The Dr. Hyman Show - Answering Your Questions About COVID-19, Long-COVID, and Staying Healthy During Cold and Flu Season

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. We are a sick nation. We're obese, we're metabolically unhealthy, and we have chronic illness. And all these diseases are diseases of inflammation. So we literally came into this pandemic pre-inflamed. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark here. No matter your genetics or lifestyle choices, as humans we all share the same basic needs like adequate nutrition, for example. But with the industrialization of agriculture and toxins in our environment, it's getting choices. As humans, we all share the same basic needs like adequate nutrition, for example. But with the industrialization of agriculture and toxins in our environment, it's getting harder and harder to get your body the nutrients it needs through food alone. And that's where AG1 comes in. AG1 is a foundational nutritional supplement that supports your body's universal needs for

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Starting point is 00:02:01 Welcome to Doctors Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And today we're going to go deep into a conversation that really matters. We're going to be tackling a topic that has left an indelible mark on reasons behind why so many Americans got so sick and died during the pandemic. And we're going to dig into the questions of why we as a nation are so susceptible to COVID-19's deadly effects. And now we're seeing the onset of cold and flu season, respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, and even the persistence of COVID-19 in more strains. So it's really important to learn from the past and learn how we can prevent and limit

Starting point is 00:02:51 the impact of exposure to all these challenging viral illnesses. So the question is, why are we so sick? Why do we have such a disproportionate number of deaths in America compared to the rest of the world from COVID-19? Six in 10 Americans have a chronic illness. 93% of us are metabolic and unhealthy. That's why. And chronic disease increases both the severity and the risk of death from COVID-19. Unfortunately, conventional medicine missed the root causes that drove the infection rates and all the hospitalizations and the deaths. Now, in this episode, we're going to explore why and how this happened and how functional medicine can help you understand how to address COVID-19 from both a prevention perspective and a treatment perspective,

Starting point is 00:03:39 and even make you more resilient when it comes to viruses and infections in general. There's a lot of things that affect our immune system, from vitamin D deficiency to our microbiome to our diet, which drives inflammation. And we're going to talk about how to address all those through the lens of functional medicine and the importance of really developing a comprehensive strategy for both diet and lifestyle prevention and supplementation to optimize your immune system so you don't get sick and so you reduce the risk of the severity of any illness you get and for sure reduce the risk of death. I'm going to talk about the data on that. It's pretty impressive. We're also going to navigate the complexities and uncover shortcomings and explore the promising solutions that lie at the intersection of health and science and functional medicine around this particular

Starting point is 00:04:25 topic. My hope is that this Health Byte episode will provide a roadmap to prevent COVID-19 for you and your family. It'll reduce the risk of severity and death and will help you better navigate the cold and flu season now and for years to come. So let's get into it. First of all, what's the deal? What happened in America? How did we have the worst COVID numbers in the world, right? America's 4% of the population of the world, and yet we had 16% of the cases and deaths, four times what we should have had. And we have, quote, the best healthcare system in the world. So why did we have such a disproportionate number of deaths and a disproportionate number of hospitalizations and cases of COVID. I mean, it's pretty striking. Seven million deaths from COVID. The U.S.

Starting point is 00:05:10 accounted for 1.2 million of those deaths and 6.5 million hospitalizations from severe COVID. It's a lot and put a huge drain on our system. So why is this important now? I mean, yes, COVID seems to be a thing of the past, but it's not really. It's still there. People are still getting COVID. So, it's important to know what you can do to prevent and protect yourself from these conditions, whether it's COVID, the flu, we're going to talk about how you can support yourself once you do get the illness and hopefully make it shorter. We're also going to talk about some of the challenges in the science and some of the things you've heard in the news. It's been a very controversial subject. There's a lot of, I don't know what to say, like it kind of in some ways to me, irrational conversations around COVID-19, around vaccines, around what to do about it, around treatments, around drug therapies. And it kind of misses the

Starting point is 00:06:13 point, I think, for a lot of us, which is how do we understand how to navigate this world and not get caught in this sort of web of confusing information. I wouldn't say misinformation. There's information, there's misinformation, there's confusing information. I would say a lot of the science has been kind of rolled over by the media. It's been kind of amplified in some ways by very outspoken people that believe one way or the other on either side. And I think we need to kind of get back to the basics. And I'm going to try to take you through what we know about this disease, what it does to your body, what the controversies are that still remain, why some of the science is not as clear

Starting point is 00:06:55 as we'd like it to be, what the science can show and what it can't show, and then what you can do to optimize your immune system and your health so you don't end up getting really sick and dying of this problem or any problem. Here's the take home here. The reason why Americans were so sick and were hospitalized at such an enormous rate and had so many more deaths per capita than the rest of the world was because we are a sick nation. We are pre-inflamed, we're obese, we're metabolically unhealthy, and we have chronic illness. And all these diseases are diseases of inflammation. So we literally came into this pandemic pre-inflamed. You've heard of pre-diabetes? We have pre-inflammation.

Starting point is 00:07:36 This is what's going on. And when the COVID virus hits in someone who's pre-inflamed, that inflammation cycle accelerates. And you've heard about the cytokine storm. You've heard about all that. It's all because obesity and metabolic illnesses like prediabetes, diabetes, and all the diseases that we see as we get older, heart disease and so forth, these are all conditions where we're pre-inflamed. And so when COVID hits a pre-inflamed person, it catches fire. And that's why we see this severity and the deaths in this country at the rate we did. So in terms of chronic disease, it's the biggest killer. There's 41 million deaths globally.

Starting point is 00:08:15 Seventy four percent of all deaths are from chronic disease. And I think that's important to understand. We think of malaria, TB, and AIDS, and all these diseases, which we should address. Even in the developing world, now chronic disease is taking over. I was recently in the Maasai area in Tanzania, and this is a tribe that lived on milk, meat, and blood for most of their history. And now they're eating lots of Coca-Cola and sweetened cookies. They all have diabetes. It's pretty depressing, actually. So it's not just in America. But in America, we think COVID-19 was bad, but there's more people that die every year from chronic disease than ever have died from

Starting point is 00:08:57 COVID. And these are preventable diseases. And it's funny, we don't talk about this pandemic of chronic disease, this pandemic of obesity, overweight, metabolic, poor health, diabetes as an imminent threat. But it is killing every day far more people than COVID ever did. Six out of 10 Americans have one chronic disease. Four out of 10 have two or more. These are things like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, pulmonary diseases, and many more kidney disease, hypertension. These are all related to the same underlying biology, even some resistance and poor diet and all the

Starting point is 00:09:33 things we talk about all the time. So it's not a mystery, but the strongest risk factor for death was people who had chronic disease. So if you had one or two comorbidities, meaning you had, let's say, high blood pressure and diabetes, you had a 70% increased risk of death. If you had three or more, which people do, they have heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, it usually goes as a cocktail because they all have the same mechanism. So really all the same piece. There's no such thing as comorbidity. It's a sort of medical term that makes me crazy because these are all connected. You know, you can't treat heart disease and diabetes and hypertension and all these things separately because they're all related. They're all mechanistically the same with different manifestations. But if you had three of these,

Starting point is 00:10:12 your risk of death went up by 130%. Also, your weight was a big factor. 75% of Americans are overweight, 42% are obese. In a deeper analysis, as I've mentioned before on the show, 93% are metabolically unhealthy, which means they have some abnormalities, including high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol, have had a heart attack or stroke, or are overweight. So only 6.8 percent of Americans don't have that constellation of symptoms or conditions. And, you know, those are the things that put us at risk. So when you look at know the obesity epidemic you know if you are overweight just overweight not obese your risk of ending up in the hospital went up by 20 if you're obese it went up by 72 and your risk of death went up by 25 if you had extreme obesity which is a bmi of over 40 it increased your risk of being in the

