital. We have treatments in the hospital like dexamethasone. We have treatments in the hospital like anti-inflammatory mediators. Like we talked about inflammation is the problem in the lung, right? So there are medications like something called Tocilizumab, which is an antibody against IL-6, which is supposed to reduce inflammation. we're not really seeing it help with oxygenation early on. That's something we can do in the hospital. We can talk about all of the things like getting enough sleep, like making sure your vitamin D levels are good, like making sure that you're getting enough fresh air and sunlight, and that can happen on the way to it. But what do we do during that period of time where you've contracted COVID-19 but you're still at home, you're not sick enough to be admitted to the hospital? That's a very important period of time.
What should you do then?
That's about seven days. So to understand what you need to do during that period of time requires you to understand what's happening. Now, let's talk about the immune system. There's two parts to your immune system. We talked a little bit about this last time, but let's get into it. There is the innate immune system. The innate immune system are all the cells that go around your body and eat up things, macrophages. And they're not educated on what the protein specifically looks like. They just know that it shouldn't be there. This is the innate immune system. The innate immune system is very powerful when you are young. As you get older, the innate immune system becomes less and less powerful. The innate immune system is the immune system that is responsible for making a fever. Kids get a viral infection. At the drop of a hat, they've got a fever. It's very...
The fever helps fight against it.
Yes, exactly. And that's where we're going with this. But on the other hand, adults who get infections, they rarely get fevers. They don't get fevers as often as kids get fevers. And the reason is because the innate immune system in the young is very strong. The key here is that you need a very strong innate immune system because it shuts down viral replication. One of the products of the innate immune system is a substance called interferon. You may have heard of this. It's a very well-named substrate. It's a very well-named substance because it interferes with the virus.
Interferon.
Interferon. So remember that interferon.
Now, we want to have that.
We want to have that.
How do you get that?
You get that from your cells and having a very strong immune system. But there's another way you can get it. We're gonna get to that. Now, that's as opposed to The adaptive immune system. The adaptive immune system is a different part of your immune system. It's the part that comes afterwards. It's the part of your immune system that recognizes antigens and makes antibodies. The problem is that the adaptive immune system comes in about seven days later. And what happens is that it starts attacking all of the cells in your body that are infected. so this is the typical scenario for somebody that ends up with COVID-19 in the hospital. The innate immune system is there. It's trying to fight this virus. There's this tug of war going back and forth for the whole week. The virus is suppressing the innate immune system. The innate immune system is trying to suppress the virus. The virus does a workaround and gets into cells and starts infecting many, many, many cells. And so the person's just sort of.
Going along for the week.
Then all of a sudden, Day seven. Day seven. The adaptive immune system comes online and they see what's happened. It's kind of like the parents just came home.
Sure.
Okay? Right? And they're like, wow, all of these cells are infected. Go to it. And now you have an immediate reaction that goes against all of these cells, especially the cells in the lungs, because that's where the virus got into. And that's why these people start to have inflammation in the lungs, you got your tennis court now being swollen.
Interesting.
Exactly.
So the problem is in COVID-19 failures is that the innate immune system is too weak and the adaptive immune system is too strong.
So what can you do in those first seven days to make sure it minimizes that?
So what I propose, and we're looking at this, but what if you look at history, if you look at history, this seems to pan out. Boosting, enhancing the innate immune system is a great way to suppress it. How do you do that? Well, interferon. One of the ways that has been tried and looked at is by increasing core body temperature for about 20 minutes at a time.
Multiple times a day?
Up to two or three times a day it's been done.
Yeah.
And then cooling it down, hot, very, very hot and then cold.
So where did this come from?
Couple things. There's a guy by the name, we talked about this before, I think, Dr. Yorag. He took these neurosyphilis patients in his clinic and he noticed that when they got a fever, they got better. So he injected them with malaria. That's crazy. Okay, so he took out blood from people with known malaria and then injected the blood into.
Oh, yeah.
That's crazy. Is it? This is what he did. I mean, it was well controlled. He monitors them very carefully. And they developed high fevers. The high fevers caused the interferon to go up. There was a study experiment where we checked in a study the amount of interferon coming out of cells at various temperatures. By the time it got to 39 degrees Celsius, which is about 101.02, somewhere in there, don't quote me on that, but around that area, a fever. Interferon levels spiked tenfold. Tenfold. Interferon does a great job at killing viral infections. Do you know we used to have patients with chronic hepatitis C? Hepatitis C was a big problem. I used to train in the VA system. We had people, they got it from tattoos, from intravenous drug use. Hepatitis C, chronic hepatitis C. It's basically a blood-borne virus and it infects the liver and causes cirrhosis. After many years. Do you know today we can cure hepatitis C? No. Do you know how we do it? High doses of interferon. It's called pegylated interferon.
And we can do that.
Does that cause a fever?
No.
It makes you feel like you have the flu.
Really?
It does. Because it's exactly what it does.
