Immunity - Dr. A answers your questions

Taking action into your consciousness by tuning into Contact Talk Radio and on TuneIn.com, Hang.fm, and UpSnap Mobile. Talk Radio. Welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. This is a show about opening up the often mysterious world of how doctors think. The goal. To empower the listener to gain access to the best healthcare possible. Good day and welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me. I'm Dr. Paul, also known as Dr. A if you like it really short. And today, gee, you know, I did 3 COVID Delta-related podcasts, full podcasts in a row. I said I wouldn't do the first one and then look what happened. And as if you've listened before, you know, I do like to answer a lot of questions that I get. And so keeping in the theme of immunity and your immune system, mixing, sprinkling in a little bit of COVID stuff, etc., etc., I want to get right to answering some questions around immunity, COVID and immunity, autoimmunity, some nutrient questions, just, just A lot of different things that have come in. As I have mentioned, I do on the YouTube feed, I do try— excuse me— and read the questions that come in. I also get them at the website. So the website's simple. It's dranow.com. And you can find links to everything, but you can also find contact information there so you can put questions in there. So we just get questions all over the place. So today I wanted to jump in and I'm going to do these in no particular order. They're how I received them, and I think they'll, they'll serve us well today for topics. So immunity, immunity and COVID, immunity and autoimmunity, etc., etc. So the first one is, you know, can you— so in the past, and if you see me looking over here, I've got the questions taped up to an easel over here, so, and they're in large print so I can read them. So that's why I'm looking over there. So in the past, you've given us some kind of high-level, big-picture things about how the immune system works. Could you just go over again the steps and stages of immunity and how it works. And so we have a framework for where it might break down. So here is the way it works. The first layer of your immune system is actually what we call your nonspecific immunity. This means it, uh, whatever the gambit is that the nonspecific immune system has, it doesn't care who the invader is. Okay, specific immunity essentially cares who the invader is. Non-specific immunity doesn't. Non-specific immunity is this sort of native immunity that we have based on anatomy and a little bit of biochemistry and some other things. And so the non-specific immune things include the integrity of our skin. Okay. Your skin is a giant reason why you don't get more infections than you do. If you look at people who get— Yeah, I saw that. Ill, uh, during, uh, you know, getting a burn, let's say, or a bad car accident that, you know, abrades their skin, the worry there always is, of course, it's terrible to have the original injury, but then there's a lot of bacteria that will, uh, get into the opened-up skin, whether it's due to, you know, a burn or an abrasion or whatever. That's what happens. What was her name? Jennifer. She was in Texas. She was more conservative. So that's the first one, nonspecific immunity, things like your skin. Also, now you don't have skin inside your mouth and your GI tract and all that, but you have mucous membrane, which is almost the same as skin, except the outer layer is not what we call keratinized. So it doesn't— that's why it's pink and this is not. The mucous membranes, while not having the nice keratinized sort of waterproof outer layer, have an additional actor that the skin doesn't have, and that is immunoglobulin A. Immunoglobulin A is an immune protein that is produced, and you can think of it sort of like oozing out into your mucous membranes because they're full of mucus, hence the name, and part of your mucus is immunoglobulin A. Now, you'll have this in your ear, nose, and throat area, your lungs, your GI tract, your genital urinary tract, and IgA is sort of like old-fashioned flypaper, if you've ever seen that, where, you know, the fly comes and sticks on it and it can't get back off. So immunoglobulin A is this secretory immunoglobulin that is there in the mucus. And so if microbes get there, it sometimes will bind them up. Now, there's 2 kinds of IgA that you can have in the mucous membranes. One is nonspecific, which just sort of tries to trap anything, but then you can also develop specific immunity. Now, I'll relate this back to something we talked about last week, and that is How is it that somebody who's fully immunized against COVID can get COVID and even spread it? Where's that lag time? Well, the lag time is because the immunization that you get as an injection goes into your system through your blood and creates IgM and IgG antibodies, but no IgA. Now, if you had a nasal spray, like there's some of the flu mist and some of those sort of immunizations, if you use a nasal spray, you'll create IgA. And so what the folks at the CDC are saying is, well, the reason that people who are fully immunized can get COVID is because they don't have IgA, and so it goes in through the respiratory system, and then it takes time for the IgG and M to attack it. And so that's why that happens. So IgA that's nonspecific is part of your nonspecific immunity. IgA that's specific is part of specific immunity. Now then you get to things like body temperature. So you can get a fever when you're sick to help make it unfriendly for the microbes in your body. That's why we get fever. Uh, and