With a new baby coming within weeks, I did my due diligence this week and went to get my flu shot. I have no idea if we’re going to see influenza this year - we didn’t last year.
Compare this to one year back. Check out the difference in the Y-axes:
The flu disappeared in March 2020 in the US and never came back. But it has come back in India and its neighboring countries, where COVID blew through like a tornado.
(For what it’s worth, the nurse who delivered my flu shot said she expects it to still be gone this year, from the lack of patients she’s seen in the office.)
So let’s presume that we’re in for another year where SARS-CoV-2 is our predominant respiratory virus. Let’s also presume that you will encounter this virus at some point in your life, probably multiple times.
A vaccination will give you good odds to avoid severe disease when you get it the first time. It is increasingly obvious now that the currently-available vaccines do not prevent either infection or transmission. We can quibble about differences in transmission between vaxxed and unvaxxed, but no matter your vaccine status, you will get exposed to the virus, you will host the virus for some amount of time, and you will pass the virus on to some number of other people. But the vaccine still shows good efficacy to keep you out of the hospital or the grave.
But is there something we can do besides the vaccine that can help you fight it off more effectively? Let’s go over a few options.
Obesity
The two biggest factors for severe COVID are: age, and obesity. Until Pfizer can perfect an age-reversing injection a la Benjamin Button, there’s nothing we can do about the former. But we can certainly do something about the latter.
This is a subject I’ve been learning about for the last few years. My beautiful wife shared Jimmy Moore’s Keto Clarity with me four years ago, and I started to educate myself much more about the science of nutrition, starting with low carb then branching out.
There’s a lot I could write here, explaining the different energy substrates in the body, on which fuel different parts of the body can function, how everything you eat is broken down and repackaged, and how cholesterol plays into all of it. I’ve been learning about it for years, and there’s still so much that I have to learn.
But here’s how I can concentrate my advice:
Eat whole, unprocessed food.
As I said in my last piece, food has been highly engineered to be maximally stimulating but minimally satiating, to maximize profits. So instead, concentrate on food as close as possible to how it originally came — unprocessed meat, vegetables, fruit. If you want bread or pasta, learn to make your own. The more it’s prepared before you get it, the worse it’s going to be for you.
That’s not to say that you need to become a three-star chef in order to eat healthfully. My breakfast is scrambled eggs, with some goat cheese and smoked salmon when I have it, sometimes toast made from my homemade sourdough. My lunch is often a grass-fed hamburger patty with cheese, bacon, and fermented sauerkraut. Dinners vary, but they prioritize the meat first, roasted or steamed vegetables second, and a starch as an afterthought.
Note that this by definition will cut out most of the sugar from your food. This is by design. Sugar really serves no biological purpose, and cutting back on it will do nothing but improve your metabolism.
Prioritize animal protein, and embrace the fat that comes along with it.
There’s a whole story to tell about the bill of goods we’ve been sold on saturated fat, that there’s no evidence to support the recommendation to choose unsaturated fat and avoid saturated fat. Nina Teicholz’s Big Fat Surprise is an incredibly well-written and thorough history of the US government’s recommendations around fat.
But there is nothing wrong with savoring the ribbon on the outside of a steak, or relishing the crispy skin on a roast chicken. Indeed, this is what will keep you satiated and keep you from snacking in between meals.
Your body needs protein — animal protein. The amino acids in plants are in the wrong ratios for your body to utilize the way your body requires. The vitamins in plants such as vitamin A are often in forms that your body must convert, inefficiently, into the human form. And the minerals in plants are bound up in structures that you can’t access, such as iron oxalate in spinach.
Everything the human body needs to function, and to function at its best, are present in animal foods. Value them, and give them the biggest share of your plate.
Give your body time to not digest, preferably at least twelve hours.
Our consumer culture has convinced us that we need to eat every three hours to keep our metabolism running high. But historically, we weren’t walking around with trail mix or pretzels. We would fast, then eat a big meal, then fast again.
Intermittent fasting, like keto, has become a crazy buzzword that has lost the meaning of what it’s supposed to represent. But it’s fairly intuitive to believe that your metabolism needs a break, and would function better if you gave it one.
It’s not hard to build in these “rest and digest” windows. Just don’t eat after 8:00 p.m., then don’t have breakfast until 8:00 a.m. the next morning. When you do the above steps to change the foods you eat, you’ll be amazed how easy it becomes.
I’m not saying that the above steps will magically transform you overnight. But it will move your metabolism in a better direction, start to heal you from the inside out, and provide your body a much better footing from which to fight off SARS-CoV-2.
Vitamin D
We’ve known about the connection between low vitamin D levels and COVID since last spring. Some of the early recommendations were to supplement vitamin D to raise your levels. But there’s a larger story to tell.