It fights against it. It kills it. It just eliminates the virus. So, so you want to cut, so when someone gets a fever in general.
Yeah.
Do you not want to eliminate the fever? Do you want to keep the fever? Exactly.
You want to keep it?
Exactly.
Unless it's causing problems. Now, remember, nothing is a good thing. Fever is a good thing. Wow. It's a great thing to have. And so what are we doing with fevers? We're giving Tylenol, paracetamol in Europe.
We don't want to do that.
We don't want to do that unless the fever is so high that it's causing the heart rate to race or.
The patient is becoming delirious. So I used to always put like a cold rag on my forehead and it made me feel better. But do I not want to do that if I have a fever?
That's fine. Cooling down your head is fine.
Okay, it's the rest of the body.
The rest of the body.
So what do they do in these things? And it's interesting what has been done in history. If you look at the 1918 pandemic, in the army hospitals where these soldiers were coming back and they had the flu, the doctors at the time thought that they were dying from the symptoms of the flu. fever, muscle aches. Hey, we have aspirin. Aspirin just came out in 1899. So they were dosing them up the wazoo with aspirin.
For the muscle pain.
For the muscle pain and for the fever. It took care of the fever. Some of these people were probably toxic. I mean, we killed a lot of people, unfortunately, with aspirin. The saying was that the German Bayer aspirin killed more patients than the German bullets.
Oh, my goodness.
In, in First World War. Now, there was a group of hospitals at the time in Northeast United States that was not doing that. What they were doing was the opposite. Instead of bringing the fever down, they were doing these treatments. And the fever up. They were putting them, they were placing very hot packs on them, increasing the temperature so they were sweating. They were putting their feet in hot baths. This is 1918. These sanitariums, as they were called, those hospitals, they didn't have the modern medical things that we have today.
Hot cold, hot cold, that's about it.
And so what they found was this, this is really interesting. When they looked at how many people came down with the flu and then progressed to pneumonia and then finally to death, they found that in the hospitals where they were practicing what they call fomentations or hot packs, that they did the best job at preventing the patient from going to pneumonia. But once they got pneumonia, it's hard. It didn't work. There was about a 50-50 chance of them dying. By the way, it was about a 40% chance of them dying in the army hospitals. So the army hospitals were doing a little better job at once they got pneumonia going to death. But the thing was is that in the sanitariums, hardly anybody was going to pneumonia. And so at the end of the day, there was about a 1.5% case fatality rate in the sanitarium and over 6% in the army hospitals.
So what happened?
So, you know, this led to a lot of intrigue and studying this, and this is where Jörg Wagner-Jörg got his idea from. It was this milieu, this environment of understanding of heat and cold and hydrotherapy and this sort of stuff, and he got the Nobel Prize for doing this in 1927. Very intensive. It's difficult. You've got to place the patient down, it takes time, you have to set it up, you have to heat the water up, you have to do all of these things. And so by 1928, we discovered penicillin. Penicillin is a pill. You manufacture it, you can give it to people, and it's a lot easier to do. So you have a choice. Do you do the hot fomentations or you just give them the pill? It's a lot easier to give them the pill. And so that's where we, as Western society, and look, I'm a critical care physician. I give medicines out all the time. It's useful. When a patient comes in with a stroke, I give TPA to break up the stroke. I'm going to do that before I do hydrotherapy. That has to work really quickly. So just because I'm talking about these things doesn't mean that I'm not, I want the best of both worlds. I'm the Swiss cheese model.
Everything that works, let's do it.
Exactly. And not to say that because this works we don't have to do this. Not to say that because we're sterilizing the equipment, the surgeon doesn't have to wear a mask. Everything, all of the above, because that's.
Really what we deserve. could you give me, if you're a lawyer, could you give me the top.
Five.
Pieces of evidence or mindful information for and against taking a vaccine?
Okay.
Could you say, like, here's what the data is saying.
Here's what you want to play devil's Advocate.
Yes.
Okay.
I want you to be a lawyer on both sides.
Okay.
Here's why you should get it, and here's why you shouldn't get it. Because there's a lot of people who are you know, saying no to it, I don't want to have it, it's not what I want, here's all the reasons why, and there's a lot of people saying you're crazy, is why you need to have it.
Yeah, and it's almost like these two populations, there's no, I mean usually with a population there's an overlap where you.
Can meet in the middle.
There's no overlap.
There's a right and a wrong. Exactly. And it's almost worse than like politics right now, it's like it's breaking up families, it's breaking up friendships, it's breaking up business relationships. If someone's not doing something, then they're bad and wrong or on both sides. So could you give the case-- that's.
Gonna be a great question.
Okay, so-- Case for and against. Okay, so you're still a lawyer on.
Each side of this.
I'm going to-- which one should I do first?
I'm gonna do the case for getting the vaccine. Maybe the top five reasons and the top five for not getting the vaccine.
Got it.
All right, all right. So I'm gonna go with the pro-vaccine.