Starting point is 00:11:01 hospital by 250 and your risk of death went up by 200 250%. And your risk of death went up by 200%. Let me double your risk of death. Now, if your blood sugar was high, which by the way, it's an epidemic in this country. One in 10 Americans has diabetes. It's estimated that probably half of all Americans have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. I would say it's probably even more depending on how you define it. Prediabetes has got a very narrow, strict definition, but I see it's a continuum. It's not like on or off, right? If your blood sugar is 99, you're fine. But what if you're 100, then you're prediabetic? Well, it doesn't make any sense scientifically. So we have these arbitrary cutoffs. But the point is, if your blood sugar is like 106 to 125, you have a much higher risk of

Starting point is 00:11:38 severe COVID by 55%. If your blood sugar is over 126, it's highly predictive of death from COVID. And it also predicts a slower recovery, meaning if you get COVID, you don't get better that fast. Now, if you look at diabetes, they kind of look at type 1 and 2 together. But your risk of COVID infection versus non-diabetics went up by about 27%. You had two to three times the risk of having severe COVID. If your blood sugar average was, we call the A1C, was less than seven, which is six is sort of the cutoff, five and a half is really optimal. If you were less than seven, you're 46% increased risk of getting severe COVID. So if you were seven to 9% A1C, it was a 232% risk of severe code and if you're over nine which is pretty poorly

Starting point is 00:12:26 controlled diabetes your risk was about 260 percent so it tracks the higher your blood sugar the worse your risk the higher risk of hospitalization the higher risk of death type 2 diabetes we also saw the same thing it's because they've met about they're more at risk not because they're so eating bad but often diabetes type 1 is poorly controlled. And often people get double diabetes, type 1 and 2, meaning if they eat sugar and they just take more insulin, the insulin is going to create inflammation, weight gain. So they had a high risk by about 41% of COVID and severe COVID by three times, 300%. When you look at just type 2 diabetes itself, there was a really strong association between, as I mentioned, high

Starting point is 00:13:03 blood sugar and COVID-19 outcomes. And it's really all controlled by insulin resistance and chronic inflammation. So just to kind of back up a little bit, when you eat sugar and starch, and by the way, the worst thing for your immune system is eating lots of sugar and starch. If you back up and look at what's going on mechanistically, when you have a high refined starch and sugar diet, it jacks up your blood sugar, which jacks up your insulin, which then causes you to store fat in your abdominal area. We call it visceral fat or belly fat.

Starting point is 00:13:31 Those fat cells are not just there holding up your pants. They're inflammation factories. They produce all these cytokines like IL-6, TNF-alpha, IL-1, which are the cytokines we saw very elevated in COVID-19. So we see basically you have this increased inflammatory process as a result of insulin resistance. And that's why we saw people with type 2 diabetes had an 80% risk of really high risk of severe COVID. You were taking insulin, which means you're often poorly controlled on types of diabetes because you don't really need insulin. You had about a 59% higher risk of ending up in the ICU, being intubated, dying. Metformin, which, by the way, is interesting, is a drug that improves insulin sensitivity.

Starting point is 00:14:20 It's one of the drugs that we use for diabetes. You saw a 44% reduction in your risk of getting into the ICU or getting intubated or dying. So that's really great. Now, also, if you look at health disparities, they're huge. I mean, we saw African-Americans having much higher risk of hospitalization death because they're often higher risk for these conditions, disproportionately have these conditions. And we saw, for example, in some communities where there are 30% African-Americans, there were 70% of the hospitalizations and deaths, and they have much higher rates of hospitalizations. What about heart disease?

Starting point is 00:14:49 Well, heart disease, again, is this continuum of poor metabolic health, we call it. And a big review in British Medical Journal showed that there was a threefold higher risk of having severe COVID or death with heart disease. If you've got high blood pressure, you had a two and a half fold increased risk of severe COVID or death with heart disease. If you've got high blood pressure, you're at a two and a half fold increased risk of severe COVID. And, you know, your blood vessels were very affected during COVID and COVID further damaged your blood vessels. I just want to also mention as part of this podcast, all the things that I'm talking about are based on peer-reviewed literature. All the references are in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:15:21 You can go dig down and find them yourself if you want to learn more. I'm kind of giving you a high-level summary of what's going on in the data. And we're just kind of laying the landscape here. We're going to go on what's wrong with the conventional approach, but we're just seeing how this epidemic of chronic disease, which is driving so much of our suffering in America, so much of our healthcare costs, so much of our federal deficit with the cost of Medicare, it's going to be bankrupt in a few years, actually, if we keep going at the current rate. It's because of lifestyle preventable chronic disease, things that we talk about all the time on the podcast and that are really at the core of

Starting point is 00:15:54 how we think about looking at our biology through the lens of functional medicine. How do we deal with the root causes? Now, what about lung disease? Well, a lot of people have lung disease that is often caused by smoking. So it's not so much dietary. It can be asthma, emphysema, lung cancer, pulmonary hypertension. You know, one in seven Americans have this and it increases your risk of having, you know, poor outcomes from COVID. Kidney disease, which is usually caused by high blood pressure and diabetes, which are all the, by the way, high blood pressure is caused usually by insulin resistance. So it's all one condition, right? You see the same issues in people. It's not like they're separate diseases, as I mentioned. So if you have high blood pressure, kidney disease,

Starting point is 00:16:34 higher risk. If you took steroids, if you're, for example, having asthma or having an autoimmune disease or various conditions where doctors will use steroids like prednisone, it really, really suppresses your immune system and it reduces inflammation, but it also actually increases your risk of severe COVID. If you're immunocompromised, it makes sense that you'd be at risk for severe outcomes from COVID like cancer, puts you at high risk of having bad outcomes, autoimmune disease. If you're older, interesting, when you're older, your immune system is not as functional. You don't respond as well to vaccines. You're more likely to get sick. You're more likely to

Starting point is 00:17:14 end up in the hospital with pneumonia, with flu. And it's because your immune system becomes compromised. That's not inevitable. You can do stuff about it. We're going to talk about what you can do, but you know, when it's why we saw the, the, the nursing homes and retirement homes just be, you know, super spreader events for COVID. These virus spread like wildfire in these because of the predisposition of these people to, to infections because of their immune system compromise. They're also, you know, if you're frail and weak, you know, which is sarcopenia, meaning you lost muscle. We talk a lot about the podcast. If you saw people who are frail and weak in the nursing homes, there was a 441% increased risk of death, over fourfold increased risk of death if you're weak and have sarcopenia, which is crazy. Also, if you're protein deficient, protein is critical for your immunity. And when you're weak and have sarcopenia, which is crazy. Also, if you're protein deficient, protein is critical for your immunity.

Starting point is 00:18:06 And when you're elderly, you tend to not eat as much protein. You don't get as much calories. You're not as hungry maybe. And we tend to need more protein as we age. So protein is critical for immunity and for repair. Also vitamin D deficiency. If you're not taking vitamin D and you're not outside in the sun surfing all the time, you're going to end up with a vitamin D deficiency. We're going to drop into what that does to your immune system. But

Starting point is 00:18:29 vitamin D accounts for hundreds if not thousands of biological reactions in your body, including regulating immunity. What was really interesting to me was data that showed that if you had severe deficiency, less than 25, which is really, really low, it's really associated with increased severity of disease, increased ICU admission, increased death, increased risk of infection and hospitalization. This is from here, it's a systematic review. What was really interesting was one study I looked at during the pandemic showed that if your vitamin D was low, you were 70% more likely to end up in the hospital and die. Another study out of Israel, a large study, looked at anybody who had vitamin D levels over 50 nanograms per deciliter.