Vitamin D isn’t actually a vitamin. It’s really a hormone, one that has myriad biological functions. But it’s really a downstream marker of poor metabolic function. So it makes perfect sense that those who had low vitamin D status are the ones showing up in hospitals, because they’re likely overweight and with malfunctioning immune systems.
You can supplement vitamin D all you want, but if your metabolism is broken from years of neglect, it’s not going to help much.
But there’s another piece. We all were taught in school that your body can create its own vitamin D from sunlight. This is one suspected reason why the flu runs through populations in the wintertime, when we’re less able to spend time outside in direct sun, the sun is lower in the sky, and not out for as long.
But think about all of those months that we were told to stay home and “flatten the curve”. How many of you spent any decent amount of time outside during that period? Or did you hide inside, throwing yourself into work, playing video games, and binging on Netflix?
Since I started working from home last March, I’ve endeavored to get into my backyard at least three days a week, when the sun is at its peak, getting as much of my skin exposed to the sunlight as I can. When I’m done I feel energized, likely because sunlight also triggers the production of nitric oxide, which is a vasodilator and relaxes the walls of your blood vessels.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we found more biological functions of sunlight in the coming years. It’s not an accident that we have very little hair covering our bodies and we can use the sun to create vitally important chemicals.
Zinc
We’ve known about the role of zinc in immune system function for a while, or at least as long as Zicam has been around. The evidence is mainly around rhinovirus - the main common cold virus - although at least one study has shown some effectiveness in vitro against coronaviruses.
The problem with supplementation of most minerals is that they can come in a whole bunch of different forms, each with a different bioavailability. This ties into my points above about plant forms vs. animal forms — animal forms are chelated, and these are the forms you should find. I take zinc picolinate, but zinc citrate or acetate also work well.
Vitamin C
This is the obvious one, as its role in immune system function has been known for centuries. The evidence is that it doesn’t help with preventing infection, but it does shorten the duration and lessen the severity of a cold, as it plays a key role in immune system function (according to this Cochrane review). But something I read last night in Gary Taubes’s Good Calories Bad Calories was what I hadn’t put together.
As I learned more about prioritizing meat over carbs, I learned about Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a turn-of-the-century researcher who spent time with the Inuits and saw them exclusively living off seal meat and blubber. He and his assistant ended up living in a hospital for a year eating nothing but meat and fat to prove it could be done without ending up with scurvy. (He ended up writing a book called Not By Bread Alone.)
This is because glucose competes with vitamin C for uptake into the cells, because they both use the same insulin-dependent transport. Eating as much sugar as we do creates a situation where the vitamin C we eat is less effective. When you avoid carbs, you actually need very little vitamin C, and then what you do take in is that much more able to do its job.
But get this!
SYNERGY!
I found this study called “Zinc, Vitamin D, and Vitamin C: Perspectives with COVID-19 with a Focus on Physical Tissue Barrier Integrity”. And it tied together a few different pieces in my knowledge banks.
Several years ago while we were embarking on this dietary journey, my beautiful wife saw a functional medicine doctor and learned about leaky gut syndrome. In the gut, there are tight junctions between the cells in the intestinal barrier. Sometimes, the gaps between these cells can drift apart and let stuff into the blood that shouldn’t be there.
The above study says the exact same thing exists in the lungs, where gaps between the cells that should be tight can sometimes drift apart. And guess what mediates it!
Zinc, vitamin C, and vitamin D! It won’t stop the virus from lodging in your sinus cavity and replicating there, but it can keep the virus from sneaking through these junctions and entering the blood stream.
When SARS-CoV-2 started rearing its ugly head last spring and we learned about the increased risk from obesity and vitamin D status, I expected public health officials to start campaigning for better food choices, rectifying vitamin D levels, and generally living a healthier life to provide a better chance to fight off infection. It turns out I hadn’t been cynical enough about the food industry’s embedded interest in keeping our food supply exactly how it is, and how nonsensical our conversation about health would become.
It’s now clear that the CDC, the FDA, and local officials won’t do the job to educate you, and the media won’t explain the connection between obesity and current hospitalizations, instead choosing to blame their vaccine status.
It’s up to you, individually, to make these lifestyle changes. The food advertised during the Super Bowl won’t help you. Staying inside and avoiding the sun won’t help you. It’s not hard, but it does require a bit of determination.
I’m willing to help however I can. Any time you have a question, just ask. But COVID is with us forever — after it recedes into its endemic phase, it will take its place among the respiratory viruses that come and go with the seasons. And once that happens, influenza will come back, as it already has in other parts of the world.
Wouldn’t you rather be ready to fight off everything, innately, rather than hoping the current injection will keep you safe from this one thing?
Thank you Joshua! I wish this information had been spread my the mainstream media! Many lives could have been saved I think. Very encouraging!
Excellent. For many reasons that would bore you and others, it explains a lot in my health life (all good by the way). Encouraging, informative article. Thanks.