#230 The Immunity Fix Webinar with Dr James DiNicolantonio

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

So, I would now like to bring on Dr. James and Siim on for today's talk.

James DiNicolantonio (0:07)

So welcome guys.

Siim Land (0:08)

Thank you very much for being with us today.

James DiNicolantonio (0:10)

And Iz is gonna work the magic for the screen share and everything. And this is where I'll drop off into the background.

Siim Land (0:18)

And yeah, leave it to you guys.

SPEAKER_1 (0:21)

What's up? Hello.

James DiNicolantonio (0:23)

Yeah, great to be here. Siim and I are gonna be discussing lifestyle strategies to support overall health and the immune system.

And a lot of this research is also coming from our book, The Immunity Fix. So these are the risk factors, relative risk of death for COVID-19. And what I wanna point out here is that every single one of these risk factors except age is modifiable through diet, lifestyle, things like that. So you can't fix old age, but you can certainly fix low vitamin D levels. So what's interesting, if you have a severe vitamin D deficiency, which is essentially 12 nanograms per ml or less, your risk of having or dying from COVID-19 is about 14.7 fold higher. And the risk of having a poor outcome is six fold higher. So you can see here, I sort of listed this from top down, but if you look at the nutrients, vitamin D deficiency, selenium deficiency increases the risk of dying by about five fold from COVID-19 and then zinc deficiency by about two fold. So D deficiency is extremely prevalent. There's about 1 billion people globally that are vitamin D deficient and about half the global population is actually vitamin D insufficient. So definitely get your vitamin D levels checked, make sure they are optimized. And when we discuss in the book too, that things like metabolic syndrome, elevated blood pressure, glucose, elevated waist circumference, high triglycerides, they all contribute to a worse COVID-19 outcome. And you can fix metabolic syndrome within weeks of essentially restricting refining carbohydrates and seed oils.

Now, what this graph is showing is the severity of the common cold. And these circular, the circles here are in adults and the squares are in children. So what you can see here is essentially, if you give one gram dose of vitamin C, there's about a 7% reduction in the severity of the common cold. But if you give four grams, there's a 20% reduction. So there's about a threefold better outcome, just simply going from one to four grams. And you can see this, a similar dose response in children.

And then if you actually use linear regression modeling, which is essentially not from clinical trials, but you're extrapolating based off of the four clinical trials, in order to get a 50% reduction in the severity of the common cold, you may need to take 10 grams of vitamin C. And really vitamin C is something that has a short half life and really should be dosed every two hours to maintain elevated blood levels.

The duration of the common cold, we see the same thing, where elevated levels of vitamin C give better reductions. And then again, we're not 100% sure on what will give us a 50% reduction, but based on linear regression, we could need up to 18 grams.

So essentially, you have a tolerable upper intake of vitamin C that has been set for some people who develop diarrhea. So essentially, two grams is the upper limit for safety for vitamin C for adults. And that's only because diarrhea, you start to experience, some people start to experience it at that level. You do have to be careful with high doses of vitamin C and people who are susceptible to oxalate kidney stones or who have kidney disease. And really, probably don't want to be taking more than 500 milligrams of vitamin C at one dose. So what seems to be optimal is probably 250 to 500 milligrams multiple times per day. What you can see here is, if you just give yourself a therapeutic dose when you're sick, you actually don't get a significant benefit. It's only the people who take vitamin C on a regular basis and then also add therapeutic doses, get a significant reduction in the duration of the common cold. And that makes sense, right? So it's something that we should be making sure we're hitting optimal levels on a daily basis. And then if you get sick, you also want to increase that.

So in summary, vitamin C essentially may not provide benefits if you only take it when you're sick. It should be something that you're taking on a daily basis and making sure you're getting probably at least 500 milligrams per day. And you can split that up in divided doses. And so it's just, it's also mimicking how we would have gotten vitamin C from an evolutionary perspective. We wouldn't, just like you wouldn't breathe all your oxygen in one sitting, you wouldn't drink all your water in one sitting, you shouldn't be taking all your vitamin C in one dose.