8 POWERFUL LONG-COVID NUTRIENTS

We also use the oral supplement, which is sort of an act— very active form of vitamin B3 called nicotinamide riboside or NR. And that's an oral supplement that can be used to raise NAD levels. Now, NAD is the coenzyme form of vitamin B3. So it's 2 vitamin B3s together with some other chemistry. And NAD is also a primer for the activity of the mitochondria. 8 powerful nutrients to consider in long COVID. So I wanna relate a story of a patient, a 25-year-old patient who had long COVID. We'll get into what was going on, but basically they had been checked out. They didn't have anything wrong in their laboratory tests, which is great. They had no major, you know, physical damage or pathologies going on. And something to keep in mind is that just because your labs are normal and you've ruled out bad pathologies, but you still don't feel well, doesn't mean that you can't be helped. And this is a place where often prescription medications are not appropriate. We certainly use those all the time, but things like diet and lifestyle and nutrient interventions are appropriate. And so this is the direction that this case took. So when we look at these 8 powerful types of nutrients, and of course there could be many more, What are the ones we're going to talk about today? Glutathione, the B vitamins, trace minerals and magnesium, etc., L-carnitine, coenzyme Q10 with alpha-lipoic acid, and then NAD support, vitamin D with vitamin K, and then melatonin. So those are the 8 categories we're going to do, and this is for somebody, again, labs totally normal. So let's break these down. First, I want to make sure that it's real clear that while I'm talking about 8 nutrient categories, there are many, many others, and individually, you, your healthcare provider may find that other ones are gonna be just as important for you. These are just 8 of the most common either nutrients or nutrient combos that we see that really target post-COVID, especially fatigue, brain fog, those sorts of things, when all of the bad things have been ruled out. So the first one is glutathione, Now glutathione is a, you could call it a main antioxidant in the body. It works with vitamin E and vitamin C to keep it recycled, you could say, and a bunch of other nutrients. But one of the things that goes on in inflammatory processes, and this has been shown now in COVID and long COVID, is that the antioxidant status, especially glutathione function, can take a real hit. And because your antioxidant status is so critical to you being able to get your inflammation back under control, get your immune system back in balance, etc., glutathione is kind of right in the middle of all of that. Now, like I said, vitamin C and vitamin E help it out, but glutathione's really in the middle, and it's a little more complicated, glutathione's biology in the body. So, In cases with people where, again, there's, there's no disease process found, their labs are looking good, but they're, you know, they've got remaining symptoms, some brain fog, fatigue, etc., glutathione support can be very useful. Now, in this case, we used a liposomal glutathione, which is very common. There's a couple of other forms of glutathione that can be useful with patients, but it can be really critical to kind of fill the tank again, get these things going back in. Another thing that filled into her case is she was not ill before, you know, the COVID experience really knocked her down and she just never really came out the other side. So she— fatigue being her main problem. Now, another category would be the B vitamins. Normally we like to give the B vitamins as a B complex, and you can get different levels of B complex. In her case, we did an active form B complex because we knew she would tolerate it. Those tend to be very good with people with fatigue. And the most important thing with the active form is that you have a mixture of the B vitamins, so you're not putting in one B vitamin in an excessive amount, you're kind of putting in all of them together. Because what will happen, sometimes we do give a lot of one B vitamin, but you have to give the other ones too, because one B vitamin might speed up a process over here in the body, and that may also require other B vitamins That are not the big one that you were giving. So B complex, really, really important. Trace minerals and magnesium. So minerals are very important. Now, throughout COVID, lots of people like myself wrote newsletters and stuff, and we talked about things like zinc and selenium and other trace elements and how important those were. But what I always said on my podcast was I tended to give people a trace mineral mix, and the one we use normally has magnesium in it too, because that's so critical for other functions. But rather Rather than just give a bunch of zinc, for example, a trace mineral mix is good because you don't always know that it's just zinc that they need. And through COVID, we saw a lot of people, you know, taking a lot of zinc but not any other minerals. And so their zinc levels would get real high, but the other ones weren't doing so good. So a trace mineral mix was useful for her. L-carnitine. L-carnitine is used to help shuttle fatty acids into the mitochondria to create energy. That can be very, very useful, especially if the diet is low in carnitine. The mixture of coenzyme Q10 and alpha-lipoic acid. Now these are real nice. They're, uh, they are semi-fat-soluble type of nutrients, but really what you're targeting here is they help the mitochondria, the