Immune system and Covid

Today I saw a celebrity on TV advertising a healthy lifestyle for combating Covid--better nutrition, lose some weight. Improve immune system. Just like zinc and Vitamin D and Vitamin C. I wonder if that is a heinous crime under HR 133?

The FTC is charging Eric Nepute and Quickwork LLC in a federal court for the heinous crime of advertising zinc and vitamin D to combat covid-19. Gasp. Isn't it good to know the gummit is looking out for dangerous characters while it ships unvaccinated illegals around the country with no testing or mitigation.

In HR 133, according to CLG News, Congress gave the FTC authority to target, arrest and fine anyone who doesn’t follow the government's narrative on lock downs, masks, quarantines and vaccines. Anyone who promotes a healthy immune system can now be charged and fined for the "criminal" act of helping people treat and overcome respiratory infection.

 
So I looked at HR 133. You could pass out reading about billions here and billions there for all manner of things.

List of articles on Vitamin D and Covid19

 Role of vitamin D in preventing of COVID-19 infection, progression and severity - PubMed (nih.gov)

Plus 146 similar articles, 118 free access, others abstract only. 

Insufficient data, and the science of pandemics

". . . The CDC declares that “there are insufficient data to recommend either for or against the use of vitamin D [to control the pandemic].”

Somehow, though, the “insufficient data” problem disappeared when it came to lockdowns and mask mandates. Before the pandemic, the official expert consensus was against those measures, but the consensus was promptly discarded in the hope that these sacrifices might help. The evidence since then could easily be called insufficient, given the lack of randomized studies and the inconvenient data showing that places with lockdowns didn’t fare any better than the places without strict measures. And given what has emerged about the minuscule rate of transmission in outdoor settings, you could certainly say there’s insufficient evidence to order people to stay inside their homes or to mandate masks outdoors. . .  

It’s not surprising that groups with disproportionately high rates of Covid mortality are also prone to vitamin D deficiency: African-Americans and other minorities, the obese, residents of nursing homes and other elderly people. Levels of vitamin D tend to decline with age, and because the vitamin is synthesized in the body by exposure to sunlight, people tend to have lower levels if they spend less time outdoors or have darker skin that absorbs less ultraviolet radiation from the sun."

 Pandemic Penitents | City Journal (city-journal.org)

And now we're in a second wave, and possibly a mutation that will be moving much faster so we'll just do more of what hasn't been working. So, the more we stay inside, the less sun and less Vitamin D, and the more depression from lack of sun and lack of socializing.  So, the experts tell us to do more of what's killing us.

The link between vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 in a large population | medRxiv

Association of Vitamin D Deficiency and Treatment with COVID-19 Incidence | medRxiv

“Effect of calcifediol treatment and best available therapy versus best available therapy on intensive care unit admission and mortality among patients hospitalized for COVID-19: A pilot randomized clinical study” - ScienceDirect

Vitamin D supplementation to prevent acute respiratory tract infections: systematic review and meta-analysis of individual participant data - PubMed (nih.gov)

There are no peer review articles supporting wearing a mask for Covid19, but there are many for using Vitamin D.

Are you sick of theories, studies, and guesses about Covid19?

 This one is about Vitamin D levels. 

New Study Found 80% of COVID-19 Patients Were Vitamin D Deficient (healthline.com)

• A new study that looked at 216 people with COVID-19 found that 80 percent didn’t have adequate levels of vitamin D in their blood.
• The study also found that people who had both COVID-19 and lower vitamin D levels also had a higher number of inflammatory markers such as ferritin and D-dimer, which have been linked to poor COVID-19 outcomes.
• A different study found that COVID-19 patients who had adequate vitamin D levels had a 51.5 percent lower risk of dying from the disease and a significant reduced risk for complications.
• Medical experts theorize that maintaining adequate vitamin D levels may help lower risk or aid recovery from severe COVID-19 for some people, though more testing is needed.

How to read the new nutrition label

This is the final week of programming at Lakeside, and the director of education uses our own Lakeside "experts" who present fine programming. Yesterday was Wendy Stuhldreher a retired professor of nutrition and public health explaining the new labeling for food (she used a one page FDA graphic issued Jan. 2018 which I've been unable to find). My take away was, "just eat your vegetables." She said it many times, especially at Q & A. Her point was that although vegetables may not be high in protein or calcium, they perform with other nutrients as an orchestra, and all play their part.

She also stressed that vegetarians must find compensatory nutrition because they don't eat red meat. The audience was definitely in the osteoporosis/bone loss age group, so she also stressed calcium, but added that it was an investment we needed to make when we were young because the body starts making withdrawals from the bank of our bones by middle age. For a cheese good for protein and calcium, she recommended cottage cheese.

My mother's generation started that 2% and 1% milk trend (she was 5'1" and always watched her weight), and now my generation is probably low on the calcium reserves that needed the fat content for our bones. I think I continued with the 1% and skim until a few years ago.  Don't give young children skim milk as a replacement for whole.

When I first decided to attend Wendy’s lecture, I thought I knew how to read a label, but there have been significant changes, and we found out why, like Vit. D is now listed, but Vit. A & C have been removed because deficiencies in those are rare. Sugar is sugar on the new label. Fat is fat, and "calories from fat" has been removed. Potassium need has been added. (You can't get enough by eating a banana, which most of the audience believed).