Starting point is 00:19:14 There was no death, like zero. I mean, you don't even get that with vaccine. Now, maybe it wasn't a big enough study. Maybe there were problems with the study, but it was a pretty compelling bit of data that showed that if your vitamin d level was high you meaning you were adequately covered and you had no deficiency and you had optimal ranges of vitamin d which i think is probably between 50 and 75 uh even though most labs say 30 or less is deficient and anything between over 30 is fine i don't think that's actually true when you look at optimal functioning of your health and immunity. It showed that there was zero risk of death if your level's over 50. So maybe we should be handing out vitamin D to every man, woman, and child in America as a way of preventing colds,

Starting point is 00:19:58 flus, and COVID. It's such a simple and expensive and safe thing to do. Dr. Andy Roark I know, you know, I have a cocktail I use when I get sick. I'll share it with you, but essentially it's high, high dose vitamin D, high dose vitamin A, and some zinc, some adaptogenic and herbal compounds that help immunity. And, you know, it really knocks it out. I, I, I literally, it's almost, I wouldn't say the cure for the common cold, but if I, if I start to feel some symptoms, I hit myself with that, never get really sick. There's a lot of reasons, like I said, why as a society we were susceptible, why we saw four times the rate of death that we would expect based on our population and hospitalizations.

Starting point is 00:20:38 It really has to do with our incredibly poor diet. We found that, for example, if you looked at the data on chronic diseases and influences on these chronic diseases, that if we had all had a better diet, we could have reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by 63% in America. That would have literally transformed everything that happened in our country. We wouldn't have had to do what we're doing now, which is this bailout. We wouldn't be dealing with inflation the way we are with mortgage rates skyrocketing. It was just really bad. And I actually had a chance to talk to the director of the NIH, Francis Collins, who's a wonderful man, brilliant scientist, but really clueless when it comes to nutrition. I had the

Starting point is 00:21:18 chance to ask him, and once he stepped down from the position, I said, why didn't you use this moment during COVID to tell America that they're at risk for a severe infection and death because of their diet and inspire them to learn how to eat better, to use this in medicine as we call a teachable moment where we use some pain point to help people understand what they're doing is affecting their health and inspire people to do better and create a national public health awareness campaign, just like we did for smoking. And he's like, well, we don't want to blame the person who's overweight. So we didn't do it. I'm like, well, it's not their fault. It's because the food industry. And as you know, I've written a lot about this in my book, Food Fix. I have a nonprofit

Starting point is 00:22:00 that's trying to address this, but I really, really think this is such a critical issue. And it was such a missed opportunity. And we focused heavily on vaccines and drug development and bailouts and, you know, stimulus packages. And I mean, I just, it was really misdirected. If we spent a fraction of the $8 trillion on educating America and teaching America and improving our food system, I think we would be way better off. So let's talk about sort of the conventional approach. Let's get into the treatment model. Let's get into what we're told to do, what science shows us works, what doesn't work.

Starting point is 00:22:38 And then we'll get into really how deeply to address COVID from a holistic perspective. How do we prevent it? How do we deal with COVID or other viruses when we get sick? How do we optimize our immune system? And this is really where functional medicines excels. For me as a functional medicine doctor, my job isn't to diagnose and treat disease. It's to understand where we're deviated from health and use the science of understanding human biology to optimize and create health. And when you do that, diseases don't have a place to go. For example, if you have a healthy ecosystem and a healthy regenerative farm, disease levels are far lower in the plants,

Starting point is 00:23:18 less weeds, less pests, less infections. The animals are healthier. i mentioned on the podcast i visited a regenerative ranch in in bison ranch in texas and they don't use anything there's no chemicals there's no sprays there's no weed killers or no fertilizer there's no pesticides the animals are basically wild they don't really have that care because they don't need it because you're left to kind of graze and live in an awful wide variety of wild and other plants that they'll throw on the ground with no till. And it was really amazing. It's a super healthy ecosystem. And in very much the same way, you know, when we create a healthy ecosystem in us, when we create a healthy soil of our own body, the host, we're much more resistant to everything. Why is it that some people might get exposed to a cold and they don't get sick and another person does? Why is it that one person gets very sick and another person doesn't?

Starting point is 00:24:19 It's because of the health of the host. All right, so we're going to come back to that in a minute. Hey, everyone. It's Dr. Mark. If you're a regular listener, you know that I'm often talking about the gut being central to the whole body health and the key to living a hundred healthy years. And this includes your skin. Thanks to a fascinating connection between the gut and the skin known as the gut-skin axis, the state of your gut can influence your skin's health and appearance, reflecting what's happening inside your body. And that's where Seed's DSO1 Daily Symbiotic can be so effective. DSO1 is more than just a probiotic for digestive health. With 24 clinically and scientifically studied probiotic strains and a plant-based prebiotic, it's designed for benefits in and beyond the gut, including

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Starting point is 00:25:42 Pharmacy. I want to kind of talk about some of the things like handwashing, masking, lockdowns, ventilators, vaccines. We're going to get into some of the controversial stuff. So the first thing is, should we wash our hands? Well, probably a good idea. I mean, if you wash your hands, you do reduce your risk of respiratory illness by about 11%. So it's worth doing. I think it makes common sense. Masking, in terms of masking, what does the data show? Well, Cochrane Reviews, which is an independent scientific review group that looks at many,

Starting point is 00:26:18 many different studies with people who are not affiliated with industry or have any political agenda, they found that masking probably makes little to no difference in the prevention of COVID or influenza-like illness. Now, listen, if you're really sick and you're coughing and spitting on everybody, it's probably a good idea to wear a mask. But on the prevention side, you know, if you're wearing a mask, it doesn't seem to do that much. Now, you can, over an abundance of caution, decide what you want to do. And it's a personal decision. But I do think if you're going into an exposed area, if you're going where there's high risk, probably wearing a N95 mask makes sense. But as a sort of social policy that was trying to reduce COVID, it didn't seem to really make

Starting point is 00:26:56 the most sense. And there may be harms, especially for children. You obviously have decreased sense of someone's face, emotional learning, recognition, communications. There may be just discomfort with it. I don't think it's super harmful. But imagine if you're like three years as a little kid, everybody's wearing masks and you can't read their facial cues. It's not great. This was Pediatric Respiratory Reviews by Vinay Prasad who wrote about this. So I'm going to check that reference.

Starting point is 00:27:23 Now, what about lockdowns? What do they do for us? Well, do they really make a difference? Well, it causes a lot of problems. It causes a lot of disease of despair, weight gain, depression, loneliness, binge drinking. You know, in a population study, 3,500 people, 48% gained weight, 34% sort of kept their weight and 18% lost weight. And those who were overweight to start with were 65% more likely to gain weight. If you're a little bit overweight, you were about 58% more likely. If you're a normal weight, not so much. But basically also, if you were depressed and anxious, you were more likely to gain weight. And there was much more risk of weight gain in women and individuals who were less than 45 years old. We also saw high rates of suicide in the youth

Starting point is 00:28:03 during the first year of the pandemic, much higher in males, youth, minority groups. So suicides, loneliness, depression, weight gain, definitely risk factors for that. Ventilators, let's talk about ventilators quickly. But initially there was ventilator use, but we realized that probably wasn't the best strategy. And there were much higher rates of readmission, mortality. There was much higher rates of non-COVID respiratory distress syndrome and respiratory failure. So it was probably not the best strategy. We learned that pretty quickly. Now let's talk about vaccines. This is a Pandora's box, but I'm going to open it a little bit. The problem with the COVID vaccine effort was, in my mind, primarily this. We over-promised and under-delivered. We were told they work and we were told they're safe.