there's a number of other things like enzymes, and you— like, your tears have a lot of things that will take apart bacteria, etc. Now, the next thing is specific immunity. So that's after you get to the inside and you have gotten past things. Then you have, remember, the, uh, B and the T cell responses. Now, you can go back and go on my YouTube channel and you can look There's a couple of B and T cell things there, but just basically, B cells make those antibody things we were talking about, and T cells make the cell-mediated immunity. So the killer T cells you might have heard of. Now, there's a cousin of the B and T cells called a natural killer cell. And kind of like IgA, it has a foot in both camps. Where it can be an immune surveillance molecule that's just roaming around your body, and anything that's not you, it kills, it just blows it up. But then there's also natural killer cell activity that is now, we know, stimulated by the specific immune system. So basically, your immune system has these layers, and they all kind of talk to each other. So for example, one big place of crossover is a antigen-presenting cell, a macrophage that eats things, gets a hold of, you know, some bacteria that you don't want, or a cell with some virus in it or something, eats it up. That's a nonspecific activity because it doesn't care who the bacteria or virally infected cell is, it just eats it up. What it does though is it goes and it presents antigen, meaning it takes a piece of that, puts it on the outside of the macrophage, And then the T cell families look at it, and then the B cell families get information. You make cell-mediated and antibody immunity against that bad guy. That's why you can get immune memory. So later, when you see the bad guy again, you have a much quicker time to go and trap it, you know, or kill it. The next one is, can you or should you boost your immunity? And they say here, I've seen a lot of people going back and forth about it's bad to boost your immunity, you can't boost your immunity, you shouldn't boost your immunity, you should boost your immunity, all of the above. So thank you for that one. That's— this is one that always makes me smile because, you know, your immune system is not static. It's always working. And a lot of us like to describe it as an orchestra because there's, you know, hundreds of actors and chemicals and cells and everything going on. And without those, you wouldn't have any immunity at all. So it's always, you know, this miraculous thing that they all come together and do what they're supposed to do to make immunity. Now, on one hand, the reason that you see people, uh, doing, you know, these— you know, they may not mean it this way, but sort of clickbaity kind of, uh, topics and titles of never boost your immune system, or you can't boost your immune system, or whatever, you is it's sort of in the collective consciousness that I want to boost my immune system during cold and flu season so I didn't get something bad. And they will come back and say, well, that's a bad idea because too much immunity is as bad as too little immunity. It's a bad idea because it's really hard to actually make your immune system work harder, et cetera. So they have good points, but really it's sort of an argument that falls apart on both ends of the spectrum. More than boosting your immunity. There are times where we give people things to improve their immunity because they need to mount a better fight. Okay, that's— that is a possible thing that can be done. But normally what you want is a supported immune system. So you don't necessarily want to jack it up, and you certainly don't want to suppress it. Talk about that coming up later. But you want it Supported. Now, what does support mean? Support means that you have everything going into your immune system to back it up so that when it starts to use immune chemistry, it doesn't run out of the prerequisite molecules and things. So that's where we get into talking a lot about certain nutrients that are important and maybe botanical medicines and other things. But before you get to that, One of the best ways to support your immune system is to do some super basic things. One is to stay hydrated enough for many, many reasons. The next thing is to sleep enough, because if you're sleep deprived, they've actually shown that your immune function goes down. Then the next thing is that you want to have enough of the proper foods going into you and not a lot of the improper foods to support immune activity. So the easiest and probably the best one to talk about for foods would be if you have a high glycemic diet. And again, you can go on my YouTube channel, look at the glycemic index one. But if you have a sugary diet, what it does is it actually slows your white blood cells down, your big fighter cells. Okay. And so if you have a lot of sugar going in— in fact, they've done studies where they gave people, you know, a dose of sugar, they checked their white blood cell activity before and after, and it was, you know, normal. And then after the sugar, it's like the white cells go to sleep for a while. So during times of stress and immune challenge, etc., a big way to support your immune system. In addition to sleeping, drinking enough water, etc., is to actually avoid sugar. You do want proteins so that you get the amino acids you need. You want some good fats, and then the carbohydrates you get, you want to focus on things like vegetables where there's a lot of mixture of, of the types of fiber and digestible carbohydrate. And again, if that topic interests you, go to the YouTube video Dietary Macros