energy-generating part of the body, get back online and do its work better. So again, kind of like the B vitamins and the trace minerals and the other stuff, the energy-producing side of the body is what eventually helps you get out of the fatigue state. We also use the oral supplement, which is sort of an act— very active form of vitamin B3 called nicotinamide riboside, or NR, and that's an oral supplement that can be used to raise NAD levels. Now, NAD is the coenzyme form of vitamin B3, so it's 2 vitamin B3s together with some other chemistry, and NAD is also a primer for the activity of the mitochondria. So a lot of times we don't give long-term nicotinamide riboside or support. There's others, there's NMN is another type of oral support for NAD+. But in this case, it was very helpful because her fatigue was so profound. So you've got all these different things targeting the mitochondria to help the energy improve and increase. Vitamin D and K. Well, that seems, you know, they're not maybe directly involved in energy production, but This person had not been on any vitamin D. Their vitamin D levels were actually quite low, and vitamin D and K work together. And nowadays many, many supplements come with a nice balance of vitamin D and vitamin K2 together, and so that tends to be what we use with folks, especially if they're very low, because D and K are fat-soluble vitamins and they really help to balance the biology and the biochemistry of each other. So going in together, you get a better effect than just a lot of vitamin D. And then finally, melatonin, which we all think about melatonin for, you know, making us sleepy at night, which is part of what it does. It's the nighttime part of your circadian cycle, at least a piece of it. Melatonin also is researched for a number of other things, but one of them is to help undo the damage in the mitochondria, the energy-producing part of our cells, that would help us to kind of get back on track when we've had this inflammation Inflammatory insult called COVID and post-COVID. So all of those things were important. Now you might say, wow, that's a lot of things, 8 different, you know, nutrient combos. That's a lot to take. Well, person was really uncomfortable. They didn't like the fatigue and the brain fog, and they wanted to get back on track, which is everyone would. The goal here is not to take these nutrients forever, especially in a 25-year-old person. You should be able to take these for a particular period of time, and then when you start getting better, you can work with your healthcare provider to decrease them, uh, and, and get rid of them. Now, this person remains on a little bit of maintenance, the Active B Complex and the trace minerals and the vitamin D and K, but they were able to get rid of all of the other ones over time. It did take about 3 or 4 months before they really felt like they were on the mend, and then a couple— pardon me— more months Uh, to get things really, uh, back online. But that's about the time that we started to decrease down to maintenance levels of these nutrients. So what are some of the important things about this? First off, this is a person who is 25, fairly young, was not sick before. So it was very clear that the COVID event and the inflammation probably triggered this. Next thing was all the big bad pathologies have been ruled out. That's That's great. Next thing was there were no other abnormal labs. So we're really looking at more of a functional issue here. Next thing was the patient really wanted to try a nutritional approach, which included diet and lifestyle, but also nutritional supplementation. And we were fully on board with doing that. What would we have done if this didn't all work out? Well, we'd go to the next steps of kicking up the intensity of treatment. We might do things which in this 16-part series on post-COVID, we're going to talk about all of these things, but We might have done a little bit of IV nutrient therapy, we might have done some sauna-type therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, photodynamic therapy, any number of things can be added on. But this is a really good example of a case where it was very clear that we had a healthy body to start with, we had the insult of COVID and then the long COVID experience, and we really wanted to try and just use diet, lifestyle, and then some nutrient supplementation to get the body back on track. And indeed, that is what happened in about 3 to 4 months. And then there's a couple months of maintenance, and then we tapered off on everything, like I said, except the vitamin D and K, trace minerals, and the magnesium, and then the B complex. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson. This is Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson, as you might imagine. And we are on most every platform, all the pod burners, YouTube, et cetera. Please check us out. You can find all the links On dranow.com, dranow.com. All the links are going to be there. Please like, share, subscribe, and do the notifications. Check out YouTube if you haven't. We're growing that community. There's a lot of stuff we've put up on there, and we're putting more up all of the time around health, medicine, everything that you could really imagine. I do want to make it clear that none of this is to be construed as medical advice. You should get medical advice from whoever your healthcare provider is, not from people on YouTube or. Radio or some other place. 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