Health & Fitness

A woman who, on the outside, appears to 'have it all' former jewellery designer Samantha Wills shared an honest account of being 39 and still not sure she wants kids. I, like many women in the comments section, felt empowered by her post. 

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Researchers have examined the human oral microbiome and discovered tremendous variability in bacterial subpopulations living in certain areas of the mouth. In many cases, the team was able to identify a handful of genes that might explain a particular bacterial group's habitat specificity.

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Preschoolers living in impoverished communities who have access to a nurturing home environment have significantly higher intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in adolescence compared to those raised without nurturing care.

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In urban environments, allergic diseases are more common among dogs and their owners compared to those living in rural areas. Simultaneous allergic traits appear to be associated with the microbes found in the environment, but microbes relevant to health differ between dogs and humans.

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Australian states and territories announce border restrictions and closures to those entering from New South Wales, including new mandatory hotel quarantine orders.

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“The Immunity Fix: Strengthen Your Immune System, Fight Off Infections, Reverse Chronic Disease and Live a Healthier Life” is a new book written by James DiNicolantonio, Pharm.D., with whom I co-wrote “Super Fuel,” and Siim Land, an esteemed biohacker and author of “Metabolic Autophagy.”

In it, they review how to improve and regulate your immunity — a topic that should be high on anybody’s list these days. The catalyst for this collaboration was a number of academic papers written by DiNicolantonio on the underlying reasons for why some people suffer worse COVID-19 outcomes.

Many who end up with severe illness produce low amounts of Type 1 interferon. There's also a reduction in their adaptive immune system. As a result, they don't clear the virus quickly and end up having to rely on a more proinflammatory killing of the virus inside their cells instead.

Immune System Basics

As a refresher, your immune system consists of two primary “arms”:

• The innate immune system, which is your first line defense made up of natural killer (NK) cells, macrophages and white blood cells like neutrophils
• The adaptive immune system — T cells, and B cells that produce antibodies

As explained by DiNicolantonio:

“We used to think that the adaptive immune system was this system that takes a while to kick in, and once you have immunity from your adaptive immune system, then you have a longer-term protection, which is true. However, the adaptive immune system also seems to have cross sensitivity, meaning if you've been exposed to previous coronaviruses, your T cells seem to have some cross sensitivity to SARS-COV-2.

So, essentially, what we see is a reduction in T cells, in the cytotoxicity of these CD8 T-killer cells, which kill viruses in a nice, apoptotic, controlled way.

When you have a reduction in those types of immune cells, you have to rely more on your proinflammatory innate immune system for clearing viruses — things like neutrophils, white blood cells, macrophages. They kill in a much more pro-inflammatory, non-specific way, and they end up killing healthy bystander cells.

What we think is going on is, essentially, you have this reduction in Type 1 interferons … which interfere with the virus. And at the same token, you have a reduction in B cells and T cells. So, what ends up happening is you don't clear the virus as quickly, and you end up having this proinflammatory killing.

Siim and I collaborated because these things are complex. We need to get this in layman's terms. What our book boils down to is that your diet and your lifestyle control those types of things, and there's things that you can do to support your own immune system.”

Your T cell function tends to decline with age. It’s also reduced in those with chronic disease. Reduced T cell function appears to be a primary cause of severe COVID-19, seeing how those with the worst COVID-19 outcomes are the elderly and/or those with comorbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease.

These factors worsen the proinflammatory response that you get from SARS-CoV-2, but they also weaken your immunity in general. “The Immunity Fix” reviews lifestyle strategies that help you sidestep and prevent this proinflammatory response. “It's a very holistic approach to looking at the immune system,” Land notes.

Top Two Nutrient Deficiencies to Address

Diet and nutritional supplementation are two key strategies that can help boost your immune function. According to Land and DiNicolantonio, vitamin D may be the most important nutrient in this respect.

Vitamin D activates more than 2,000 genes, DiNicolantonio notes, including vitamin K-dependent proteins and repair genes. It also helps your body produce powerful antimicrobial and antiviral peptides.