Starting point is 00:28:45 They kind of work and they're kind of safe. They don't really prevent you getting this sickness or having the disease that you're trying to protect against. And also, there were some significant COVID vaccine-related side effects that were under-reported and actually only tracked much after it was all rolled out. Now, it's important to think about a particular concept when it comes to vaccines. It was never explained to the public. One is something called disease immunity, and the other is called sterile immunity. So sterile immunity is when you get the measles vaccine. You get it

Starting point is 00:29:21 when you're a kid, you never get measles, you never need another vaccine. That prevents you ever from getting the disease. That's called sterile immunity. The other protection you can get from vaccines is disease immunity. So when you get the flu shot, it doesn't necessarily prevent you from getting the flu, but it might reduce the severity and it might reduce your risk of getting it, but it doesn't prevent you from getting the disease. COVID vaccine was like the flu vaccine. It was not sterile immunity. It was disease immunity, meaning that it may reduce your risk of getting the disease and reduce the severity and the risk of death, but not really in a significant way for the majority of the population. And in fact, natural immunity was turned out to be far more of a protection than vaccine immunity.

Starting point is 00:30:06 I mean, if you got the disease and you didn't get vaccines, you actually had a better protection longer term from COVID. That's not to say the vaccines didn't help and aren't helpful for certain sections of the population. For example, if you're chronically ill, have diabetes, if you have heart failure, if you're elderly, it certainly would be something to think about. I remember when I was in training for medical school and residency, we had very clear guidelines for the flu.

Starting point is 00:30:31 It was basically only recommended for those over 65, those with chronic disease like kidney disease, diabetes, heart failure, and only for children who had some issue, whether it's asthma or some congenital or inherited disease that made them at risk for having immune issues or some chronic disease as a kid. And that changed so that the recommendations went from the select group of people who should get the flu shot to everybody over six months old should get the flu shot every year forever. Now, it's a bit of an overkill, I think, in my view, especially when we understand how to regulate immunity. So the COVID vaccine, the Pfizer, BioNTech, and the Moderna mRNA vaccines, and the Novavax protein subunit vaccine, they help prevent severe COVID symptoms. They help prevent hospitalizations and death.

Starting point is 00:31:22 And like I said, they benefit the immune compromise, the obese diabetic, but they didn't prevent the spread of the virus and they didn't cause sterile immunity. So we were told they work, meaning we would never get the disease, doesn't do that. And we're told they're safe. And it was really hard to know that because, you know, often you don't realize the side effects until the drug or compound is rolled out in the population. And vaccines are like any drug, every single drug, whether it's aspirin or Tylenol or a statin or Prozac, they have side effects. Now, we call side effects things that we are seeing, things that we don't want.

Starting point is 00:32:02 But they're not side effects, really. They're effects of the drug or the compound that we don't like. We call them side effects, but they're actually part of the mechanism of the drug. Now, one of the most concerning things we're seeing is this increased risk of myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart muscle, and also pericarditis, which is inflammation of the sac around the heart. And this is a very serious condition. It can cause chest pain, shortness of breath, fast heartbeat.

Starting point is 00:32:30 Really common in men under the age of 40 and higher among younger males, age 12 to 24, who had a second dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. This is from the European Journal of Clinical Investigation. It's systematic review. This is not my opinion. I'm just sharing the data. So I want to be really clear here. This is concerning to me because we're seeing a dramatic uptick in sudden deaths in a lot of these athletes and young kids. And this is not something that was happening before COVID. There is something called the vaccine

Starting point is 00:33:01 reporting system or the VAERS, also the vaccine safety data link, basically showed there are about 15.3 cases per 100,000 for those age 12 to 15 and about 13.9 cases per 100,000 for those 16 to 17 after the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. That's concerning. Now, it's important to note that COVID-19 infection itself increases the risk of myocarditis more than you would get after a vaccine. But also after the second dose, this is really important, after the second dose, and all these require two doses of the vaccine, your risk of having this heart inflammation is higher than if you had an infection. So if you got COVID, your risk of having this ultimately is lower than if you had a vaccine. This concern for me around

Starting point is 00:33:45 young folks getting the vaccine is that they're not that high risk for dying or getting severe infection. They generally get milder illness. They don't end up in the hospital unless they have some chronic disease or obese, which by the way is like 20% of kids. So maybe there's some argument there, but these are not the high risk people, and they're at much higher risk of getting the complications, it seems, from the vaccine. In a 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis published in BMJ Open, the overall cases were low, obviously, in the population, but there was a higher risk in those who had the mRNA vaccine without having had COVID before. So basically, the relative risk was two. Now, this may not sound like a lot, but that means it's a 200% increased risk of getting heart damage

Starting point is 00:34:34 from the vaccine if you've never had COVID before. So that's quite concerning to me. Also, blood clotting was a thing that happened with certain women with the j and j vaccine and the issues really don't we don't really know the long-term risk of of imrna coronavirus vaccines now i i can tell you as a practicing physician we learned something called um the doctor years of a disease so for example i learned in medical school about a condition called the pheochromocytoma which is an adrenal adrenal tumor that has all sorts of effects in the body. It stimulates adrenaline and produces lots of, you know, stress hormones. I've been practicing medicine since 1987.

Starting point is 00:35:16 I've never seen a case of it. I don't know, actually, of any of my friends who've seen a case of it. It's super rare. With COVID vaccine, many of my patients, and I don't even have that busy practice anymore, but I still see a fair bit of patients, but not like I was seeing 30 patients a day. When I was younger, I've seen a lot of post-COVID vaccine injuries, neurologic problems, immune dysregulation, just had a friend who had a severe allergic reaction, rash over his body. And so these are not infrequent. Now, some of them may not range to the severity of myocarditis,

Starting point is 00:35:54 which is a very severe heart condition. But I think there's a range of problems that people have, including something that I've been witnessing is like long COVID. And we'll talk about that as a post COVID vaccine syndrome where people get very neurologic issues, immune dysregulation, inflammation, increased susceptibility to infection. So there's something going on that we don't quite understand and it's being mapped out. I think we'll learn more over time, but I, again, I just want to sort of highlight, I'm not pro vaccine. I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm not anti-vaccine, I'm pro-science.

Starting point is 00:36:29 It's like saying, you know, I want safe airplanes. It doesn't mean I'm against airplanes or against flying, right? So in some ways, medicine has gotten its place, which I don't really understand, where if you question any of the science, where you look at the data, where you ask questions about the safety of vaccines, you're considered an anti-vaxxer, which just does not make any sense to me at all. In fact, the sole purpose of science is to keep asking questions, is to keep generating hypotheses, is to keep challenging our assumptions, is to keep looking harder at the problem and seeing if we're wrong or right. That's what science is supposed to do. Not saying vaccines are safe. Take them.

Starting point is 00:37:06 Don't question it. If you question it, you're a heretic and anti-vaxxer and you're ostracized. This doesn't make any sense to me. So I've had vaccines. My kids have had vaccines. I'm not anti-vaccine. I'm pro-science. And that doesn't mean all vaccines are the same.