or Diet Macros, and it's all about those things. So those are very, very important as far as supporting immunity. So if you want to, and if you want to kind of stay out of this somewhat silly argument about should I boost my immunity or not, or all this business, Just think of it as supporting your immunity. That's really what you're going for. Now, there are specific things you can do to help, and we'll talk about them specifically coming up in a new another question because I see it's coming up here. But nutrients can be important. Now, I was reading a review of a clinical case earlier for legal reasons, and the other review. reviewer was saying, well, you get enough nutrients from your food, you should never need additional nutrients. And I know that that's something that's been said over and over in American medicine for a long time, and it's just plainly not true. It is very hard to get all the nutrients you need out of your food, uh, because of many, many reasons that I've done in previous shows. Supplements can be helpful. Now you need to be thoughtful about— so you don't want to over-supplement or under-supplement, but the bottom line is When you go into needing to support your immune system to go into a fight, you're going to upregulate your immune system, and that is going to make you really use up these nutrients and other things, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, etc. So it's not that you're really like priming the pump or something, but you want the good guys around to support your immune function. So when it's called on, your immune system is ready to go. It's ready to fight. Next question is a really good one. And it says, so if I get sick with something like COVID or some other infection, and I also have autoimmunity, what do I look out for? So just to review, autoimmunity is literally when your immune system attacks a part of you. So one of the most common forms of autoimmunity is called Hashimoto's thyroiditis, where your immune system attacks your thyroid gland. That's not a very nice thing, right? Or you could have rheumatoid arthritis, where your immune system attacks the lining of your joints. Also not very nice. Or you could have a digestive system autoimmunity, like say Crohn's or colitis or something of that nature. Or you could have a neurological autoimmunity like multiple sclerosis and others. There are many forms of autoimmunity. Now, if you're getting sick or sick and you have autoimmunity, there's a couple of buckets of problem that you can get into. One of them is autoimmune people can tend to be on drugs for their autoimmune condition that are also immune suppressive. I'll talk about the mechanisms of that in the next question, but that is one bucket of problems. The other bucket of problems is an autoimmune person can have an imbalanced immune response, meaning their immunity is all focused in this one area against those parts of you that you have autoimmunity against, but then you have maybe a little bit of immune neglect in another area because you're all focused over here in this one area. So there's a couple of things to watch out for. One, many people, not all, but many people with an autoimmune disease can get aggravation of their autoimmunity with an infection. Okay, and that's because the infection causes the immune chemistry to rise. The body is already autoimmune, so some of that immune chemistry rise goes over and, and fill— overfills the autoimmune bucket. So one thing you do want to look for is a change in your symptoms. And let's say you've been pretty calm with your symptoms, whatever they are for your autoimmunity, and now they seem to be ramped up, and you also know that you're also sick. Now, there's no way not to get, you know, sick really practically, because everybody will get an acute something somehow. Yeah. But what you want to do is monitor and mind yourself during that time period. Now, if you're an autoimmune patient and you're not, you know, sometimes on the front end of treating autoimmunity, you're not controlled really well with your autoimmunity and you get a lot of symptoms, that's a time to call, you know, your primary medical caregiver or your specialist and just let them know that, you know, you've got a cold or flu or COVID or whatever and you're having these symptoms. They need to know about that so they can appropriately deal with it. So for safety, you want one of your healthcare providers to know this. And one of the reasons is if, let's say, you're on an immune suppressive drug and it's helping you, but then you get an infection, you might need some extra anti-infective treatment to back up your immune suppressive drug. So that's, that's another thing autoimmune folks need to watch out for. Now, as goes with these things, there is never anything that's 100%. And so when I say that an autoimmune person tends to get aggravated during an infection, that doesn't mean all of them do. I got a great comment earlier this— it was yesterday, I think, and then this morning— where a person said, hey, do you want to hear a real weird thing that happened with my health? And I said, oh, okay. And they said, you know, they they got exposed to this illness and they have these immunologic problems and they were expecting to get much worse and they actually got better. And they wanted a comment on why that might happen. Well, the real answer to why that might happen is it could be a lot of things, but what made the most sense is that in most cases, when you get sick and you already have autoimmunity, raise your immune activity, autoimmunity gets aggravated. Sometimes— because