Those over the age of 60 have a ninefold greater risk of dying from COVID-19 than that of younger individuals. If you’re severely vitamin D deficient, your risk can be 15fold greater. So, while you cannot change your age, you can certainly alter your vitamin D status, thereby potentially minimizing your risk.

However, in order to convert the vitamin D into its active form, you need magnesium, so magnesium would probably be the second-most important nutrient deficiency to address. Magnesium is also required for immune cell function, so if your magnesium level is low, your immune function could be impaired. 

“People who have genetically low magnesium in their natural killer (NK) cells and their CD8 T-killer cells … their immune system is down. They have chronic activation of Epstein-Barr, which 95% of us are infected with, and they're at a much higher risk of lymphoma,” DiNicolantonio says.

“And that's just one nutrient. Being deficient in one nutrient can potentially cause this immunodeficiency essentially. So, in the book, we go through how nutrients and your immune system interact and why nutrient deficiencies are probably leading to a lot of these poor COVID-19 outcomes.”

Zinc and Selenium Are Also Important

In terms of importance, zinc would probably nab the third spot. Taking zinc lozenges at the first onset of cold symptoms has been shown to cut the duration of the common cold by six to seven days, but you have to take it correctly.

“If you're using lozenges, you have to take it every two hours,” DiNicolantonio explains. “You got to take it within 24 hours of symptom onset. You have to take about 18 milligrams per dose, and you have to get the total daily dose over 75 milligrams.”

Fourth on the list would be selenium. Not only is selenium deficiency associated with a fivefold higher risk of dying from COVID-19 and a threefold higher risk of having a poor COVID-19 outcome, but it is also associated with coxsackievirus-induced cardiomyopathy (Keshan disease).

So, if you're deficient in selenium, a nonvirulent RNA virus called coxsackievirus, which typically only causes hand, foot and mouth syndrome in certain children, can become much more virulent, leading to virally induced cardiomyopathy. Patients with this cardiomyopathy, known as Keshan disease, are typically given selenium. Selenium is also important for the production of glutathione, which appears to play a significant role in COVID-19.

The Importance of Melatonin

Another thing that is associated with improved COVID-19 outcomes is melatonin. DiNicolantonio explains:

“Melatonin is interesting. I kind of view it like molecular hydrogen but with some additional advantages. Melatonin can freely pass into any cell membrane, so that's very key. If you want to get to the oxidative stress, you have to be able to access it and get into the mitochondria. Melatonin and molecular hydrogen are two molecules that can do that and really do that well …

Melatonin is not just this hormone we secrete in the brain. We synthesize it from serotonin, and it can be produced in many cells. So, it's active throughout the entire day. What's interesting is that it's one of the only molecules that seems to increase the transcription of Nrf2.

Most plant polyphenols and all these other Nrf2 boosters only inhibit the inhibitor of Nrf2, which is KEAP1. Essentially, they're making the current Nrf2 levels more active. When you add melatonin, that increases the transcription of Nrf2. Very few molecules can actually do that.

And Nrf2 is how we boost our endogenous antioxidant enzymes. Really, that's the key. If you have acute respiratory distress, you want to boost your overall endogenous antioxidant systems, and the best way to do tha is through Nrf2 activators, particularly melatonin.”

High-Dose Melatonin Reduces COVID-19 Mortality

As for dosage, a recent case series involving 10 patients with COVID-19-related pneumonia used 36 to 72 mg of oral melatonin per day in four divided doses, which is far higher than recommended for sleep. DiNicolantonio comments:

“It's so safe. Doses of melatonin up to 1,000 mg per day in humans have shown virtually no side effects besides grogginess and sleepiness … Melatonin use is associated with an 83% reduction in mortality from COVID-19, a 30 to 50% reduction in testing positive for SARS-COV-2, and in a case series of 10 COVID pneumonia patients, it cut the duration of hospital stay by five days.

And none of those patients who got melatonin ended up on a mechanical ventilator or died whereas in similar severe COVID-19 cases that were hospitalized at the same time, 25% to 40% of those individuals ended up on mechanical ventilators or died.”