Starting point is 00:37:25 So do I have any question about getting my tetanus vaccine every 10 years? Not at all. Do I think getting basic vaccines for things that are important that I did, for example, when I was younger, like children's diseases, polio vaccine, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, pertussis? Absolutely. Do I think that we should be getting all these vaccines all at once in kids and there's a new vaccine for every condition that we're throwing on these little baby immune systems? Do we have any data to support that? Not at all. I mean, when we talk about evidence-based medicine, you know, when we study one vaccine in one group for a particular time, we have evidence on that particular vaccine in isolation. But what if you give 27 vaccines or maybe you give five vaccines at once? Where is

Starting point is 00:38:14 the evidence for all of those vaccines given collectively and their safety over time? We don't have it. It's not done. That study has not been done and it will never be done. So we really have to kind of be smart and understand what the data show and what it doesn't show and have a sober view of our risks. So I think it's really important to kind of take a measured view of this whole vaccine thing and get out of this debate of pro or anti-vaxxer. It's not like pro-life or pro-choice. I mean, that's just a black and white thinking that we have to get away from and start to be more rigorous about our thinking and start looking at the data carefully to make careful judgments about what we should and shouldn't do. And particularly given our own health history, our genetics, our immune function, our other issues in terms of our chronic disease

Starting point is 00:39:01 risks, our personal preferences, other things that we can do to modulate our risk factors. So I think it's important. So now I want to talk about what do we do to actually help the host, right? So we can give vaccines, which artificially jack up your immune system to fight a particular infection, or, and maybe not or, maybe and, we can also help our own immune system optimally function better. And that's what I want to talk about. So how does functional medicine look at this problem? How do we understand why we are seeing such an epidemic of inflammatory diseases? Not just COVID, but everything, all the chronic illnesses, autoimmune disease, allergic diseases, compromised immune

Starting point is 00:39:42 systems. How do we deal with that? Well, we have to look at the modifiable risk factors that we can change. And there's a large number of modifiable risk factors for COVID-19 and for pretty much everything. So this kind of goes across the gamut. But let's talk about how the data pan out around what we can modify in terms of our risk of getting infections and viral infections, and particularly COVID-19. First is all these chronic illnesses, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, heart disease. These are things that I've written about, talked about for decades. They're fundamentally diseases of affluence, diseases of excess, diseases of abundance,

Starting point is 00:40:21 diseases that occur in a supply of ultra-processed diet that's high in starch or sugar, and it's a real, real problem. So these are not inevitable things. They're things that can be modified and even reversed. The other thing that really drives our risk is our blood sugar regulation. And I've written many books about this, the 10-Day Detox Diet, Blood Sugar Solution. But blood sugar is is a huge uh factor in your risk as i mentioned earlier about the diabetes uh increasing risk for covid hospitalizations and deaths and and managing your blood sugar is really important so i you know cutting down certain sugar and optimizing your diet to increase more fiber protein fat uh following you know a

Starting point is 00:41:01 simple exercise program really important our diet overall but that quality plays a role so you know microbiome, our gut, everything, we'll talk about that in a minute, but all that plays a role in our risk. Environmental toxins, we have less control over heavy metals, air pollution. I just saw a patient yesterday who was in China and she lived there for a while and her lead levels were off the chart. I've never seen this in all my years of practice. And she literally had just come from China. She had just done her labs and I was like, holy mackerel, you know, the air pollution is so bad there that it's literally, you're breathing it in, you're getting in your blood and it's on your food. It's pretty much everywhere. So air pollution, heavy metals, mercury, lead, arsenic, all these

Starting point is 00:41:45 things are prevalent in our environment and we need to reduce our exposures. Our nutritional status plays an enormous role, like enormous role in our immune function because it's not just the food we eat, but it's also the vitamin and mineral levels that play a role. So vitamin D deficiency, I would say, would be number one. If you can do one thing from listening to this podcast, get your vitamin D tested and make sure your level's 50 to 75. And if it's not, you need to take increasing amounts of vitamin D3 to get it to that level. You know, some people need 2,000, 5,000, depends on your genetics. Some people need 10,000, but it's really critical to get your vitamin D level up. And if you want to learn how to get your vitamin E tested, you know, you can ask your doctor

Starting point is 00:42:26 or you can use functionhealth.com. I'm a co-founder and chief medical officer. It's a really simple access platform where you can get over 110 lab biomarkers that you can just get yourself for less than 500 bucks and twice a year testing. And it gives you a roadmap of what's going on with your health.

Starting point is 00:42:45 And it prevents you from having to argue with your doctor and go through insurance and all this stuff you have to do to get the test you want. Vitamin C, really important. You know, it's amazing to me, but 10% of Americans have a vitamin C deficiency at the level that would cause scurvy, like full-blown scurvy,

Starting point is 00:43:01 teeth falling out, immune system dysfunction. And when you looked at those with severe COVID, 82% of those had vitamin C levels were extremely low, according to an article in the Nutrition Journal. Vitamin K is important for immunity. Omega-3s, zinc, selenium, very important in regulating immune function. Also, chronic inflammation that's caused by our diet, lifestyle, all the things we talked about, definitely can predispose us. The gut, many of us have gut issues. And in functional medicine, we talked about dysbiosis. About 60 to 70% of your immune system is in your gut. So right underneath the line there is your immune system. And when you have damaged gut,

Starting point is 00:43:40 it actually causes a leaky gut. You have bad bacteria, maybe gluten, toxins. It releases toxins into your immune system called lipopolysaccharides, causes something called endotoxemia, and that creates systemic inflammation. So if you have a bad gut and a microbiome, it causes a huge issue. And we see this a lot in the ICU. People who end up in the ICU have horrible microbiomes, and it creates more inflammation and more risk of death. Chronic stress from any source, emotional emotional stress psychological stress definitely will suppress your immune system uh one study showed that they injected cold viruses into groups of people they could see who was going to get an actual cold by the level of stress based on a perceived

Starting point is 00:44:20 stress questionnaire so these are they're validated metrics for looking at stress and they were able to see oh if you were really stressed you were going to get the cold. Even if you had the cold virus injected into your nose directly, if you weren't stressed, you didn't necessarily get the cold virus. Genetics play a role, and I think there's some controversy about this, but it's not judgmental. It's just the reality of science that certain genes actually help protect you, and certain genes may predispose you to higher risk of infection. So there was a strong association, for example, for a certain gene that about 10% of people in European ancestry have that protect them against COVID. They're two times likely to remain

Starting point is 00:44:58 asymptomatic after getting the COVID virus if you have this particular gene. But there are other ones, for example, like vitamin D receptor genes where you're meaning of absorbance by vitamin D, you might have a higher risk of severe COVID and higher risk of getting sick and having problems. So how do you begin to look also at your biology? And I think this is really why I helped co-found Function Health, which is a lot of people come to see me for extensive evaluations. We do deep dives. We get lab testing. We know what's going on with their biology. We can create a roadmap of where things are going wrong. And most people have no clue. That's why I co-founded Fungi Health. And in our first cohort of over 20,000 people, over a million data points, we found that

Starting point is 00:45:40 collectively 67% had some severe deficiency. Not a deficiency that I would say that's from my perspective as a functional medicine doctor. I'm looking at what's optimal. Like optimal vitamin D is 50 to 75. But a vitamin D of less than 30 is what I'm talking about here. Or iron level is extremely low or B vitamins extremely low. So I'm talking about not optimal levels, but just the lowest possible level. Okay. 67% of our cohort, and this is a health forward population, had one of these biomarkers of a significant nutritional deficiency. So it's important to get your numbers

Starting point is 00:46:19 checked, to know your numbers. And that's really why we started Function Health. You can go to functionhealth.com. If you want to use the code youngforever, you can skip the wait list, little trick, and get your labs tested and see where you're at because it'll give you guidance and insights about how to optimize your health based on that. So the things you should look at is your CRP level because that's going to tell you the basic level of information. You want all your omega-3s, because that helps regulate immunity. You can measure your zinc levels, selenium, magnesium, vitamin D, iron status, all affect immunity. Your blood sugar, A1c, which is your average blood sugar. Your blood count to see if your immune system is working.

Starting point is 00:46:58 Your metabolic health, liver, kidneys. And also your cardiovascular risk factors, right? Your lipids, your B vitamin levels, homocysteine, cortisol, stress levels, heavy metal levels. All these can be done through functionhealth.com. And it's very easy, just 15 minute visit at Quest and you'll be able to get your labs. Okay. So what do we do from a functional medicine perspective so that you can prevent getting sick in the first place and have more resilience when you do get sick and be able to recover faster and not end up in the hospital and not die? How do we not die, right? How do not die?