remember, it's not one thing, it's an orchestra of chemistry that makes your immune system work— sometimes what happens is the orchestra ramps up and gets really loud, and the chemistry it puts off actually calms the autoimmunity down. And in this person's case, that happened. Now, I think they were fortunate because that's not the normal thing, but it can happen that way. And this is a follow-up from the other autoimmune question, and the question is, my doctor told me my medication lowers my immunity. Why would this be? That's a good one. Um, in autoimmunity, you have, uh, the need to calm your immune activity down. So again, you have this line you're trying to hold where you don't want too much immunity so you're attacking yourself. You don't want no immunity so that you die of, you know, infections and stuff. You want to, you want to kind of dampen the activity of your immune system. Now, there are many, many ways to do this. There are a lot of things people will try from the natural world that are immunomodulatory. A real good example is like curcumin from turmeric. Sometimes essential fatty acids are used this way, etc., etc. But in the drug world— and this question particularly was about drugs that lower immunity— and why does your doctor tell you that? Because they want you to watch out. If you get an infection, you need to let them know because you're on an immune suppressive drug and the infection can kind of go wild in you, right? Yeah. So you do have to be careful. So that's why your doctor tells you those things. Well, there's a couple of mechanisms by which these drugs will be immune suppressive. So they're not really immune modulating, they're more suppressing the immunity. But the bottom line is you can get an overall suppressive drug like a high dose of a steroid. And an overall suppressive drug like high-dose steroids is very good at calming the autoimmunity down. But it basically opens the door up for other infections to come in. Why would that be? Because the things that the steroid suppresses so your autoimmunity feels better are also the things that tells your immune system to get going and kill this thing that's coming into you. So steroids are sort of the, the old original version of immune suppressants. There's others too, of course. But in modern times, we have all these biologic drugs. They tend to be the ones that are designer drugs. They're targeted at certain parts of your immune system, for example, and they tend to be extremely expensive. You know, some of them in the United States can be, you know, $100,000 to $300,000 in a year. Some of them can be, you know, $20,000 a dose. Just kind of depends what the drug is. Some are not quite that expensive, but they're still really expensive. So these drugs, unlike say a steroid that goes in and blocks the inflammatory cascade at the beginning, these things go in at the very end and they plug into places where maybe an immune trigger would be. So they plug into it and then the immune trigger can't get in there. Okay. So they're very good at blocking your symptoms, like in autoimmunity. They're extremely good there. The problem is, kind of like with the steroids, although they're not a blanket suppressant, they do block this immune activity. And that means they're not just doing it— say you have, you know, rheumatoid arthritis— they're not just doing it in your joints, they're doing it everywhere in your body. So then if you get something coming in, uh, like an infection, you're gonna have more trouble there. And that's something that you really need to keep track of, which your doctor will warn you about. Okay, literally, we, uh, in our clinical practice have seen patients come in on these, uh, biological drugs to suppress some immune function or balance it. We've seen them come in with, um, you know, 2 fungal infections, 3 bacterial infections, a parasite, you know, all kinds of stuff, and they had no symptoms at all except they were fatigued. And the reason that we checked them for all those infections was because we knew they were on an immune suppressive drug. And so while they didn't really have a lot of symptoms from these infections, they had to be killed, these infections. You have to monitor that sort of thing. So that's what your doctor means by your medication may lower your immunity. And if you're on that kind of thing, an immune suppressive or immune modulating drugs, you know, collection, especially for autoimmunity, you do have to be extra careful around other people. So, for example, when we're treating people with cancer who are immune suppressed, we would recommend— this is before COVID you know— we would recommend that while they were in the clinic that they were masked up and anybody who was near them or symptomatic was masked up. And Staff's masked up. If we had people, you know, who had immune suppressive therapies and they're autoimmune and any, you know, they're, they're positive for these infections or people around them are symptomatic, you know, we mask up for that reason just to help lower the amount of potential for transmission to an immune-compromised person. So the next one is— go away from the autoimmune, and now it says, you mentioned things that block or slow COVID viral uptake by our cells. How do they do this? Okay, so it's kind of 2 categories we've talked about with regard to uptake. There are the viral uptake blockers, which is important because for a virus to replicate, it needs to go into your cell, and there has to be machinery that takes the virus up and puts it in the cell. So that's a viral uptake process. And then there is the, uh, Zinc, the