As explained by DiNicolantonio, melatonin is actively produced throughout the day and is a master antioxidant, meaning it scavenges free radicals. It also binds to melatonin receptors that upregulate your innate antioxidant defense systems.

“Melatonin actually seems to concentrate in the bone marrow and that's important because your immune system comes from stem cells produced from your bone marrow,” DiNicolantonio explains.

“From those stem cells, you get your immune cells. Some of your immune cells can even produce melatonin. We think it's being concentrated in the bone marrow to protect immature stem cells and immune cells from oxidative damage, which actually makes a lot of sense.”

Nebulized Hydrogen Peroxide

While Land and DiNicolantonio hypothesized that inhaled molecular hydrogen at 2% or 3% would be a potential important strategy in COVID-19 patients requiring ventilation in a hospital, this can be significantly expensive. A better alternative, in my opinion, would be nebulized hydrogen peroxide, which you can do at home. This is my personal go-to strategy, and I’ve seen many recover from COVID-19 using this strategy. You can review my video below for more detailed in formation.

Nebulizing hydrogen peroxide into your sinuses, throat and lungs is a simple, straightforward way to augment your body’s natural expression of hydrogen peroxide to combat infections and can be used to support the immune system.

All you need is a desktop nebulizer, food-grade hydrogen peroxide and some saline. That way, you have everything you need and can begin treatment at home at the first signs of a respiratory infection. Keep in mind food grade hydrogen peroxide must be diluted down to a 0.1% dilution before use.

I believe the hydrogen peroxide works like a signaling molecule, and may even have some direct viricidal effect on the cells in the lining of the lungs and the sinuses where the virus takes hold initially. So, you're potentially killing it directly, plus supporting your immune responses.

Address Your Metabolic Health

In addition to addressing nutrient deficiencies, in particular vitamin D, magnesium, zinc and selenium, Land stresses the importance of optimizing your metabolic health.

“Research [has found] that metabolic syndrome, obesity and diabetes, all those things, worsen the outcomes of COVID-19 as well as other infections like influenza. Obesity also increases the duration that you can carry the virus and share it for longer. So, it's especially negative in a society that tends to be in poor metabolic health.

One interesting thing that we discovered during the writing of the book is that one of the molecules that gets activated during an infection is called HMGB1, which stands for High Mobility Box-1.

That gets activated during an infection, and it's one of the key molecules that kind of offsets the cytokine storm by activating NFKB and NLRP3 inflammasome and eventually causes this massive pro-inflammatory cytokine response …

What we theorized based on this research, is that hyperglycemia, insulin resistance, elevated blood sugar will make it more likely that HMGB1 is going to get into the cell and turn on NFKB and these other pro-inflammatory cytokines that will eventually lead to the cytokine storm.”

The Case for a Low Linoleic Acid Diet

DiNicolantonio and I discussed the importance of avoiding seed oils in our book, “Superfuel.” In it, we dove deep into the importance of healthy fats for metabolic health, and the destructive nature of linoleic acid-rich vegetable oils.

Linoleic acid (LA) is one of the most perishable molecules in food, meaning it’s highly susceptible to damage. When it oxidizes, it turns into oxidative metabolites called oxidative linoleic acid metabolites or oxylipids or OXLAMs that damage proteins, DNA and cell membranes and are likely the primary culprit of chronic disease.

OXLAMs also activate pathways that destroy your immune response. What we didn’t fully appreciate at the time was that even healthy oils, such as olive oil, can have a negative impact, thanks to their LA content. LA is also high in conventionally raised chicken, as these animals are typically fed LA-rich grains.

If you exceed 10 grams of LA per day, and perhaps as little as 5 grams — regardless of their source — you may radically worsen your metabolic health. From a historical perspective, 150 years ago, the average consumption of LA was 2 to 3 grams. Today, many get more than 30 grams a day from their diet. In my view, an LA-restricted diet may be the single most important dietary intervention available. DiNicolantonio adds:

“That's a great point, and I think from a COVID-19 perspective, the biggest thing you want to do is increase the resilience of your cells to oxidative stress. Unfortunately, if you're consuming a diet high in LA, and if it doesn't get burned for fuel and it gets stored in tissues, the half-life of LA is 680 days, and it can start oxidizing the cellular membranes, including on your immune cells as well.