Starting point is 00:47:35 I think it was a book that was written a while ago. So the first is obviously get your diet sorted out. Eat whole, real, unprocessed foods. Diet quality is really important. And this is not just an opinion. If you look at a high diet quality compared to low diet quality and the risk of COVID-19 and the risk of severe COVID-19, you had a 40% lower risk of severe COVID-19, this is an article published in Gut, if you had a high diet quality um if you want to basically figure out how to reset your whole biology quickly you can use my 10-day detox diet which is uh available on anywhere you get your books uh it's it's got a cookbook and essentially it's written

Starting point is 00:48:17 to help reset your metabolic health hydration really important drink half your weight in ounces and water every day make sure you get electrolyzed as well with that avoid ultra processed food this is the number one thing that's going to suppress your immune system and screw up your gut and cause inflammation processed starch and sugar fried foods trans fats added sugars sugar sweetened beverages alcohol these are all things that are going to cause more immune issues how do you think about you know choosing nutrient dense food that has the nutrients that are going to help your immune system? First is vitamin D. Okay, where do you get that? Fatty fish, you know, I like it, herring, mackerels, things like that,

Starting point is 00:48:54 sardines, mushrooms, although, you know, it's hard to get enough for mushrooms, porcini mushrooms, you can almost never get in America, best source of vitamin D, but it's only 400 units per serving. So you need about 10 times that. Of course, I could eat 10 servings of perchini mushrooms. Not a problem for me. You don't like that. That's okay. So sunlight's really great.

Starting point is 00:49:15 You can get outside, but probably most of us need to take vitamin D. Omega-3s, best sources are what we call the small fish. We call them smash fish, salmon, mackerel, anchovies, herring sardines um and and those are really rich in omega-3s um zinc is important pumpkin seeds grass-fed beef oyster and seafood selenium really important brazil nuts are great have two of those a day organ meats maybe not like that but high in selenium pasteurized eggs sardines halibut uh grass-fed beef. Also important to increase your intake of anti-inflammatory foods, phytochemicals, and antioxidants-rich foods. Vitamin C, where do you get that? Citrus foods, kiwis, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, bell peppers, tomatoes, all the vitamin

Starting point is 00:49:57 A building blocks you can get from the carotenoids like spinach, kale, bell peppers, sort of the orange, yellow stuff, sweet peppers, winter squash. You might want to take active form of vitamin A. You can't really get that from vegetables. Sometimes the conversion is not so good. You need fatty fish. Liver is probably the best source. Raw cheeses, you can get vitamin A. Vitamin E from sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, collard greens. Glutathione-rich foods are really important as an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory compound. Sulfur- collards cabbage watercress cauliflower bioactive whey protein exercise also will help boost glutathione supplements i like nscl cysteine and these by the

Starting point is 00:50:38 way can help the covid as well nscl cysteine lipoic acid, the B vitamins, methylfolate, B6, B12, all help recycle glutathione. Lots of polyphenols. So all the colorful plant foods, make sure you get on those. They help your gut. They help your immune system. Campfrol, which is really important. It's from spinach, cabbage, and dill. Quercetin, really important in COVID, turns out.

Starting point is 00:51:01 It can help really prevent the risk of getting COVID and the severity of the infection. It binds to the spike protein, inhibits the enzyme that's needed for the virus to replicate, so for COVID to replicate. So I took a lot of course during COVID, but you can get it from food, dill, onions, garlic, oregano, chili peppers, spices, apples, leafy greens, broccoli, other bioflavonoids, hesperidin, which is another bioflavonoid, like oranges, grapefruit, lemons, tangerines. Allerapine, what's that? Well, extra virgin olive oil. Very antiviral, immune-boosting. Catechins, also very important from green tea.

Starting point is 00:51:38 Very good. Lauric acid, which is an antiviral fatty acid, but it's an unrefined coconut oil, breast milk, hard to get that, but definitely get the coconut oil. Lots of antiviral, anti-inflammatory spices, including your diet, ginger, garlic, turmeric, rosemary, chili peppers, oregano. Oregano is a great antimicrobial. Garlic is as well. And there's rosemary and ginger and chili is very anti-inflammatory.

Starting point is 00:52:03 What about protein? Well, we do need a protein. A protein needs to go up during infection. Protein deficiency increases your risk of getting infection and getting really sick. So we need the amino acids that are building blocks of your immune defense systems. And these include taurine, carnosine, and serine creatine, which, by the way, are not found in plant protein. So there are essential amino acids, and you can argue that you may be able to get

Starting point is 00:52:26 those all from plant proteins, but you cannot get some of these other, we'll call non-essential, not essential, but they actually are important, amino acids from plant proteins. You just can't. So taurine, carnosine, anserine, creatine, only found in beef and lamb and animal foods. We probably need about a gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight for healthy aging and healthy life. However, during infection and during certain periods of stress, you may need more. So where do you get it from?

Starting point is 00:52:53 Well, I would get a clean protein and sort of well-raised protein. So I like regeneratively raised meats, which are hard to find, but you can from Forest of Nature, a great company that sources bison venison elk and many others uh grass-fed meats uh like beef lamb wild game we're generally raised dairy i like goat whey particularly um you can make your own goat yogurt you can do all kinds of stuff there's a cream around where i live in the berkshires and they have a sheep your yogurt which is really good you You can also get eggs, poultry, I see free range or pasture, I would say pasture raised

Starting point is 00:53:31 because free range can mean they maybe have like a square foot to walk around. Wild caught fish, but small fish, great source of protein. Sometimes you can get legumes, nut seeds, non-GMO tofu, tempeh, all that can be helpful. So that's the kind of main part of your diet. What about gut? How do you help your gut? Well, you need probiotics, prebiotics, and polyphenols, and a few other things that can be really helpful. So probiotic foods are things like fermented foods, grass-fed sheep, cow, coconut yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, tempeh miso natto kimchi pickles all that stuff who knew pickles were probiotic food i grew up on those sauerkraut also great has uh lactobacillus plantarum very good for your immune system prebiotic foods to help fertilize the good

Starting point is 00:54:16 bugs i drew some artichokes garlic leeks asparagus artichokes themselves, bananas, apples, cocoa, chocolate, prebiotic food, burdock root, flax seeds, jicama, seaweed, all great prebiotic foods. Polyphenols, really, I mentioned those earlier, but those are really important for your gut microbiome. The little dudes in your gut need to eat those colorful plant compounds that makes them grow and flourish. Other things that can help your gut include bone broth, colostrum, certain things called beta-glucans, which are found in mushrooms, zinc, vitamin D, glutamine also help your gut. You can help your immune system by optimizing your lifestyle, right? You can get enough sleep. So you need optimal sleep for gut immune function. You need the sleep to help your immune system repair for

Starting point is 00:55:07 maintenance work to be done, seven or eight hours at the minimum. You can check out my sleep master class. We'll link to that in the show notes. Certain supplements can be helpful like magnesium, threonate, glycinate, L-theanine, and many, many others I talk about. Exercise also really helps support immunity. Over-exercise obviously doesn't, right, if you're running a marathon. But basically, most people don't worry about that. So mild to moderate exercise for 30 to 45 minutes a day really helps boost immunity, supports NAD, and I would do resistance anaerobic training. Stress, also learn how to kind of reset your nervous system. High stress suppresses the immune system, and it increases your risk

Starting point is 00:55:45 of infections, as I mentioned. So learn techniques. And I would say, most people don't realize they have to actively relax. It's not something you just sit there, watch TV, and eat pizza, and have a beer, and relax. It's things like meditation, or breathwork, or yoga, or guided imagery, or guided meditation. There's a binaural beat app that I'm using called NuCom that I like like i have no affiliation but essentially i put that on for 20 minutes and i go into a deep state of profound relaxation and wake up very refreshed so getting your body into a state of relaxation really important nature by the way who knew increase exposure to nature increases your natural killer

Starting point is 00:56:24 cell activity. This is from data from the Environmental Research and Public Health Journal. So being in nature also helps. Indoor air filters gets rid of all the pollution, pathogens, really important. What about other things to talk about? Let's talk about some of the other things. There's a lot of stuff that's going on here that we want to cover. But I think that I want to cover, but I think that I want to kind of get into some of the research around, you know, how to address COVID, long COVID

Starting point is 00:56:50 and some of the challenges we're seeing as well. So stick with me on this. I'm going to keep going in because I think this is such an important topic and I'm spending a little more time on it. The first thing I want to talk about is sort of what should you be taking supplement-wise? This is the easiest thing to do. And this is a stack you can use to support your system during colon flu. So what are the most important things? And I'm gonna talk about a lot of things, but the most important I would say would be vitamin D.

