NUTRIENTS FOR IMMUNITY: Preparing for Cold & Flu Season

To Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. And today we're looking at preparing for cold and flu season, things that you can do that you probably have control over in your life. And this section is going to be on supplemental nutrients. So in the previous section, we talked about, you know, diet and lifestyle and other stuff like that. Now, what supplemental things might be good? So first off, let me just say, Nothing I'm gonna share with you is anything other than general health information from a doctor. This is not medical advice. So you should take this information and work it out with a healthcare provider that is trained to sort these things out for you. So don't take medical advice from people on, you know, the radio or YouTube and stuff. But that being said, just a little quick education. So in the nutrient world, on the supplement side of things, we might have things like amino acids. So those make up proteins, usually broken down, you know, like tyrosine, etc. We might have a number of amino acids put together like a tripeptide, like glutathione. Then we might have fats and fatty acids like the phospholipids or, you know, fish oil, omega-3s, 6s, etc. And then we can have vitamins and minerals. And so minerals are going to be water soluble. They're going to be the inorganic part of cofactors. And the vitamins then fall into 2 categories, which is fat soluble and water soluble. And so if we're looking at fat and water soluble, why would we care about the difference? Well, fat soluble vitamins, we tend to, if we take very much of them, we tend to recommend that you do a larger amount in the beginning, kind of a loading dose, and then taper off to a maintenance dose because a fat soluble vitamin, your body can build up in the tissues and while they're very useful for you, there are toxicity associations with too high of the fat-soluble vitamins. So you always want to have some advice and guidance if you're going to do like a lot of any particular fat-soluble vitamin beyond your food or maybe a multivitamin or something. Whereas the water-soluble vitamins are mostly not stored, they're a little bit are stored here and there, but mostly what you eat or consume today is gone, you know, by tomorrow or the next day. And so the water-soluble are considered a lot more safe. Now they might cause other, like gastrointestinal upset or other things like that, but generally they're pretty safe. So the fat-solubles are A, D, E, and K. A, D, E, and K, those are our fat-soluble vitamins, and they are all very important in the world of your immune system. Now we'll talk about them first and we'll talk about water-soluble stuff. So a real common one, we saw more about this in the last couple of years with COVID where there's some publications where people with more normal, like higher normal levels of vitamin D, had less dangerous versions of COVID when they were in the hospital, and on and on. I've talked about that on previous podcasts and put out those data and that sort of stuff, but basically vitamin D levels, you want to be sufficient. Now, you can get a vitamin D test pretty easily and Generally speaking, that's fine for general monitoring. If a person has never taken vitamin D, a lot of times their healthcare provider might say, well, for a month, why don't you take extra, you know, kind of get the level up and then we'll go down to a maintenance dose. Maintenance dose might be 2,000 IUs, 5,000 IUs, 10,000 IUs, depends on how your body utilizes vitamin D. Now, normally in modern times when we're supplementing with vitamin D, vitamin D and vitamin K, like K like king, go together and they do a lot of work together. So we think about vitamin D for bones, right? Well, one of the reasons vitamin D works for calcium metabolism in bones is because the vitamin K is there to help it get the calcium in the right direction, and so that it doesn't go to a soft tissue, it goes to the bone. Well, it turns out that they do a lot of other things together. Vitamin D obviously does way more, it's involved in immune function, hormone function, Et cetera. So most of the vitamin D supplements now, you can also get a vitamin D/K2, so D and K, K like king, DK2 supplements, and those maintenance ones are usually like 5,000 units of vitamin D and some hundred micrograms of K2, and that's, it's a particular ratio, and most supplement companies that are reliable have that figured out. If you're just taking vitamin D, that's fine too, it's just I think for long-term use, D and K2 go better together. And again, you know, run that by your healthcare provider. Vitamin A, something certainly that we can get toxic with. Pregnant women should take very low doses of vitamin A 'cause of potential teratogenicity to the fetus. But vitamin A is very important. It's also very important in acute use when we have especially respiratory infections, viruses, stuff like that. So vitamin A, while we don't want, you know, tons and tons forever, A lot of people are quite low. Their diet may not have as much, you know, whatever. So a lot of times if we are recommending things, you know, on an acute basis, we might give like a larger dose of vitamin A, sometimes 25,000 or 50,000 international units of a fat-soluble vitamin A for a little bit, and then we taper the person down, sometimes more, sometimes less. Again, that's a clinical decision to make, but vitamin A is incredibly important in your— respiratory function. So it works in all epithelial tissues, and your respiratory epithelium is a big place that it works. And so it helps support the immune system there. It's also been used in a number of other things to support immune function. The thing, just like with vitamin D being a fat soluble, is that if you keep— take a high dose for a long period of time, you can get overdose or toxicity symptoms, which is why if you're going to do, you know, a lot of this or long term, you really should— be working with a practitioner who understands how nutrients work and how to guide you there. Then the last one is E, vitamin E like Edward. And so vitamin E is a good base nutrient. A lot of times if