If you increase your omega-6 intake, that affects the levels in your immune cells. And if you saturate your immune cells with this oxidized LA, you're probably at a much higher risk of secreting more proinflammatory cytokines in your own cells, and your lungs and your arteries are probably much more susceptible to the damage that occurs when our body tries to kill off viruses.

I'm sure if we were to actually look at the blood levels of oxidized LA in severe COVID-19 patients, they would be sky high … So yeah, it's likely a huge driver of overall inflammation.”

Simple Strategies to Improve Your NAD+ Level

Another important molecule is nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+), which can be increased using precursors such as nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) and/or nicotinamide riboside (NR).

NMN appears to be the superior of the two, as it activates a salvage pathway. However, you don’t need to take an expensive supplement to improve your NAD+ level. Strategies such as exercise, hot or cold exposure and time-restricted eating — which costs you nothing — can get the job done. Land explains:

“A lot of the NAD that your body produces is recycled through the salvage pathway. Very little (less than 1%) of it is going to come from food, especially tryptophan or niacin.

The easiest way to prevent losing your NAD as you get older or as you get immunocompromised is to promote the salvage pathway, and one of the activators of this NAMPT enzyme that governs the salvage pathway is AMP protein kinase (AMPK), and AMPK gets primarily turned on by catabolic stressors in the body, such as exercise, sauna, cold, as well as fasting.

What I've concluded is that doing this regular intermittent fasting or timed eating is a very efficient way of keeping our energy levels high and preventing the lowering of the other things that lower NAD, like inflammation and oxidative stress.

The problem is that NAMPT is controlled by sirtuins and sirt1 especially. Sirtuins are longevity genes. Sirtuins also control your circadian rhythms. So, what I think is that if your circadian rhythms are misaligned, if you’re doing shift work or you're jet lagged or something, then sirtuins are not going to be expressed, and you will also then inhibit NAMPT, which will then shut down the NAD salvage pathway.”

In other words, when sirtuins are suppressed from mismatched circadian rhythms, you also suppress NAMPT, as the NAMPT requires sirtuins to work. Sirtuins also consume NAD, so if your NAD level is low, you’re not going to get the benefits sirtuins provide.

“I think the supplemental NR and NMN are very useful if you're in an NAD-deficient state because the problem is that if you're already low in NAD, then it's hard to raise that bar because you're already so low and depleted,” Land says.

“If your NAD is high, then you experience the less negative side effects from inflammation oxidative stress because your body can repair and deal with it, whereas if you're immunocompromised, you're very old or you are just nutrient deficient and have low NAD, then it's a vicious feedback loop. So, using something like a NAD precursor or a booster can be a quick fix to get yourself back on the right track.”

If you use an NAD or NMN supplement, consider getting it in suppository form. Other alternatives include subcutaneous or intranasal administration, all of which are more effective than oral supplements. That said, as noted by DiNicolantonio, if your NAD is low, your best bet is to address the underlying cause rather than simply adding supplements.

“Ultimately, any type of oxidative stress is going to deplete NAD. So, fix your metabolic dysfunction and improve your nutrient deficiencies first, and ultimately your NAD need is going to go down. Fix the things that are causing you to burn through your NAD.”

One of the most common sources of oxidative stress is electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure, which is the topic of my book “EMF*D.” Two primary enzymes consume NAD. One is poly ADP-ribose polymerases (PARP), which is also known as adenosine ribosyl transferase (ARTD). PARP is used to repair DNA damage, and every time PARP is activated, it uses up 150 molecules of NAD.

The good news is that strategies such as sauna, exercise and fasting not only will improve the production of NAD, but also will reduce the consumption of it. These strategies also lower inflammation, which in and of itself will lower your NAD consumption.

