COVID Treatment

The earlier the better

FYI- COVID is treatable.

Even more so if you start treatment early.

Even more so if you keep yourself healthy so your immune system kicks it out quicker before other comorbid issues amplify the infection.

What I write now has nothing to do with COVID vaccinations.

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Prevention is really the best treatment plan:

1- Keep your metabolism in great shape. This is best accomplished with a lower carbohydrate moving towards ketogenic diet.

Why?

A few reasons.

• Ketones naturally produced by your own body during a ketogenic diet are helpful to your immune system. It appears that ketones or possibly lack of excess sugars, keeps your immune system humming on all cylinders.

• Ketones are also great anti-inflammatories. We know that Severe COVID is an aggressive inflammatory disease.

• Lower Carbohydrate or Ketogenic diets lower your natural insulin levels. Too much sugar or insulin can stress your immune system. COVID is stressing it enough so let's not add more on top.

• Excess fat mass in overweight people can be inflammatory. The excess inflammatory fat can be indirectly measured when looking at some laboratory blood tests - Leptin and Adiponectin, both measured at the Institute for Medical Wellness (IMW) during your annual wellness visit. When Leptin is elevated and/or Adiponectin is decreased, it can be a sign of excess inflammation in your body stemming from your overloaded fat cells. This excess inflammation is another burden on your immune system, which you do not want if you have COVID.

  The graph below shows that mortality rates during this pandemic are higher the more Obese you become.

  

• Ketogenic diets tend to remove some inflammatory dietary foods that can affect your gut. It has been shown that 70-80% of your immune system resides in your gut, probably to protect you from what you put into it. So if you have been chronically eating inflammatory foods, knowingly or not, you again have a stressed immune system, which you do not want if you have COVID. There may be a debate here, but my clinical experience has indicated to me that industrialized processed foods are very inflammatory to the gut. Next would be natural toxins found in plant foods. There are very few inflammatory toxins in beef, chicken, fish and eggs. We can debate the science surrounding this at another time if you’d like.

  

2- Get yourself to optimal Vitamin D levels.

What are optimal Vitamin D levels? The answer probably depends on who you ask. But if you are reading this I guess you would ask me?????

I have been testing Vitamin D levels for over 15 years on a regular basis, well before others jumped on the D-bandwagon. My advice was to have serum Vitamin D blood levels between 40-70 ng/ml. 40 is acceptable in the Winter with higher levels usually occurring in the Summer when we are outside working on getting more sunshine and natural Vitamin D production.

Now that optimal Vitamin D levels have been shown/suggested to reduce your risk of bad outcomes from COVID, my new goal levels are between 50-79 ng/ml. If you need Vitamin D supplements to achieve this I usually use Vitamin D3, and if dosing 5,000 iu or above I add in Vitamin K2, at least 100ug daily to help balance out the D's effect on calcium in the body. I learned the hard way about 10 years ago when I ended up with a kidney stone from supplementing too much Vitamin D WITHOUT the K2. Once I learned that lesson, I added Vitamin K2 to my regimen and suggest it to others if they are on higher doses of Vitamin D.

Healthy Vitamin D and Vitamin K2 have been shown to help prevent Osteoporosis and Heart Disease. So this is not just about COVID. Getting back to COVID, Vitamin D helps to buffer/balance out your immune system activity. It can help decrease the risks of the dangerous cytokine inflammatory storm that occurs in many hospitalized COVID patients.

I think that is enough for now.

I'm sure there will be more later.

I'll end with a pic of my IMW homemade tomato sauce, sometimes known as "gravy" to others.

As I was at the farmers market today, I picked up about half a dozen large Jersey tomatoes. First step boiling them for about 5 minutes after a few small slices on the skin. This makes it easy to peel the skin off the tomatoes so it does not get into the sauce.

I cut the tomatoes into small pieces and let them lightly simmer in a pot that had some onions, peppers and garlic that were sauteed in garlic olive oil..

Added some spices including salt, black and white pepper, onion and garlic powder, Italian seasoning, a bit of chimichurri seasoning, and a little bit of traditional aged balsamic vinegar.

The smell in my house while the sauce was simmering was fantastic. It also proved I did not have COVID as I had no issues with sense of smell or taste.

Tonight I will use the sauce for Gluten-Free Chicken Parmigiana, a request from my daughter. If I remember I will take a few pics and include them in a future post. The pics will be of the Chicken Parmesan, not my daughter.

As always, comments are always welcome about COVID or my recipe….

The bigger the community we build here, the more we can learn from each other and get through this strange strange time in the world.