Starting point is 00:57:12 Vitamin D, vitamin D, vitamin D. You're probably sick of me saying it, but get vitamin D to your level in your blood over 50 to 75. And the only way to know is test because some people need 1,000, some people need 5,000, some people need 10,000. But make sure you get that checked. Second is get on a good multivitamin. You might want to take a little

Starting point is 00:57:28 extra zinc, a little extra vitamin C, omega-3 fats. That's sort of a basic stack that most people do. If you really want to up the game on that, I would take quercetin, 500 milligrams twice a day. My favorite is a product called HTB Rejuvenate, which contains quercetin, another bioflavonoids, really it's an immunorejuvenating compound from Himalayan tartary buckwheat. I'm an advisor, investor in Big Bold Health, just full of transparency. But it's a really amazing product. It was developed by my mentor, Jeffrey Bland, who's the father of functional medicine. And make sure your gut's healthy.

Starting point is 00:57:57 So probiotics are really important as well. And there's a number of probiotics. I'm going to put all the stack in the show notes. You'll see exactly what I'm recommending, the doses. Melatonin might be helpful for some people as well. Colostrum can be helpful. And certain peptides, we'll talk about peptides. Now, peptides are a little bit controversial, but there's one in particular that's worth talking about called thymus and alpha-1. Your thymus gland is your immune system. It tends to shrink as we get older. It's widely used as peptide in China and in COVID-19 patients. And it was shown to

Starting point is 00:58:26 decrease hospitalization, especially those who had more severe disease. And it decreased death by helping restore lymphocyte function and depleted T-cells. This is in the International Journal of Immunopharmacology. So I think this is not just, oh, some cool biohacking thing. There's a lot of data on this. And some of it's in this country, some it's not, but I found it incredibly helpful for myself and my patients when I got COVID. I could even use it intravenously. And the dose really depends on what's going on, but when you're sick, it's about 1.5 to 10 milligrams a day and you can reduce the dose. You can take it every three to four hours. You can do up to five milligrams IV, and you can have subcutaneous shots. And you'd probably want to consider taking it for a good 20, 30 days. Now,

Starting point is 00:59:12 you can take this as a peptide that you take regularly during cold and flu season if you want. It's hard to get, and it requires some education, but peptides can be very helpful. Others include thymus and beta-4 and LL37 and BP157. We're going to click to all the show notes in there, but it has really improved overall function. Next is, you know, what can you do if you actually get the disease

Starting point is 00:59:37 or you're exposed? Well, one of the things that's really surprising is the nasal rinses. You can get it from Walmart and Betadine, but sort of do it yourself. You put two teaspoons of Betadine in six ounces of water, use a bulb syringe, and it's going to squirt in nostrils. You can gargle and spit it out. And it showed that this is a randomized controlled trial in JAMA Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery Journal. So the viral titer reduced by 75% after one day versus 32% in the control group.

Starting point is 01:00:06 So it's not like a cure, but basically if you think you're exposed, go rinse out your nose and mouth with betadine. A little gross. I did it during COVID. It kind of was my hack to get around traveling. But it can be pretty impressive. So I would encourage you that. There's other things we're going to put in the show notes around how to apply it.

Starting point is 01:00:24 You can gargle with it and so forth you can actually put ointment around your nostrils just to you know to sort of protect yourself as well uh there's actually nasal sprays uh we'll we'll link to the uh povidine iodine which is essentially bathing nasal sprays um as well there's also l37 which is peptide that's an antimicrobial peptide, and it can help the innate immune system work better. Choletal silver may be helpful as well. There's 85% effectiveness in reducing infection in healthcare professionals in journal called PLOS One. So it was, I think, a 1.8% infection rate in experimental group compared to a 28% infection rate in the control group. That's a pretty big difference just by using some colloidal silver nasal rinse spray.

Starting point is 01:01:15 Science for Health has a great one called Health Liquid Silver and so forth. So what about medication? Well, there's a lot of talk about different medications during COVID, including, you know, ivermectin and many other drugs. I think, you know, there was some data showing that ivermectin was effective, enlarged bed analysis, reduced the risk of death, reduced severity and so forth. So I think that's certainly something you consider. There's also antibiotics that maybe were used, but not necessarily good data on that, like azithromycin. Sometimes anti-inflammatory treatments worked well, like nebulized, B-desonide steroid or inhaler, oral prednisone, colchicine, aspirin.

Starting point is 01:01:57 Some of these things may be very helpful because it's an inflammatory condition and it can reduce the severity. Often blood clotting with COVID, so some of those blood thinners can help. There's monoclonal antibodies that were used. Those were very effective. I'm not sure why they were so hard to get. It makes sense to me because that's what President Trump had and it basically kind of knocked out his COVID pretty quick and he was pretty darn sick. So there's many versions of that, many companies that make that, but it's something to think about. The supplements we talked about are post-infection, but the most important thing is vitamin D, quercetin, zinc, vitamin C, N-acetylcysteine, curcumin, and NAD, which can be helpful in terms of your immune system as well.

Starting point is 01:02:36 You can also consider taking vitamin A and green tea extract and selenium, lipoic acid. So all these are going to be in the show notes and the doses and frequency. Of course, you don't have to take all of it, but I'm just giving you kind of a menu of things that have data and have been studied. So I want to close out by talking about long COVID because I think this is something that is going to be with us for a long time. It seems to be showing up in five to 30% of people who don't require hospitalization for acute COVID and maybe more in those who've had hospitalizations. You know it's a real condition, it's not in people's head. I've had many, many patients with this. There are different outcomes depending on people's underlying health status

Starting point is 01:03:18 and there's recurrence and new symptoms and it's just a mess. If chronic illness, obviously diabetes, high blood pressure, neurological or psychiatric issues, you're twice as likely to develop long COVID. So it's a big thing. The good news is, you know, while traditional medicine really does not have a good approach to this, functional medicine and our understanding of how to optimize the body's own ecosystem can really help you recover. And I've had many, many patients recover fully from this, including myself. I actually developed really kind of bad post-COVID for a bit and had arthritis and all sorts of stuff. So what are the symptoms? Well, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune disease, the chemdelp, loss of taste or smell,

Starting point is 01:04:01 brain fog, cognitive dysfunction, like just not being able to think. Gut issues, very common. Diarrhea, stomach pain, shortness of breath, cough, chest pain, dizziness on standing, headaches, limited ability to exercise, neurologic problems. I've seen a lot of this. Neuropathy, pins and needles, POTS, which is orthostatic hypotension. When you stand up, you kind of get dizzy. Mass cell activation, histamine intolerance, where you get like, you know, rashes, pain,

Starting point is 01:04:33 swelling, redness, diarrhea, low blood pressure, migraines, asthma, really bad. So not everybody has obviously all these symptoms, but it is a serious problem for people and they have different degrees of severity depending on the person. So how does COVID actually cause problems? Well, it actually, a little bit of complicated science here, but it enters the body through the respiratory tract, but it ends up being a disease of the blood vessels. And your blood vessels are everywhere in your body. So it affects everything, right? So it affects the health of the endothelium.