mineral zinc uptake. Okay, so in older, uh, videos we've talked about these zinc ionophores, right? Well, zinc ionophores or ionophores are the little, uh, areas that is like a key where you can put it in, turn it on, and the zinc will go in the cell. Well, the more zinc you have in your cells, the, the less likely virus are to get a foothold. Now, zinc doesn't naturally like to go into your cells, so that's why sometimes you need these ionophores to help out. Now, some of the ionophores we talked about were things like green tea or green tea extract, which is EGCG. There's also the flavonoid called quercetin. We've got videos on all these things. Um, quercetin, green tea, those both work pretty well. Old-fashioned plant medicine called quinine. Uh, quinine does this really handily, very well. The thing you want to be careful with, with quinine, you want a healthcare provider that's used to using it because it can cause synchonism, which is dizziness and ringing in your ears and other things you may not want. So you just don't want to go out willy-nilly and take some quinine. But that indeed is one, and it does help out. And then there's other things that are drugs, like hydroxychloroquine is another one that does that. Well, then if you look at the other side, which is the viral uptake inhibitor, then you have things like the antimalarial drugs. Now, if we had, you know, 3.5 to 4 hours, we could really get into how antimalarial drugs cross over into the world of antiviral activity. But we don't have that much time. We will be getting the hook here in about 30 minutes, so we don't want to get into that. But the bottom line is there's categories of drugs that help block the virus from going in your cell. Now there's some newer designer-type drugs that do that, these biologic or biosimilar medications, and those you would often be given in a hospital, maybe outpatient nowadays a little bit. There are also things such as the whole group of antimalarials. So one, probably one of the biggest used antimalarials in the whole world is actually a drug that I was involved in researching with respect to cancer as well, and that is called artesunate, which is a semi-synthetic of artemisia. Artemisia annua is the wormwood plant, and artemisia has been used in traditional medicines for thousands of years as an anti-infective and other things. Well, it turns out that the artemisia, artemisinin, all of the other components that come from the wormwood plant are, um, really very adept at blocking uptake into the cells. Now they have a secondary benefit, which is that they kill a lot of co-infections. Now we talked about co-infections before, and, um, one of the things to keep in mind with co-infections is if you already have an infection but it's kind of latent, it's laying back and avoiding your immune system not making you too sick. A lot of those latent infections wait for you to get a bigger infection like the flu or pneumonia or COVID or some other thing, and then all these latent infections pop up and say, all right, the immune system is busy over here, we're gonna replicate and create problems. Now you don't just have pneumonia or COVID or the flu or whatever, now you got COVID pneumonia or the flu and all these other latent infections that were laying around. And people always say, well, if you're not symptomatic, how can they be a problem? Well, they aren't a problem when you're not symptomatic, but when you become symptomatic with the other disease, uh, the immune system can't fight on all those fronts at one time. And then it becomes very, very important for your immune system to be balanced. And, uh, and not have to fight all these other guys, these co-infections. So it turns out that some of the antimalarials, like the artemisia family, kill a lot of the co-infections. We've used it a lot for that. Others to consider would be— we mentioned hydroxychloroquine. Ivermectin works in a similar way, blocking viral entry. And then, as I said, there's a lot of new modern designer drugs that do this as well. Now, the next question was a follow-up, and I kind of jumbled those together, but they were basically talking about zinc, and you said zinc needs to get in the cells to help with viral infection. That's where the zinc ionophores come in. So literally drinking green tea, if you like to do that, is a support to zinc getting in your cells. Quercetin. Quercetin you find in, you know, onions and certain other plant material. It's a flavonoid. It's a polyphenol from the plant. You can look up quercetin with a Q, Q-U-E-R-C-E-T-I-N, quercetin, and just look it up online. Say foods with quercetin. Now let's say you're maybe exposed to people a lot who are sick. healthcare worker, or maybe you live with people who bring home stuff from work and you, you're concerned about your zinc getting in there, um, you might want to take it a next step beyond just eating and, and drinking your, you know, EGCG or quercetin. You, you can also take those things as supplemental, just take them along with your food. Um, that's probably the best way to do it. In, in immunologic cases like with COVID and other things, we may actually give extra of those, or maybe some medications that do this zinc thing. But while we're on zinc, this is something after I printed these out that I saw again, a really big kerfuffle online. I think, you know, social media is great because it connects us all and we all get to see stuff and we watch strange videos like this one. But social media also has a whole lot of, you know, contention and drama and other stuff on it. And this, this was on a healthcare provider