First.
And that one, I'll have to admit to you, is a little bit easier for me to do. Why? Because I'm a critical care doctor. And I've seen the worst of the worst. I mean, I have seen families ripped apart, wiped out because of the virus. Really? Yeah. I've had a situations where we're intubating somebody and we say, call the husband. And they call the husband and he's down in the ER himself.
No way.
Yeah. And they're in the same room and people, one dies. and the other one's still there. Oh, yeah. So this is the type of, I've seen these things and we've got to call up family members. So, these are not just war stories, these are things that happen. And it's hard to, you,'re seeing this.
On a weekly basis.
On a daily, there was a period there in February where I worked literally five weeks in a row. I got up at six in the morning, went in at seven, didn't get home till eight and I did that for five weeks.
Wow.
Because there was just nobody else. Who else is going to do it? And to see that, I mean we had nurses that instead of seeing two patients, at a time, they were seeing four patients because we had nothing else. We had to write up, and maybe these are the reasons right here, basically. We had the state of California, and I don't think the state of California is unique in this. I think all 50 states were doing this, were making their hospitals to come up with plans as to what we would do if people came to the hospital and we just didn't have resources.
What'd you do?
Yeah.
So we had to come up with a protocol that would say, who are we going to give treatment to and who are we not going to give treatment to? And the reason for that was, I'll explain, has to do with exponential growth, which we'll talk about.
Sure.
But it was interesting in that protocol, we could not use age as a determining factor. It had to be based on medical Medical futility, basically.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So that's very hard to do. I've been a physician for 20 years, 20 plus years. Never thought about that. That's like disaster medicine. Disaster triage. So one of the reasons for this is, and I think one of the things that is the reason why people don't understand why things are going is because of this idea of exponential OK, so let me explain. I'll give you a choice, Louis. I can give you a million dollars right now.
Yes.
Or I can give you a penny right now. But tomorrow I'll double the penny, and the next day I'll double it again, and the next day I'll double it again for 30 days. What would you take?
I would take the second option.
You would take the second option.
Exponential growth.
That's because, Louis, you understand exponents.
Yes.
So if you do that, to 30 days, you'll realize that on the 30th day alone, I'm going to be paying you over $5 million. Okay?
So, but to someone who doesn't understand.
That, think about this. I give a million dollars to somebody and they go out and buy a house. That's logical, right? If you someone on a million dollars and they went out and bought a house, what they're doing would be commensurate with what they got.
Yes.
Okay, now imagine I give somebody a penny today and I'm about to give them two pennies. and they understand exponents, but nobody else does. And they go out and they buy a house and they go out and buy a boat and they go out and buy a car and they go on a big vacation and you're like, Whoa, this guy is crazy. He's way over spending. He's got, by the end of the first week, I think he has like 64 cents in his wallet. Wow. By the end of the second week, he's got a few hundred dollars. So clearly, This guy is way overspending. And that's the thing that I think a lot of people see is they see a few hundred cases here and there and the government's coming down like a ton of bricks and they're saying you're just using this as an excuse to, but what they don't understand is that it's going to go like that for a long time and then right at the end things start to pick up and go real fast. Real fast. And we have examples of this. It's happening already. I mean, the Delta variant came from India. It was first discovered in India. And what happened over there was, I mean, if you look at some of the stories, they showed up to the hospital, there was nothing there for them. There was so much, there was such a demand for oxygen, they ran out of medical grade oxygen. They had to use industrial grade oxygen. And the problem with that is it wasn't sterilized. And so they're getting pumped full of oxygen, and two weeks after they get off, that they survive and they get off, now they have black mold in their sinuses and it starts starts to eat through their skull and into their brain. And they have to get this cut out.
Yeah.
So this is the kind of stuff.
I mean, there's whole situations where ICUs, basically the oxygen just ran out and everybody in the ICU died at the same time.
Really?
Yeah.
So this is the problem with exponential growth. Start to learn about exponential growth and you'll see why once we get to exponential growth, there's very little that we can do about it.
Okay.
And so one of the pro points of a vaccine is that it could potentially reduce the spread and prevent you from getting to that exponential growth. Got it. Okay? So that's called the R naught value. If you look at the R naught, that'll tell you if it's at one, that means that there's going to be no growth. One person infects only one person. So it's going to stay the same. Everybody, the number of people that are infected is never going to change. If that R value goes down, below one, that means the pandemic is going to just go out. It's going to fizzle out.
Where are we at right now?
We are at 1 point something and it's going up. So one person infects 1.1 people. This is on average. And so long as that number stays above one, we're going up.
The chance for exponential growth is going to happen.
That's correct.
Okay.
So.
The natural history of these things, have you noticed that they go up and then they come down? So what's happening there? Something is changing. You know, this last time in February it came back down. A lot of people said, oh, it's the vaccine. It's not the vaccine. What caused it to go down? Louis, remember back, when things started to get really rough, did you notice that a lot of friends of yours said, Hey, you know what? We were gonna get together Saturday night, but we're not gonna do that this time. That's exactly what happened. And that happens when that happens across the board. the virus can't spread.