Starting point is 01:04:56 And basically this is a virus called the ACE2 receptors, which is a gateway for the virus into the cells. It attaches to the ACE2 receptors, damages them, causes deficiency, and that leads to damage to blood vessels and heart, cause blood clots and blood flow to the organs. You get brain fog, blood flow to your brain, headaches, and loss of these ACE2 receptor function. ACE2 is you get increased inflammation, you get scarring, and it also damages your mitochondria, which is another factor you get fatigue. So what is the web of long COVID? How does this all connect? And my friend Leo Gallin, one of my mentors, godfather of functional medicine, really amazing guy, helped to

Starting point is 01:05:35 unmap this. So what are the things that happen with the web of long COVID? The first is significant mitochondrial damage, and that has cascading effects. In your mitochondria, your energy factories, they cause fatigue. Also, you get this end endothelitis meaning you get the endothelium which is the thin layer of cells along your blood vessels gets inflamed so it's like just inflamed blood vessels everywhere you get blood flow issues problems with oxygen delivery you get many blood clots you get activation of your immune system with mast cells you get disorganized immune response which really kind of affects your monocytes, macrophages, which are your white blood cells. You can lead to autoantibodies. You

Starting point is 01:06:10 basically start getting autoimmunity. It impairs your T-cell function, which is the part of your immune system. Lymphocytes makes it harder to fight the infection. It makes it more likely to get more infections. And you get viral persistence even with COVID. You get it in your GI tract and it can cause a lot of gut issues. People with long COVID have lost a lot of beneficial gut bacteria, they get bad bugs growing, they have lower butyrate, which is important for your immune health and the gut, and then you get leaky gut and the whole cascade continues. So the number of tests really important to look at. There's a test for cytokine and spike protein testing. It's called, you can go to covidlonghaulers.com and it explains a lot of what these tests are. It's good, you can go to covidlonghaulers.com and it explains a lot of

Starting point is 01:06:45 what these tests are. It's good to know what's happening in there. You can check your T cell function called T-Detect. It's a newer test. You can measure your NCRP or D-dimer, ferritin. All these are markers of inflammation. Get your complete blood count, IVC, chemistry, liver, kidney, vitamin D level. We talked about over 50 zinc. Make sure you get that checked um i want to look at your ekg heart exams maybe get an oximeter to look at your oxygen level all these things can help you sort of get a sense of where you're at so what's the approach we would use well the first is you know diet and lifestyle all the stuff we just talked about um maybe even intermittent fasting sort of like time-restricted eating you know 16 hour 14 hour fast can help hydration sleep

Starting point is 01:07:23 exercise low histamine diet, gut support, the herbs, all the stuff we talked about. Same as with supplements. I think really looking at how do we address things that can help enhance ACE2, including vitamin D, quercetin, curcumin, omega-3s, resveratrol, lipoic acid, N-acetylcysteine. These are the same things that work for prevention,

Starting point is 01:07:44 for treatment, for post-COVID. It's really the same. It's all in the show notes. Even CBD might be helpful. Estrogen may be helpful for long COVID in women after menopause. Mitochondrial support is really important in these patients. CoQ10, carnitine, methylated B vitamins, even a postbiotic we call mitopurinolethane, very helpful for mitochondrial function. So really important to help your mitochondria, help your immune system, help your gut. So you need to make sure that you see what's going on. It's interesting in colonoscopies, a published paper we'll link to, in patients with inflammatory bowel with long COVID found there were persistence of viral antigens in the biopsy sample. So when they took biopsies for someone with inflammatory bowel

Starting point is 01:08:28 disease, they actually found COVID virus even after they resolved their COVID. There's certain probiotics can be helpful. Bacillus subtilis with B7092, we'll link to it. It's called Tundrax, can be helpful. Some herbs might be helpful like tolovid, Chinese herbs from ground whale root may work as well as paxlovid. Another cocktail of antiviral and immune-modulating herbs called medicinals. Again, there's a lot of studies supporting the use of these in medical journals for immune-modulatory activity. It may not be directly against COVID, but it just generally helps your immune system. You've got microbiome sorted. Obviously the polyphenol rich diet, the vitamin D, quercetin, curcumin, resveratrol, the fermented foods for your microbiome, the prebiotics, resistant starches like green bananas, sodium butyrate. You can take our pro butyrate alec as a product for getting butyrate levels up,

Starting point is 01:09:20 which helps your immunity. Reishi mushrooms also helpful. So a lot of stuff you can do to get your gut microbiome sorted. We're going to cover this more in detail in other podcasts, but really important to get your gut sorted. So make sure you get your gut really healthy. Now, sometimes additional treatment may be helpful, and this sometimes can be a little hard to access for people, but I think it's really important if you're stuck to think about these things. And IV, some simple IV support can be helpful like IV NAD, glutathione, vitamin C, lysine, all can be helpful. I found ozone therapy very helpful and this can be done through various clinics, but going to 10-pass ozone a few times a week, ozone dialysis or EBO also can be helpful. A lot of data in Europe from ozone and COVID showing it was very effective.

Starting point is 01:10:07 I don't know why I never picked up here. It's probably just the medical industrial complex. But it's unfortunate. I was in conversation with a lot of European doctors during COVID and talking about their experiences in ICUs and hospitals using ozone. Not very effective. Hyperbaric oxygen can help with recovery. There are facilities around the country where you can go get treatments. Usually requires 20, very effective. Hyperbaric oxygen can help with recovery. There are facilities around the

Starting point is 01:10:25 country where you can go get treatments, usually requires 20, 30 treatments. Another treatment is a little harder to access, a little more expensive called plasmapheresis, where essentially filter out all the inflammatory stuff from your blood can be helpful. There are immune modulating therapies like exosomes. These can be also expensive, but very, very helpful in select patients. Who knows, even stem cell therapy may help. So we're going to look at all these things as a as as the menu but you have to decide what's right for you in terms of optimizing your immune system to start with in terms of the simple things that are very free like exercise lifestyle you got to eat anyway so optimizing your diet not not to be more expensive than eating a crappy diet in fact it's it's probably cheaper. And some basic supplements.

Starting point is 01:11:06 And then you can kind of navigate based on what your issues are, whether you have COVID currently or whether your immune system is compromised or whether you have long COVID to optimize your approach. We've done podcasts on this with Dr. Leo Gallin. We'll link to those. So we've covered the landscape of COVID. I hope you're a little more enlightened than you were before you started listening to this. It's a lot, but I sort of want to summarize

Starting point is 01:11:30 by saying, you know, we know that, you know, the virus is important, but also the host is equally as important. And if you optimize your own wellbeing through lifestyle, diet, the right supplements, basic, simple practices, maybe a few extra enhancements we talked about. You can be resilient and immunoresilient and rejuvenate your immune system and help prevent COVID, help prevent you getting from really sick or dying from it and prevent long COVID. And even if you have this problem of long COVID, I would not lose hope. We're seeing a lot of emerging therapies that can be really helpful for this. You have to take around,

Starting point is 01:12:06 find a good functional medicine doctor. So hope you like this podcast, one of our health bites. I hope you found it helpful. Make sure you share this episode with your friends and family. Leave a comment about how you've maybe used some of this to impact your resistance or treatment for COVID

Starting point is 01:12:24 and your recovery. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introduce to you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays.

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The Dr. Hyman Show - Answering Your Questions About COVID-19, Long-COVID, and Staying Healthy During Cold and Flu Season

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