group, um, so, you know, they, they should know better. But, um, there was a big— pardon me, my allergy is getting the best of me— there was this big, uh, brew Haha. Going on in this group about, well, we're telling people to take zinc, but zinc depletes copper and it's dangerous and all this. Well, of course. All right, if you know enough that, you know, you're licensed to prescribe something like zinc, you're supposed to know enough to know that zinc and copper have a balancing relationship. And in your body, you use zinc in certain places and copper in others. And if put a lot of copper in you, I can deplete your zinc. Put a lot of zinc in you, I can deplete your copper. So the real point of their contention was a good one. It was about safety. But here's the rational way to think about this so that you don't have to worry about these things. Yes. And if you go back to, you know, my videos and a lot of other people's videos early on in COVID, a lot of the doctors were talking about zinc. They're telling you, you know, take 30, 50, you know, 70 milligrams of zinc a day. Remember, take it with food to make you— make you throw up otherwise. So eat half your food, take your zinc pill, eat the other half of your food so it digests, right? But we were talking about that, and every time I said it, I said this is a short-term thing. Long-term, what do you want to do? You want to have all the trace minerals because it's not just about zinc. Obviously zinc's important, and a lot of people are zinc deficient. You can actually get it tested. But the important part about that is you want to have all the trace minerals there to build you up and to balance the zinc out. So for the most part, what I have done through all, all through my years of practicing during cold and flu season, and now in the last year and a half daily, uh, through COVID is to give people a multi-mineral. Now, multi-minerals that come in different types— the ones that I give tend to be a multi-trace mineral because a lot of people already taking calcium and magnesium and other things like that. But the bottom line is you want to look in there and you want to make sure you see zinc and copper, and they'll be in a ratio that's appropriate. You'll see selenium and chromium. You should see molybdenum, and there'll be other trace minerals. That's a, that's a very good product. So what I had people do was to get their levels up, to take a little bit extra. Let's say that the recommended dose is, uh, you know, we'll make it easy, 1 pill a day, right? Take it with food. Well, what I would have people do is, you know, 3 or 4 pills with their food, uh, for 3 or 4 weeks, and then go down to 1 pill. Okay. a day. So then you get this nice little crescendo going up, kind of fill the tank, so to speak, and then you go down to a maintenance dose. But here's the thing, trace minerals like your B vitamins and vitamin C are all water soluble. So that means that what you take today that you don't use can leave your body. Now minerals get stuck, uh, in a good way in enzyme systems and things, so they might be occupied, so they might all be leaving today. but they also don't build up in your body, with the exception of your bones and a little bit in some other tissues. You don't really store minerals long-term in places, so you, you do need to be mindful of getting them in. Same with B vitamins and vitamin C, the water-soluble nutrients. So zinc, you know, all the kerfuffle about it's got to be balanced with copper and all that. If you just take a reasonable multi-trace element And maybe in the beginning do a little bit more and then back off, take it with food, you're always going to have those things balanced out. Okay. So what else on the question board do we see? Oh, really good one. I've seen this discussed and I've been asked it. If I'm taking all these immune supplements, will I not get COVID? Well, you're, you're asking a, a great question, and it's a question that absolutely nobody will have the answer to. If, if they tell you for sure one way or the other, they're, they're shining you on, they're lying. Um, so this is the way to think about it. You cannot guarantee that by doing X you will not have Y happen. Okay. It's very hard to prove prevention, meaning unless you've got decades and a lot of people and they're all doing something and you can make a causal association between we took these nutrients and those people didn't get COVID, you can't really prove that one way or the other. Now also, there are people that categorically will say It will never protect you. Okay, so taking nutrients won't protect you. Okay, I don't buy into either argument because what it takes to get any illness, especially COVID, is so many dominoes falling in a lot of different directions that your nutrient status is just one piece of the puzzle. So for example, let's say you're taking all the right immune nutrients and all of that, but you're, you're not sleeping, you're sleep deprived. Or let's say you're taking all the right nutrients, but you're eating a high sugar diet or whatever. Nutrients going to help you? Sure they will. But do you have other places where there's a hole in the bucket? Yes, you do. And just like we say with, you know, cancer prevention, you could do everything perfectly and still get a disease. You can still get COVID or the flu or whatever, but it lowers your propensity for it. And what we normally see is it lowers how sick you get. That's really the important part of immune nutrients. So it's not that you'll never get COVID, but it's that you are, um, you have some backup. And the more things you do right, the