Change Your Brain Every Day - The Surprising Vitamins for Fighting Off Illness, with Dr. Parris Kidd

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

In this age of pandemic, the last thing anyone wants is a compromised immune system. After all, our immune systems fight off infections and keep us healthy. So what role do vitamins and supplements play in all this? In the third episode of a series with scientist Dr. Parris Kidd, he and the Amens reveal some of the surprising and lesser-known vitamins that are vital to the health of the immune system.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are on episode three with Dr. Kidd, and this is just so fascinating. Dr. Kidd, I just have to personally tell you,

I actually feel like I owe a lot of why I feel so great and so healthy to you. My supplement routine has changed dramatically. And I actually haven't been sick. You even mentioned it. So even during this time of this crazy quarantine, I'm usually one of those people who gets sick a lot. And when I get sick, I get really sick. And it's been like, what, a few years now since I've been really sick. Quarantine all by itself is bad for the immune system. Right. Actually, I feel great. I've enjoyed it. There's chronic stress. People are watching the news too much. So we've talked about vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E. And I also want to talk about zinc. In NeuroVite Plus, we have 20 milligrams of zinc.

And why is zinc important to the immune system? Well, you know, with that very nice product we just developed from Mood, the Happy Saffron, I learned something about zinc. I learned that zinc is spread across all of our chemistry, across all of our biochemistry. It's required for at least 200 enzymes to function. It's required for our DNA to be transcribed into proteins. It's required for at least 2,000 proteins to function, which could be as much as a third of all the proteins that the body makes. And zinc is just involved in a wide range of organ functions, so much so that in countries where people are not, especially children, are not getting enough zinc in their diet, their growth actually becomes

stunted. And those children tend to have, not tend to, they do have a higher risk for diarrheal and other types of infections. And if you give them zinc, the rate of infection falls, their growth resumes. And that's just one example of how important it is. So it's important for the solid tissues, that is the bone marrow, the thymus, the spleen, to make immune cells. And it's also important for the immune cells themselves to be communicating with each other, to be fixing damage, and to generally be functioning on a high level. And then it's important as part of the antioxidant defenses.

So there are very important antioxidant enzymes that need to have zinc. So zinc goes across all of our biochemistry. And we need it not only for our mood and our memory and other brain functions, but for a wide range of immune functions and for overall growth we needed for our reproductive and sexual function. So for example, men lose zinc during sexual activity. And so zinc is just a very, very important nutrient. And it's estimated that up to 20% of all Americans may not be getting enough zinc. So we talk about nutrient gaps in the American diet. And it may be that as many as

one in five Americans are not getting sufficient zinc. That's by the most conservative, by the most limited estimates. Wow. And during one of the White House news conferences, the president who's been rooting for hydroxychloroquine, which I think had a significant positive impact on my parents who both had COVID-19. He mentioned zinc, but so did Dr. Philaday, who's our integrative medicine chief, because zinc was involved in actually killing the virus. And as you mentioned in the last episode, I've been seeing a number of videos going around about zinc and I don't know why it shwebs, but... Because of the quinine. But that it helps it absorb better, that it helps with pain, that... Right. Quinine water is actually similar to chloroquine. I mean,

correct me, Paris, if I'm wrong, and that helps to kill malaria. And so the quinine has been a treatment in the past for infectious agents. Well, one thing that I do is I'm the science guy. From the time I was a little boy, I was a nerd. I got serious about science by the time I was 11 years old. Science is all that I do. It's the only thing I really can do. And I've learned through my 36-year career with dietary supplements that we've got to stay with the science. Okay?