Spread.
Unless people gather.
Exactly. And so what really is causing this to stop and come back down again is people's behavior.
We've had Wim Hof on who is a proponent of this and the power of boosting immunity and how he's done these kind of superhuman tests where they've injected him with viruses and he's been able to essentially say, no, go away from my body in the cold and through breathing and mindset. So, yeah, I'd love to hear your story on this.
So, you don't need to be hot to do that. You don't need to be part of the Polar Bear Club, not to say that there isn't some use for that. So, I start to look into the research on this, and one of the areas that really held my fascination was the 1919 pandemic, 1918 flu pandemic and what happened. So one of the things that you've got to understand about COVID is the timing. Timing is everything. And really there are two phases to this disease and you can really draw the line with COVID is when someone is at home versus when someone is at the hospital. COVID and what's going on with COVID at home is completely a different animal than what's going going on in the hospital, and I'll explain. And this has been borne out by research and studies, and I think this is, this is not controversial. This is pretty well understood, is that when somebody is infected with SARS-CoV-2, it suppresses the innate immune system. Now, the innate immune system is part of your immune system that gives you a fever. It sends out these macrophages to, to kill things that don't look like what it's supposed to look like, as opposed to the adaptive immune system, which is later on, that's antibodies, that's protein structures, that's T cells, B cells. So what the virus does is it has a strategy where it infects the person, it suppresses the immune system, it allows it to replicate and spread into multiple organs of your body. And then when the adaptive immune system comes on, it now has all of these cells that it has to attack, all of that inflammation especially in the lung, can put you into pneumonia, get you hospitalized and on a ventilator. And so the strategy should be at the beginning of the virus is to improve, is to substantiate, is to boost the innate immune system to get rid of the virus before it gets to that phase. But what we're noticing is when people get to the hospital and they have pneumonia is the immune system is overramped. It's causing inflammation too much. And that's why things like steroids work. That's why things like anti-inflammatories work. And so what we're noticing is when we do randomized controlled trials on remdesivir, which is an antiviral, that's going to work early best. When we look at steroids, we found that that only works great at the end. And so the timing is really the key. So when you understand that, you'll understand that one of the tools of the innate immune system is something called interferon. Interferon is a protein and it does exactly as it sounds. It interferes with viral infections. What SARS-CoV-2 does at the very beginning of this is it takes interferon and suppresses it. And it does it in a way because it uses its proteins in a way that it suppresses the body's ability to create interferon, to use interferon. We know that from very well conducted studies that have shown that people who have innate problems with interferon always seem to have very bad courses with SARS-CoV-2. People who have mutations with low interferon levels have very bad courses of SARS-CoV-2.
So we wanna strengthen interferon.
Correct. So with that in mind, with that framework in mind, one of the things that I looked into is what did people do prior to, you know, 1928? And why do I say 1928? It's because in 1928, we discovered penicillin and penicillin and the use of penicillin prior to penicillin. When you went to the hospital, things were very labor intensive. The doctors, the nurses, they would be doing hydrotherapy. They would be doing all of these treatments that were very, very labor intensive. After 1928 and the production of penicillin and antibiotics and drugs and the FDA and randomized controlled trials, now we were able to control disease by affecting the pathology, so the bacteria. And so a lot of that, what we learned, had gone away. So what was it back in prior to 1928? What was it that we did in these hospitals when the flu pandemic arrived. And so I started to research that. And what I found was something that was really interesting and started to really attract my attention and start to look into it. If you go back.
There was a.
Number of hospitals, especially in the northeastern part of the United States, which is where America basically was centered at that time, that was this rebirth, if you will, among the snake oil experts and the people peddling killing morphine and arsenic for all of these things that could work. There was this understanding of this rebirth in the late 1800s about natural remedies and about things in terms of nature and fresh air, sunlight, these sorts of things. And these hospitals, they were known as sanitariums. Well, there was one particular fellow, actually a number of them. There was a Dr. Jackson in New York, but more notably, John Harvey Kellogg, who you may recognize that name as starting Kellogg's Corn Flakes and this health food industry back at that time. He was the director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, which was the world's largest hospital. And they saw very, very elite patients. People like JC Penney, people like Montgomery Ward, people like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart. They would they could all go to this hospital for this.
They were like the Cleveland Clinic of their time.
Exactly, exactly. And these weren't just like things that they were pulling out of a hat. These things worked and that's why people went there because it was the state of the art. So what did they do? They were using hydrothermal therapy. They were heating up the patient. I mean, if you can see pictures of this, it's a hilarious crack up because you'll look down the hospital hallway and you'll see these rooms, these treatment rooms with little holes and out of these little holes were their heads. The patient's heads were popping out. and this room was used to heat up the body.
It was a hot box. It was a sauna.