shorter your illness generally will be. Now the next one I thought was really great, and there were 2 questions like this, so I put them next to each other so we could talk about this all at once. First one is, can you explain how vitamin A and D— so A like apple and D like daffodil— how do vitamin A and D help with immunity? Okay, well, they're both fat-soluble vitamins, which means what? Fat-soluble vitamins can build up in your blood and then in your tissues. The fat-soluble vitamins are A, D, E like Edward, and K like kappa. So A, D, and K can build up in your blood. So we do, you know, we want to be careful about megadosing fat-soluble vitamins. On the other hand, there are some of them when we are around a lot of sick people or fighting off a lot of infectious things that we will use up more of. Now, there's different ways that these things work. So D, you hear a lot about, D like dog. Vitamin D is like most fat-soluble vitamins, it's not so much a vitamin. Vitamin D is actually a steroid hormone. And so it is made from cholesterol just like your, uh, corticosteroids, like cortisol is, and just like your reproductive hormones are. So it's a steroid hormone. Well, why does vitamin D— so I don't know if you remember back, like, you know, 25 years ago or more, you know, we were told it was like malpractice to tell people take more than 400 IUs of vitamin D because they would calcify and die. And then about, you know, 15 years ago to 10 years ago, we started seeing all this vitamin D research. Vitamin D helps prevent cancer and helps prevent infections. And, you know, it makes the sun rise in the morning, all this stuff. Well, why the big change? Well, science caught up to reality, and that is vitamin D is very important. So yes, you don't want to overdose on it, but you also don't want to be low. And vitamin D is one where it's easy to get your levels checked, and you really should have your levels checked if you're taking vitamin D long term. But that being said, vitamin D being a steroid hormone and doing other things that, uh, that bind— there's these things called the vitamin D receptors, and they affect all sorts of stuff. Okay, well, immunity and immune function is one of those things. So again, it's not that you want to have, uh, you know, 500% of the vitamin D you need, you want to have a good amount, you know, like 70 percentile or 200 percentile, so that you have enough vitamin D activity in your body. Not too much, not too little. Okay, now vitamin A, like alpha vitamin A, is a hormone-like substance as well, and it binds at these retinoids. So vitamin A, one of its forms called retinol, There's also like retinyl palmitate and retinyl and all these things. Those are vitamin A. Well, vitamin A in your body, in your bloodstream, is very selective in the body about where it goes. So your body uses a lot of vitamin A in 3 major tissues, and it doesn't want the vitamin A in other tissues. Okay, so those three tissues for vitamin A are the eye. It's pretty simple. Epithelia, which means your skin but also your mucous membranes and everything else, and then your reproductive system. All three of those use a lot of vitamin A, and they have very specific binding sites and transporters to make sure the vitamin A gets into those cells and not into others. Now, in the case of vitamin A and immunity, there's a few things it does, but one of the big things it does is it helps with the epithelial immunity. So you could think your skin, but think more about what we talked about earlier, those IgA places, the mucous membranes. So we use a lot of vitamin A with people, especially when they're getting respiratory transmitted viruses and bacteria, because you have to keep the vitamin A levels up in the respiratory mucosa, because that's where the entree point, the entry point, is for those type of viruses, bacteria, etc. So whether it's something like SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, or Mycoplasma pneumoniae, or, uh, you know, the common cold, or whatever it is, If you are low in vitamin A in your body, you you will have a worse time with your mucous membranes fending that stuff off. So that's why vitamin A and D are often given. Now they are fat soluble, and we definitely test people's vitamin D. We sometimes will test vitamin A if we use it a long time, but kind of like the zinc story, we we don't give like tons of vitamin A for. And ever and ever. You, you take enough and then you back down. I really recommend with fat-soluble vitamins, well, with any medical treatment, because remember, number one, this is all just my opinion. Number two, it's not medical advice. Number three, if you get your medical advice from, you know, TV or YouTube or the radio, you're probably in trouble. So check these things out with an educated healthcare provider. provider, meaning they've done some extra work to figure out and understand how to dose nutrients and things of that nature. Getting to the next follow-up question, which is, my doctor told me vitamin A and D were potentially toxic and I should not take them. Why would my doctor tell me that? Well, for example, there is a condition called hypervitaminosis A, which is too much vitamin A. And you could have any hypervitaminosis you want. But this goes back to what I was saying, where your body cannot get rid of fat-soluble nutrients. So A, D, E, and K, we are always cautious about super high doses because eventually your body will fill up with them. For example, your liver will store a lot of vitamin A because that's where a lot of the transporters are made. And when it runs out of storage spaces, you