The public health concern about sun damage and advertising about sunscreen has been so successful, we now don't get enough Vit. D and today's children don't play outside as much as the boomers and Gen-Xers. She gave the new thinking on sodium/salt--because more of us are eating out, we're not eating as many vegetables--and it's not the sodium, it's the lack of vegetables.  One woman (very thin) in the audience commented about addiction to sugar, and Wendy said that has not been proven and commented on the difficulty of using control groups for nutrition studies.  But one she did recall concluded sugar was less harmful than other sweeteners.

I know how we all love to read those organic and health food websites, but when doing an initial search, I add USDA or FDA to check the research, aka bibliography/footnotes.

Six things about Vitamin D, Harvard Medical School Health Beat

A number of factors influence a person’s vitamin D levels. Here are six important ones.

1. Where you live. The further away from the Equator you live, the less vitamin D–producing UVB light reaches the earth’s surface during the winter. Residents of Boston, for example, make little if any of the vitamin from November through February. Short days and clothing that covers legs and arms also limit UVB exposure.

2. Air quality. Carbon particles in the air from the burning of fossil fuels, wood, and other materials scatter and absorb UVB rays, diminishing vitamin D production. In contrast, ozone absorbs UVB radiation, so pollution-caused holes in the ozone layer could end up enhancing vitamin D levels.

3. Use of sunscreen. Sunscreen prevents sunburn by blocking UVB light. Theoretically, that means sunscreen use lowers vitamin D levels. But as a practical matter, very few people put on enough sunscreen to block all UVB light, or they use sunscreen irregularly, so sunscreen’s effects on vitamin D might not be that important. An Australian study that’s often cited showed no difference in vitamin D between adults randomly assigned to use sunscreen one summer and those assigned a placebo cream.

4. Skin color. Melanin is the substance in skin that makes it dark. It “competes” for UVB with the substance in the skin that kick-starts the body’s vitamin D production. As a result, dark-skinned people tend to require more UVB exposure than light-skinned people to generate the same amount of vitamin D.

5. Weight. Body fat sops up vitamin D, so it’s been proposed that it might provide a vitamin D rainy-day fund: a source of the vitamin when intake is low or production is reduced. But studies have also shown that being obese is correlated with low vitamin D levels and that being overweight may affect the bioavailability of vitamin D.

6. Age. Compared with younger people, older people have lower levels of the substance in the skin that UVB light converts into the vitamin D precursor. There’s also experimental evidence that older people are less efficient vitamin D producers than younger people.

Don’t see a link, but this is on their e-mail newsletter. http://www.health.harvard.edu/

http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-HealthProfessional/

But not too much

"You cannot get 600 IU of vitamin D daily from diet unless you eat salmon 3 times a day and drink 2 gallons of milk a day," said Michael Melamed, MD, MHS, Albert Eistein College of Medicine, quoted in JAMA, 2011;305 in an article about the importance of Vitamin D. But don't go crazy--too much can cause problems and put you at risk for cancer, cardiovascular problems, falls and fractures.

Too pretty to stay inside today

Can't remember if I posted this poem here. Originally wrote it this summer for my other, other blog on retirement after an e-mail from . . . forgotten whom. . . oh well.

Song of the Other Sister
by Norma Bruce

Glucosamine chondroitin
maybe some ibuprofen
Viactiv with calcium
fish oil and Senior Centrum.

Ohioans need vitamin D,
build those bones for all to see;
Stretch and bend, wear socks and shoes,
Take a walk after the news.

Breathe deeply now, in and out,
wave to your friends give a shout,
life is good we can't complain,
but we'd settle for less pain.

Thursday evening I asked my husband how much he weighed because I wanted to see if he was "government approved."

"160," he shouted from his lounge chair in the other room.
"Oh, you've never weighed that in your life." I said.
"But I have my check up tomorrow, so we'll find out."
"Are you 5'8"?"
"No, I'm 5'9" same as always."
"Can't be. You're getting shorter." I said.

Turns out he was 156 and 5'9" so I guess we were both half right. Dr. Wulf says he has the body of a 55 year old. Must be all that dancing with the ladies he does (leads an aerobics class and he's the only guy). So now what do I do? I'm married to a younger man. How will I keep up?

Why can't OSU cite its own or peer reviewed research?

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. It's happened twice now in about 6 weeks. If I see something health related in my OSU human resources site I think I should expect something other than shilling for an anti-aging supplement company. I noticed an article under Wellness about Vitamin D and immunity. It's flu season so I clicked on it and it brought up an interesting page (reformated from the original) about vitamin D research. I made the assumption I was reading research from the University's canyons of labs, offices, gov't grants and libraries, but by the time I started rolling through footnotes that began with #25, I realized something was wrong. So I scrolled to the bottom and got a link to Life Extension Magazine, a pop-health webpage that sells anti-aging supplements! And it wasn't even current--it was almost 2 years old!

The first time I was caught was a scare story about plastic baby bottles--that link led to an advocacy page loaded with the words, "might," "could," "it is thought," and nothing concrete out of thousands of studies.

If an OSU researcher has a break through, ah-ha moment, and it's out there at a popular science or consumer health website, by all means, let us know. But don't be making stuff up, folks, and sending off to buy supplements.