Exactly, exactly. That's exactly what they were doing and keeping their head cool. Now, this type of treatment spread and it was well understood. And I think the zenith of this, interestingly, was a guy by the name of Wagner-Jauregg. He was an Austrian psychiatrist and he had his asylum there in Austria and there was obviously a lot of people with neurosyphilis. Neurosyphilis is a condition, obviously, where you have syphilis that goes to the brain. It's a type of bacteria. It's an organism. And this is before penicillin. So we couldn't treat it. We could treat malaria, but we couldn't treat it. So this guy, Jor Jorag, Wagner Jorag, noticed that when his neurosyphilis patients had fevers, they actually responded and they got better. Their symptoms abated. And so he had this idea, what would happen if I purposefully infected them with malaria?
Right.
Because malaria gives you really high fevers. And so he did it. And wouldn't you know it, he cured them of their neurosyphilis. No, no, no. And then he treated them, yeah. And then he treated them with the known treatment at the time for malaria, cleared the malaria, so he was able to basically cure neurosyphilis by inducing a fever. And for this, he actually won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, ironically, in 1927, the year before penicillin was discovered. So if you look at the 30,000 foot level about where we've come in the United States and in fact the world in the last 100 years, we were going down a path of enhancing the body's own way of dealing with the virus or whatever bacteria, whatever it was. You know, the immune system is so incredibly complex. We didn't understand it at the time, but we understand it now. And it has so many ways, so many angles of attacking pathogens, that if we are able to just turn on that machine, that machine is going to be, I mean, let's look at it. People who get infected with coronavirus today, more than 80% of them recover on their own. because of the immune system. It's only a small amount of people that cannot deal with the infection and they end up in the hospital. Of course, we have so many people being infected that it's overwhelming our system. So what happened in 1928 was the discovery of penicillin, the discovery of all these medications, randomized controlled trials, the FDA, that what we've done is we've, since that time, we've gone down a road where we take a chronic We study it, we know, and we do the randomized trials, which is what we should do, and we come up with treatments that treat that. And that works really well until you have a pandemic. And now you have a brand new disease that comes on the scene. It is overwhelming everybody. We don't, there's no way we can do the randomized controlled trials fast enough. And so what I became interested in is, is there something that that we can do that isn't a pill, that doesn't need to be prescribed, that doesn't need to have a factory to make, that we can do to already enhance a system that we are already given when we're born to help deal with the disease that's already kind of dealing with it anyway. But if we could just go from 80% to 85, 80 to 90%, that would take care of it. That would have a tremendous impact on taking off the stress from our healthcare system. That's what I intended to do. I looked at what were these guys doing at the time of the pandemic because here these people are, they know what to do with these diseases. This is the treatments that they're using. What did they do during the pandemic to treat this? Wouldn't you know it, I found the resource and it was amazing. I'll stop there to see if there's any questions before I go on because the next part was just mind-blowing.
Yeah.
What's the resource or what's the research on this? Okay. So, there was this guy by the name of Dr. Rubel. Dr. Rubel was the medical director of the sanitarium in Boston. It was the New England Sanitarium. And he said, this is what he said. He said, basically, I'm paraphrasing, he wrote this article in a, it wasn't even a scientific journal. It was a church periodical. These were all Seventh-Day Adventist institutions in the northeastern part of the United States that were doing hydrotherapy. Same thing with the Battle Creek Sanitarium. And what he wrote in there is like, the pandemic has offered us this opportunity to really put to the test these type of treatments that we're doing. Let's see if it works. So this is what he did. He coupled, he got all of the information from about 10 sanitariums. in the northeast of the United States and he pulled the data. And then he went to the army camps. Because in the army camps they had the best, they had the brightest doctors, they had all of the resources. As you remember from 1918, these people from Europe, these soldiers, were coming back to the United States. The war had just ended and they were bringing back unfortunately with them the flu. And so as they came back they made these camps in the United States and they were treating these people. so about 20% of the people in the camps came down with the flu. And when they came down with the flu, again, two components to the disease. The first part was the virus, the viral replication phase, and then pneumonia. And if they got pneumonia, there's no antibiotics. It was almost like a death sentence because it's 40 to 50% mortality rate. Okay?
Wow.
So the key was, you don't want them to get to the pneumonia stage. You want to get this before it gets to the pneumonia stage. And the thinking, the thinking in the army camps at the time was, what's killing these people? It must be the fever. It must be the symptoms of the flu. And so aspirin had just come out in 1899 Bayer aspirin. Ironically, it was a German company that came up with aspirin. And so they were giving aspirin to all of these people in the camps. I mean, 'cause aspirin would take away the fever. Aspirin, ironically, the fever is the sign that the innate immune system is doing something, right? You get interferon, fever goes up. And so the very thing that was trying to help these patients, they were getting rid of...
They were suppressing it, which was causing them to be more sick.