Dr. Fauci is one of my heroes because when I was writing my book on HIV, Living with the AIDS Virus, he was the one who actually let in the activists and worked with the activists to move forward with getting that virus under control. And I'm with him. We've got to stay with the science. YouTube does not cut it. You've got to stay with the clinical trials. You've got to stay with the science. YouTube does not cut it. You've got to stay with the clinical trials. You've got to stay with the science that we know. And we know that in clinical trials, zinc as glycinate, which is what we have in our supplements, benefits immunity. That we know for a fact. And you can get it in a very substantial allowance from the Neurovite Plus. You can even take twice the dosage of the Neurovite Plus if you want added protection. Now, we haven't even got to vitamin D, which turns out to be a very, very important nutrient

for balancing the immune system. So the immune system has all sorts of ways it can go. It can be hesitant, or it can be overaggressive. So it can be more or less pro-inflammatory, or it can be more or less anti-inflammatory. And vitamin D made in the skin or coming in with the foods is converted into a hormone for which all the immune cells and the solid tissues have sensors. They have receptors. So even the single immune cells can respond to vitamin D. And we know that up to 90 some percent of Americans are not getting sufficient dietary vitamin D. Because of all the paranoia about skin problems, people as they go out, even when I take my grandkids to the beach,

I see little kids totally covered. They have full clothes on, they have a big hat on, they're not getting enough sun. So it's no wonder that we're having issues. And people with vitamin D deficiency also have a higher risk for autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, stuff like that, because vitamin D is balancing the activity of the immune system. And that's very, very easy to get. So, you know, BrainMD offers a very high quality vitamin D3. And I want to caution the people out there not to take vitamin D2 because it competes with

vitamin D3. You need vitamin D3. That's the one that becomes the hormone. That's the one that has receptors all through our tissues. So vitamin E now is in the cell membranes, and vitamin E is important. And 80-some percent of Americans probably aren't getting enough vitamin E from their diets. Are we seeing a picture here of the American diet being really bad? The standard American diet? So let's stay with vitamin D just for a minute. There's a new study out of Indonesia on who died with COVID-19.

And they were older, male, and had low vitamin D. So when they actually corrected for age, sex, and other conditions, low vitamin D was one of the significant predictors of death. And so it is so important. And what I've seen routinely over the last 20 years is a very high percentage of my patients are deficient in vitamin D, which is why in NeuroVite Plus, we have 2,000 international units of vitamin D. But I need to touch on this because I take NeuroVite Plus, plus I take our additional vitamin D and i take it daily i take i take about 10 000 international units daily um because i think not everyone

absorbs vitamin d the same way i think it's dependent on multiple things they're also mutations too right i test mine regularly i have um an amazing amazing an amazing endocrinologist up in san francisco that is a researcher at UCSF and he calls himself the savant of thyroid and much like you he's gotten grief his entire life because he does things very unconventionally has a huge waiting list of people coming from all over the world to see him gets grief from his colleagues and I've never felt better, but there's a big discrepancy on what keeping your vitamin D level optimal is. Now for me, he thinks that he thinks it's very overblown, this idea of vitamin D deficiency or toxicity. He thinks it's very overblown. Vitamin D toxicity

is just like the idea of it is just not what people think it is. He wants mine between 80 and a hundred. So, but I hear people say, Oh, that's too is. He wants mine between 80 and 100. But I hear people say, oh, that's too high. He's like, that's crazy. But that's within a normal range. Why would- My OBGYN said that's way too high. So I want to clarify this. Well, let's talk about units. At nanogram per mil, 80 to 100 is very high, but it's still safe. And it looks with vitamin D like the higher you can get, the better off you are. I would not recommend going beyond 100 nanogram per mil, which is 250 nanomoles per liter. But the higher the vitamin D goes, the better off you are. And this includes the health of all the organs. It includes brain function.

It includes bones, joints, everything. This is truly, vitamin D is a pro-hormone. And when it becomes converted into the functioning hormone, calcitriol, then it does all kinds of marvelous things. And 10,000 IU is actually a fairly modest dose. And we know that taking it daily is better than going to your physician and getting a huge injection of it every few weeks or whatever. So important to take a daily vitamin D3 of high quality and to keep your total intake no more than 10,000 IU. And then it will go up. Then it will go up. And then to keep your blood level at no higher than 100 nanograms per mil. Yeah, I see these doctors arguing.

Measuring it is important. Measuring it so you now have a sense of how much you need. All right. I've never felt better. We're going to talk about magic mushrooms. Mushrooms and immunity, not hallucinogens. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast,

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