you can get 200 or 300 international units of good vitamin E in a good quality multivitamin, that's plenty for you. We use it because it's part of the oxidation reduction system in the body. And so the redox system is there to help to modulate oxidation reduction. We always want both of them going on, but we wanna get back to kind of the midline. And that's what the oxidation reduction system does. And vitamin E is a big component of that as well. So usually lower doses though, 'cause it's kind of a chronically administered thing. Target doses are usually 200 to 400 international units a day for most adults, but you might be a little higher for certain things. And again, if it's, worked out with your healthcare provider. Whatever they come up with is great. Now, we also want to talk about water solubles, and I'm going to keep this to just some of the, the basic, the big ones. So vitamin C, we've had plenty of videos and audio on vitamin C. Bottom line is it is water soluble, it leaves your body, you don't store much in your body, and as soon as you get sick, your vitamin D levels plummet. down to either undetectable or almost undetectable. And that's because it's fully dependent on you eating it all the time, every day. The problem with that is, is that vitamin C is involved not just in oxidation reduction generally, but it's also involved in kind of the care and feeding of a lot of the immune cells. A lot of the reactions that the immune cells use to create an immune response are vitamin C dependent. And what we see in some research anyway is that if we keep the vitamin C levels up to normal during an acute or even an exacerbated dangerous illness, people will be in the hospital less time and may have some less sequelae, etc. So vitamin C you can take. Now, a lot of times the limit is your bowels. If you take too much vitamin C all at once, you get loose stools. It's not dangerous, it's just uncomfortable. So what we usually have people do is take it with each meal, split it up through the day. have them start with 500 milligrams and go up until their bowels feel a little bit loose, so 3 times a day, and that's usually really well tolerated. And vitamin C, it's one of those things that, you know, when you're healthy you can take just a little bit, and if you're getting sick you might want to take a lot more and then kind of, you know, taper down when you're feeling better. But vitamin C is definitely a very good preventive device on the front end. Now, does it keep you from getting sick? Not all the time, no. But again, you don't have to try and do everything you can to be a big target for immune problems. The B vitamins generally are water soluble as well. They have some cousins that kind of go both ways, but most of the B vitamins, and if you look even in the research for COVID, COVID prevention, all that stuff, there's a lot of inferential research around like using B complex, et cetera, 'cause they run so many enzyme systems. Yeah. And what we wanna remember is that the B vitamins do a lot of the work with enzyme cofactor, but they always work with minerals. So we'll talk about minerals too. Then there's glutathione and supportive things. So N-acetylcysteine is actually a form, an oral form of an amino acid that's a rate-limiting amino acid for the formation of glutathione. It also does other things like thin your mucus out. Turns out it's very helpful for your respiratory system, et cetera. And it can be directly supportive to your immune system. So a lot of people will take N-acetylcysteine. Again, it's water soluble, it's quite safe, and so if your healthcare provider recommends that, that's what they're going for probably. Now you might use N-acetylcysteine therapeutically, such as in a nebulizer or something, but this is more oral preventive use. A lot of people now will take glutathione, the acetyl glutathione or the liposomal glutathione or reasonably absorbable orally. Glutathione on its own is not terribly absorbable orally, but acetyl or liposomal glutathione, and we'll have people take that with their vitamin C kind of chronically in preparation for assaults on the immune system. And then the final part I wanted to just mention was the minerals, and so early in the COVID experience The discussion of zinc ionophores and zinc and all this got everyone really excited. And so everyone was taking these tons and tons of zinc, and, and now everyone's got like too much zinc and their copper is suppressed, which for some people may not be bad, but it's, it's one of those things where it's a balanced thing. Yes, if, if it's— you're gonna do it for 2, 3, 4 weeks, you're gonna take a lot of zinc and it doesn't make you throw up, great, you know, whatever. What I tended to do with patients, especially during COVID was to have them do a multi-mineral. This is that's going to have a good quantity of zinc, a little bit of copper, and then all the other trace minerals like selenium and chromium, etc., because they really work better together. And it's not just zinc that is helpful with the immune system. It's, it's sort of the famous trace mineral, but you need the other minerals as well. So a good trace mineral is better long-term for that than just taking a lot of one trace element, and that includes zinc. Now, if you're really around a lot of sick people or you know you're going to be exposed or something like that, then a lot of people will, for example, use like zinc lozenges when they're on airplanes, you know, increase the zinc in their oropharyngeal area. It actually works better if it's directly in contact with your mucous membranes. Or they might take a little extra zinc while they're traveling, etc. That's fine, but I think long term you're better off using a multimineral. So that's a little quick trip through nutrients. You can also go on the Dr. A Now website, dranow.com, and look into the archives of the newsletter, and there's nutrients for COVID in there in the newsletter. And we've got a ton of them in the videos and in the audio for the podcast as well. But again, not medical advice. Run all this by your healthcare provider. Like, share, subscribe, and I will see you guys for the next session.