Exactly. And so at the end of the day, it was about 10-15% of these patients were coming down with pneumonia, okay? Because they were giving aspirin and all of these sorts of things. Compare that now to what was going on in the sanitariums. So in the sanitariums, they were not doing this. What they were doing, what was the treatment, what was the rational treatment in the words of Dr. Rubel that they were doing. So as soon as they came down with symptoms, they would isolate them, they would put them in bed, they would have them rest, they would also expose them several times times a day to sunlight, sunshine, fresh air, ventilation was very important. And then they would do something called fomentations. And that's the old term for hydrotherapy. Essentially what they would do, practically speaking, is they would get a pot of boiling water. They would put these towels into the pot of boiling water, take it out, ring it out, and they would place it on the bed. The patient would lie on this with a sheet in between so they wouldn't be burned. and then they would place fermentations on top of them, basically creating, if you will, a hot box. And they would do this for about 20 minutes. When they were done, they would then put cold water on them and rub it and basically to cause vasoconstriction, we now understand, and lock that heat in. So only about 2-3% of those patients came down with pneumonia. So at the end of the day, the overall case infectivity of mortality rate was like 6% for the army camps and 1% for these hospitals, these sanitariums. So then I looked at that. I said that is remarkable. Here we have, it's not a randomized controlled trial, different populations, different things, but it at least tells me that this has been tried before. I mean, a Nobel Prize has been given on the basis of this type of treatment. And here's something that you don't need a prescription for, you don't need a test. If you feel bad, you can start this right away. And so as one of my recommendations going back to the original question, doing contrast showers is a nice way of doing this as a tonic to help prevent and keep your immune system on kind of a sentinel mode looking around. But if you actually come down with it, if I've gotten where I think I might be coming down with something, I will do the hot fomentations and you'll just be sweating there. But after you're done, you feel amazing. Really? So if you feel like, okay, I'm.
Getting a cold, I'm getting a flu, I'm getting a virus, whatever, something, what would you do from that moment as you started to feel that? You go right into hot, cold showers?
Is it the— Justin: so the first thing I would do is I would alert my wife. Dr. Justin: yeah, of course. Justin: It's hard to do it on yourself. and what she'll do is she'll get a large foot bath and she'll put the hottest water you can tolerate in there and put that on the ground. I'll lay down. Yep. And I'll put my feet in there and that helps anything that any part of your body that you can do to try to heat it up, heat up your core body temperature is important.
Okay.
So basically we'll put down a hot towel, I'll lay on that, keep my feet in there, anything that will increase your core body temperature, cover me up with a blanket. heated, but I'm being heated up. And, and then that's for about 20 minutes. And then that comes off. I get cold water on the feet, cold water on, on my chest. And then for just a brief moment for about 30 seconds. And then I go lay down and you can do that once, twice a day. And what that will do. And there's, this is not hocus pocus. They've actually, they have actually done the studies where they, they will take mono monocytes, which are responsible for secreting interferon, take monocytes out of, they've done the study where they take them out of people at different temperatures and then they expose them to bacterial challenge or some sort of foreign challenge. And right when you get to about 39 degrees, the interferon response goes up tenfold. I mean, it starts to go up, starts to go up, and then right about 39 degrees centigrade, which is maybe 102 degrees Fahrenheit, you get a 10-fold increase in interferon response, which is exactly the same substance that we are lacking early on in the course of this disease, COVID-19.
Is this something that someone could prevent on a weekly basis where they do hot cold as well, or is this just something you do in the shower? It's like, okay, let me do hot cold for five minutes and and help me there.
So I do my showers hot, cold, but that's another point that you bring up because there is a whole society on this planet that does literally this pretty much twice a week, five times a week, and you know who I'm talking about.
Yeah, and they don't get sick or they say that, you know, I talked to Wim Hof and he's like, I don't remember the last time I got sick.
I mean, there's the Fins, that there are so many saunas in Finland that if you were to ask every Finnish person to go into a sauna at the same time, there would be enough saunas to do that.
Yeah.
And then they jump in the cold. They jump into the cold water.
And so if you look at the COVID data in Finland, they outperform just about any other Nordic country next to them in terms of mortality rate, in terms of, I mean, not to say that The Swedes don't do saunas and the Norwegians don't do saunas. They just don't do it as much. And the data is actually a little.
Bit.
Overestimating because a number of people, a lot of people who are in Helsinki that came down with COVID were actually people, immigrants from Africa that had come down. There was a huge problem early on. And that goes back to the vitamin D issue. so here we have people with dark skin coming from Africa who are used to getting the sunlight that they need to stay healthy. And now you're putting literally at the other extreme of the planet where through the winter, the sun may not even come up. And they are at extreme risk of getting a vitamin D and huge problems in terms of COVID-19.
So is steam room and saunas also beneficial in hot tubs or You think just hot, cold showers?
