Dr. A breaks down which nutrients may help with COVID-19: vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc, vitamin A, and quercetin. The video covers dosing, how hospitals use them, and why you should talk to your doctor before supplementing.
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Hey, it's Dr. A. Wanted to just highlight a newsletter. Again, if you're new to these newsletter highlights, what we do is talk through the big picture of the newsletter, and that way you can watch it and hear it. And if that sounds like something of interest, I put the link to the newsletter in the description box below, and then you can just go right there and read it. Benefit of that is it's a lot more detailed than us just talking about it, and there's the references and resources. A lot of people like those, so you can get them obviously with the electronic print version. It's very easy. So the one I want to highlight today is about COVID-19 and nutrients and what has been studied and known and what have we learned in the last year-plus around this topic. So the first thing is, you know, none of this is medical advice. Don't get medical advice off of YouTube or anywhere. This is just talking about research and information. Always run everything past your healthcare provider. But in the newsletter, I go into fairly good detail with a lot of background references with the major nutrients that we see benefit with in COVID patients. Now, does that mean if a person is taking these nutrients they're not going to get COVID? Well, that's unlikely. There are some data that would show that some things, like your levels of vitamin D, may be associated with your propensity to get COVID or not, but that's not a hard and fast thing, but the way that I look at it with nutritional augmentation and things like, you know, avoiding colds and flu or shortening them up or COVID or whatever, it certainly doesn't hurt. And something I'll say, having or continuing to work with a lot of people who are both in hospitals and at home with COVID or post-COVID, is it's nice at least to see now that the hospital, many hospitals, I won't say all, but many hospitals in the U.S. are adding some of these nutrients into their orders, their standard protocols while you're in the hospital with COVID For example, I was helping someone a couple weeks ago and standing orders included oral vitamin C and zinc and vitamin D, etc., and that was in a regular, just standard old hospital. So that's kind of nice. The way I would think about that though is you're better off if you don't wait till you're in the hospital to get some preventive nutrition. So what are the big ones? And again, the newsletter gets into the down and dirty and talks about all these things in quite a great bit of detail. Well, the first one I already mentioned, vitamin D. Now, it's a fat-soluble vitamin, and normally in cold and flu season, people that have better vitamin D levels will often have shorter colds and flu, maybe have less propensity for getting it. We're kind of seeing data come out that way with the COVID so you want to have your levels up. The up and downside of fat-soluble vitamin is once your levels are up, it takes very Or a lot less to keep them there, but it's fat soluble, so that means it can build up in your body and you can get too much. You can actually be toxic with fat soluble vitamins. So what you need to do is acutely, you can tolerate probably some vitamin D supplementation, but if you're going to take vitamin D for very long, you know, say more than 3 or 4 months, you want to probably check with your healthcare provider and they can check your level. And once you're in about 50 percentile of the normal range to, you know, to 100% in the upper part of the range, it doesn't take very much to keep you there. Now, again, that's a discussion for your healthcare provider, but some people it's 2,000 IUs, some people it's 10,000 IUs to keep them there. That's something you have to recheck to kind of find out. Big deal is you just don't want to go too high. Another one is vitamin C. I mentioned that earlier. It's water soluble, so this goes through you. Uh, every day. And one of the things about vitamin C is it is one of the triplet of antioxidant defense that's at the base of all your antioxidant activity. It's water soluble, so that means what you, you, what you consume today, you use today pretty much. Vitamin C levels go down when we get sick. We use more vitamin C when we're fighting off bugs, and so because it's water soluble, you're going you're probably not eating enough to keep your levels up. So what the newsletter goes into are dosing strategies and how to take it safely and all of that, but vitamin C is probably one of the most universal helpful things. Now, I will say that there, there was a bit of data that came out about a month ago, or maybe a little bit more now, about vitamin C and zinc, and they did a study and they said, well, it doesn't look like it helped COVID. It was an interventional study, and I wrote about this in another one of the newsletters, but the bottom line of the study was that they didn't really do the study long enough to reach statistical significance. So you're really not supposed to report something does or doesn't work when you don't have statistically significant data. And another twist is the authors came back about, you know, 3 or 4 weeks later after the publication and said, well, maybe we looked at the data wrong and there might be some benefit to using these nutrients. So you have to be a little bit careful when you read the headlines around some of these things, but certainly vitamin C and then, as I said, zinc. What's the deal with zinc? Well, zinc is used on a number of levels for immune function. One is a lot of your, what we call maybe your first line of defense, non-discriminate killing cells in the body that like to kill, you know, virally infected cells and other stuff use a lot of zinc. Now zinc is one of those things where we need a balance. It balances with copper in our body, so again, if you take a lot of zinc for a long time, you really need to work with somebody and have a balance. Short term though, zinc is water soluble. A lot of people who tend to get sick more have lower levels of zinc. And so zinc's kind of thing where you just want to build your body levels up. You don't want to, you know, try and go out and take a whole ton of it all at once. The other thing you have to be careful with zinc is it's a trace mineral. If you take zinc on an empty stomach, you're likely to get very nauseated or even throw up. So I always warn people if they're going to take zinc to take it with food, and by that I mean in the middle of a meal, because if it's not— if it has any chance to stick to your stomach lining, You'll get cramps in your stomach and likely throw up or be very sick. You'll never want to take zinc again. Now, there are liquid forms of zinc that are a little easier, but I would still take those with food too. Then there are other nutrients— vitamin A, another fat-soluble nutrient. I get into that a bit in the newsletter. Some of the other types of products, there's some Not really a vitamin or a mineral, but part of a plant, uh, flavonoid called quercetin. The reason it's, uh, proposed to be helpful is that it's a zinc ionophore, and you've heard about this probably if you looked at like the, um, research on certain drugs in COVID. Some of the drugs take the zinc and they put it inside of your cells where it can actually be more antiviral. Zinc has a hard time getting in the cells right away. Well, there's actually natural substances like EGCG from green tea and quercetin, bioflavonoid, where they help the zinc uptake into your cells more quickly. So a lot of times we have people at home and they're doing zinc and vitamin C and vitamin D and things, we may add, you know, quercetin to the mix. Like I said, vitamin A, also fat soluble and has a lot of It has a lot of immunomodulatory activity, and then there are a number of other things as well. But if you really want to get into it and look at the references and resources, there's a whole lot in the COVID-19 and Nutrients newsletter, and I will put the link to that newsletter, direct link, down below, and you can go and get all that stuff. Thank you very much, really appreciate you listening. If you like this, like, share, subscribe, share, all the other things that you're supposed to do with YouTube videos, and I'll see you on the next one. Thanks.