can become vitamin A toxic. vitamin D, your body will try and hyperconvert to other forms and try and get out, but it can get overwhelmed as well. So yes, they are— A and D, or A, D, and K actually— are potentially toxic, which is why they should be used appropriately. So it's just like the zinc discussion. Yeah, if you take, you know, 100 milligrams of zinc forever, you're gonna have too much zinc. You know, this is common sense, really. Well, A and D, you build up faster than you would build up zinc, so you just have to be very, very careful. Okay, so they're— they are potentially toxic, but you just want some guidance with taking them. It's not like you're, you know, going to immediately drop dead if you start to, you know, take some vitamin A or something. But yes, fat-soluble vitamins, be cautious with them over time. Um, I got this question a whole bunch of times, and I think it's a great question. I'm gonna try and do it justice. Um, and it says, uh, okay, one more time, and I don't think this will be the last time. Um, how can a fully vaccinated person for COVID-19, fully vaccinated, still get COVID? and transmit it. This has come out in the news and it's true, etc. This is the way you want to think about it. If we go back to what I talked about earlier, and that is your immune system has a T-cell and a B-cell specific branch. When we think of immunity, often we think of B cell and antibody immunity. So we'll start there. And if you get an injection of an immunization either into your muscle or subcutaneously, that goes to your peripheral circulation and it bypasses the mucous membranes. Okay, when it gets into your peripheral circulation, the antigen that you know, has triggering your immune response from the vaccine triggers the formation of B-cell product IgM like Mike and IgG like George. It doesn't make IgA like Apple. IgA is what protects you from getting viruses in your respiratory system. So the reason currently with the vaccines that are out right now that help you trigger IgM and IgG, and also then the T-cell products that we've talked about before. Those vaccines do that, but then they don't make the IgA to protect your mucous membranes, your respiratory system. And so there's this lag time where you get exposed to COVID-19, especially with Delta variant, etc., but you get exposed to COVID-19 you're fully vaccinated, it gets into your mucosa in the back of your throat, your nose, your nose and throat area, etc., even your lungs. There's no IgA against it made, and it takes the body quite a while before the IgM or IgG response reaches your mucous membranes. Now what that translates to is that whole time before Uh, the cavalry comes and the IgG or M gets there, you are breeding COVID in your respiratory system and you can give it out to people. So this is why they talk about protection methods, whatever they are— distancing, masks, etc.— even if you're fully vaccinated, because you can be a breeding ground for COVID just as much. And this is based on the CDC research I cited in previous, uh, Delta, uh, episodes. So you can go back there and look at the show notes in the YouTube. Um, you can breed it as much as an unvaccinated person, and that's how that happens. Um, so there's a lot of things to think about. There's a lot that goes on. Um, but I think you You know, we've kind of— we've tread over some good questions. That's probably enough for one day of new information. I do just want to, number one, thank everybody who is not only watching us on CTR but also has gone over to YouTube, and they can share these on YouTube with friends and family. I really appreciate that. I want to thank you for subscribing to the YouTube channel. That really does help out. Liking, sharing. All of those things, they—it's—it is true. It really helps. Really appreciate all of the questions. Now remember, if you're trying to find one hub where all the stuff is, like the you know the newsletters, the Instagram account, the Facebook account, YouTube account, other articles by me, and just all all all the stuff, Dr. A—it's just dranow.com, D R A N O W dot com. Dr. A now dot com, D R A N O W dot com, and you can go there and there's links to all of this stuff that's out there because it's there. I'm in a lot of places all at the same time, and people have a hard time kind of keeping up. If you want to give some you know feedback or questions or whatever, Dr. A now has a contact us portal and also a very direct way or the question. Uh, you know, the comments down below on the YouTube channel, which again you can get the link right through Dr. A Now. Um, and, uh, all, all the other information is going to be there too. So again, thank you so much. Thank you all of you, uh, people who have subscribed. Thank you all who send questions in. Um, it's, you know, sort of building a community. And, um, I'm really trying to answer questions as factually as possible to the best of my ability. Sometimes there's stuff like, well, everything, but like with COVID where it's a moving target. And we know stuff now we didn't know 3 weeks ago. And we certainly didn't know 6 months ago. You do the best you can. And I always try and be really upfront with, we don't know this, but this is what we think is going on. I'll try and answer your questions as very, very honestly as possible. And without a lot of drama, because I don't— I I don't do that. It's— I know it's a big thing on social media, but I don't need to involve myself in that. All right. Well, we're going to get to Hook. This has been a great show. Thank you everybody. And I'm Dr. Andersen. I'll see you all on the radio next week.