I think, you know, it's interesting. I think all of those things are acceptable. If you look culturally, and I've talked to people from Iran, I've talked to people from Asia, I've talked to people from Africa, in every one of their stories, there's always a grandma that knows when someone gets sick to heat them up. I mean, whether it's using the sand in Iran or using the hot pools they all seem to have this understanding in their DNA, for lack of a better term. It seems as though we knew this as a society for many years, but because of technological advances and just labor and ease of treatment, we've kind of forgotten it.
Right.
We'll just say, we'll take this pill and that'll make you feel better. But heating someone up when they start to feel some type of sick for 15-20 minutes, making the head or the neck cool, heating it up, and then putting cold afterwards and then resting sounds like a simple remedy that we could all do naturally.
Yeah. And if people are interested in this, a website that I found that's really helpful is a simple one. It's just hydrotherapy@home.com, hydrotherapy@home.com, they have a number of resources that I found that are very helpful videos to show how to do it. You know, there's another website that I found called hydro4covid.com that's a number four there. Hydro, the number four covid.com where they actually go through the techniques and what a lot of these websites have done that have been doing this because there's been this sort of background movement all this time for the last 100 years that never fully got rid of hydrotherapy, especially in the physical therapy literature. They use it extensively for people's muscle aches, for people's, you know, when people are recovering from certain diseases, physical or physiotherapists love to use hydrotherapy because it's been shown to work. It probably works for more than just that. What they did there on those websites is they tried to go back to, you know, what John Harvey Kellogg used in their protocols. You can actually get the book that John Harvey Kellogg wrote. It's about a thousand pages and the name of the book is Rational Hydrotherapy. therapy. It's available on Google Books. If someone scanned it in some poor, poor soul scanned every thousand page in there and you can read it. And these guys were, I mean, they were giants back then that they were just amazing.
Wow.
I'm curious. You're exposed to COVID every day, right? I mean, you're exposed to people with COVID every day, essentially, right?
Yeah.
Have you got COVID yourself?
Not that I'm aware of. You know, I never, if I had symptoms of a virus, It lasted about a day and then went away. So I figured that couldn't have been COVID. But at the same time, one of the things is when I go into the hospital, I've got PPE, there's negative pressure rooms. It's probably, if somebody gets COVID at the hospital, almost always it's because of something they did outside the hospital. Really?
Yeah.
I'm curious, is there a way, do you believe that with all these disciplines that we could do with all the steps, with all the strategies, all this stuff, Is there a way to prevent it from and actually if COVID entered our body that we could reject it and Disintegrated it or just it would not affect us is that possible?
It's it's It's possible if we had the kind of I mean it happens every day people get COVID every day and their immune system kicks it out. Kills it the problem. Yeah, the problem is is that we have comorbidity and so if you were to look at it, I mean, there's different populations that have different abilities. We can predict. It's not a mystery. We can predict plugging in your information, your age, your comorbidities, your weights, your BMI, all of these things. We can kind of predict what your chances are of getting it, and then if you do get it, what your chances are of dying.
What's comorbidities?
What's that mean? Comorbidities, other diseases.
Diabetes, hypertension. If you have other diseases, then Yeah. The immune system probably won't be able to defend it as well.
Yeah, exactly. And so that's why we take a multi-pronged approach. And so one of the biggest, in my opinion, one of the biggest barriers to getting what we need to get done is just perceptions and politics and all of these sorts of things. So if you look at, if you come to MedCram, which is where we do a lot of the stuff, you'll never be able to figure out, Kyle and I are are sort of the co-founders of MedCram. You wouldn't be able to figure out if I was a Democrat and he was a Republican or vice versa. I mean, that's one of the things that bothers me about this is that we're talking about people's lives and people's lives, in my opinion, are rank at the top. Politics is something, it's like a hobby that you might want to do it, but to see what we've done, whereas we've actually used this pandemic to promote our politics is just so... And so I talk about masks and say, oh, you talked about masks, you must be a Democrat. But then I talk about natural remedies too. Oh, well, then you must be one of these anti-vaxxers. No, I mean, even a dead clock is right twice a day, right? Just go for the truth and speak with the data speaks and let the rest take care of itself?
Now, what is the truth about masks in your opinion? Or I guess based on the data?
Yeah.
So basically, here's the problem. The problem is that there's two ways that the virus spreads. And here are the two ways. It can spread in large droplets. So if I'm standing in front of you and I speak and spittle comes out of my mouth and lands on you, in that droplet are probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of particles of the the virus. And that's a large amount. And if that goes into your mouth or you wipe or you touch, you're gonna get the virus. So what masks do is that they completely eliminate that. That's why the masks don't have to be to the level of being airborne. They don't have to filter out viral particles. They just have to eliminate droplets. But unfortunately, that's not the only way that it spreads. So if you can imagine, being in a room and somebody's smoking on the other side of that room, even if they're wearing a mask and you're wearing a mask, you're going to eventually smell the smoke because the very tiny little particles of smoke are going to fill up that room eventually because of diffusion. That's another way, an airborne way. That's another way that the virus spreads. Masks aren't going to help that. That's why you can go, if everybody went to a large meeting and everyone wore masks and it was an enclosed room with no ventilation, COVID's gonna spread like wildfire. And that's why we get these different, like, look here, the masks didn't help. Why are they making us wear masks? It's because there's two different ways. And so the way you take care of that way of the virus spreading is through ventilation. And really, unfortunately, the CDC hasn't gotten onto this until just recently. There's a guy that we had on, a researcher from the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Joseph Allen, who's been really on this since the very beginning, talking about ventilation, talking about cracking your windows open, talking about if you're in a room, making sure that there's enough turnover of air in the room. And so really, you've got to do both of those. And so, people don't understand that. Unfortunately, politicians don't understand that. Here we have outdoor dining shutting down. So why is that? We don't want people congregating, but it's outdoors. the chances of you getting a virus outdoors in well-ventilated areas is pretty low. So what do people do? Instead of having their parties at outside dining, they go home and they have big parties inside of a house. And what happens is we get a lot of people coming down with...
Surprise more.
So, because... Yeah. Because I've been hearing that people are wearing the mask all day long, they're still getting it. Certain people, right? So it's not only the mask helps, but you can still get the virus.
And here's the case in point. Imagine getting a bunch of people all wearing masks into a long cylinder and keeping them in there for hours on end.
You're talking about when we go on a plane?
Exactly. There's been some stories, but for the by and large, we haven't had massive outbreaks of COVID-19 coming from planes.
And why is that?
Here it is. It's because that air is highly filtered through HEPA filters There's 50% of the air coming out of those jets from up above. 50% of that air comes from outside, which ostensibly I would hope has no viral particles. And the other half is coming recirculating from the plane, but it's gone through extensive HEPA filtration where it completely takes out the virus. And so that is probably the cleanest place that you can possibly be is on a plane. Absolutely.
Even if someone's sitting next to you, one foot away. and then if they're coughing.
Yeah, if they're sitting next to you and they've got a mask on, then you should not be getting those large droplets. But here's the problem though, is on a plane, that system is only working when the engines are running. So the most important times to be very careful and not to snack, not to take your mask off, is on.
Before it takes off.
Exactly.
So go get on the plane last.
Exactly.
Give your mask on.
Don't pay to go on the plane first.
I know.
Wow. Yeah.
Sit in the back seat if you have to, to go last.
Right.
Okay. What about nose breathing? I've been doing more research. There's a. Someone we just had on who's studying the effects of nose breathing and how I'm always getting this wrong. Is it nitric oxide or nitrous? Nitric. Nitric oxide. What comes when you breathe through your nose, it creates nitric oxide in it. and there's been studies, I don't know if you can confirm this, that essentially COVID cannot exist in a state of nitric oxide. Is that true? And what does that do when we breathe through the nose and not through the mouth?
Well, I'm not sure that the amount of nitric oxide in vivo. So here's the word that your viewers should be aware of. In vitro, that's on a lab bench, on a Petri dish. and then in vivo. So we may do studies on in vitro that something, you know, that nitric oxide kills the virus or that zinc kills the virus or that hydroxychloroquine kills the virus.
In a little petri dish.
In a little petri dish, right? At a concentration that may never be achievable in the actual human body. And then we move over to the human being and it doesn't work. I haven't seen those studies. I will say this though, that breathing through the nose humidifies the air. And I know that the virus does not like humidity, generally speaking. It does not like humidity. And so that also may play a role. But I mean this thing about in vitro and in vivo and getting a medication that works and why can't we just get this medication to people. I mean, if I could show you staph aureus or streptococcus, I mean these are bacteria that infect people. I could put staph aureus on a petri dish. and I could drop a little disc of methicillin on that petri dish and you would see clearly that there would be this halo around this disc where the bacteria were just decimated. They were just killed instantly. And I'd be like, well, great, this is amazing. Hey, we got this patient over here with a staph aureus pneumonia. Let's just give him methicillin and he should be fine. Well, as a doctor for the last, you know, 20 years, I've seen case after case and I've gotten to learn and anybody who does this will learn, it's not just me, that something may work really good in the lab, something may work really good on paper, this thing may just decimate staph aureus. But you give that to somebody, maybe there's some other extenuating circumstance that's causing them not to get better. I mean, the body is a very complex machine. Putting a seatbelt on after the car accident is not going to help the person who's injured, even though it would have prevented it in the first place. And so there's so such complexities that I think the public needs to understand that just because there's a lab test or a value that seems to work, it's a whole nother thing.
Yeah.
Applying it to the patient.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And testing that over and over and dosage and does it affect other, does it impact you in a negative way by, by that much, all that stuff.
It's not just about the food.
It's actually about how our body responds to what we put inside it. If you feed your body something that's.
Not good for it, it's going to react poorly, not going to be good for you. If you feed your body something that is good for it, it's going to activate its health defenses.
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