Other Benefits of Sauna Bathing

In addition to preserving your NAD, sauna bathing also mimics a fever, which is your body’s first-line defense against infections. DiNicolantonio explains:

“The reason why we induce a fever to fight an infection is because that allows our cells to secrete heat shock proteins. In order for a virus to replicate, it has to infect your cell, hijack your machinery, and it has to export its ribonucleoprotein complex out of the cell to replicate. In order for that complex to get exported, the M1 protein has to dock onto it.

Heat shock protein 70, which gets released during sauna sessions, can combine to the viral ribonucleoprotein complex preventing M1 protein from docking. [By] inhibiting the export of that viral ribonucleoprotein complex, [heat shock protein] essentially inhibits viral replication.”

According to Land, regular sauna bathing and exercise are among the best things you can do to strengthen your immune system and increase your body’s resilience. The two are also complementary.

Exercise causes preconditioning hormesis, so if you exercise before your sauna, then you significantly bolster your body’s ability to handle infection and other stresses. The heat will also promote recovery from the exercise by boosting growth hormone, repairing damaged proteins and reducing inflammation.

More Information

This interview merely touches on a small number of highlights of the information found in “The Immunity Fix,” so to learn more, be sure to pick up a copy. To connect with DiNicolantonio and Land, see their websites, DrJamesDinic.com and SiimLand.com. Both can also be found on Twitter and Instagram by searching for DrJamesDinic (@drjamesdinic) and Siim Land.

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Thomas Lewis, author of “The End of Alzheimer’s: The Brain and Beyond,” is a microbiologist with a Ph.D. from MIT. He’s done a lot of work on diagnostic testing, and in this interview, we explore how retinal assessment and other laboratory tests can be used to stratify your risk factors for chronic disease and COVID-19. Lewis recently published an excellent paper on this.

We first met almost two years ago at the Academy for Comprehensive Integrative Medicine in Orlando, Florida, where he gave a presentation on how assessment of the retina can be used as a diagnostic tool to evaluate your risk for a wide variety of diseases.

The Eye-Brain Connection

As just one example, glaucoma and Alzheimer’s disease are often linked together, with glaucoma occurring first, as they did in Lewis’ father’s case. His dad developed glaucoma several years before he developed Alzheimer's.

Lewis goes so far as to refer to glaucoma as “Alzheimer's disease of the eye,” and Alzheimer's as “glaucoma of the brain.” Similarly, cataracts are a manifestation of your innate immune response against acute and chronic infection. If you are, say, 50 years old and you have early nuclear cataracts, it's a bad sign, as it’s an indication of a chronic infection.

The infection is what’s causing this unfolded protein response to slowly matriculate in the lens of the eye. According to Lewis, “If you have an early cataract, that's a bad sign for longevity. Most people with cataracts die of some vascular event fairly young.”

Your Eye Is a Window Into Your Overall Health

Lewis explains the general theory for using the eye as a biomarker for systemic disease:

“When you look at disease, in the allopathic system, you're either healthy or you're sick. But we really lie on a continuum of health. I say we live on four different continuums, determinants of health, lifestyle, risks, things like that. For physiological health, we measure blood, stool and urine …

For pathology, which is largely ignored, we do ultrasounds, MRIs and CT scans that assess tissue changes. The eye happens to be particularly good at that because the eye is transparent, and the methodology used to measure the eye is low-cost and noninvasive but highly precise and accurate.

For example, optical coherence tomography (OCT) is much more precise at looking at micro vessels, capillaries, compared to MRI because the wavelength of light they use to create the interference is a much shorter wave length. In other words, it gives much more detail than an MRI.”

OCT is a type of tomography that uses safe, nonionizing light waves. At a cash price of about $50, it’s also an affordable diagnostic tool that can tell you a lot about what’s going on in your body.

I was intrigued with the test and found a local optometrist to perform it for me. I hadn’t had an eye exam for a few decades so thought it would be a good checkup. Well, I had no glaucoma, 20/20 vision, near and far without glasses, and my OCT was totally normal, like that of a young adult. It’s great to know that lifestyle changes work. Next month I will share an article on what they have done for my physical body.

Again, because the eye is transparent, OCT allows you to see all the micro vessels, and whatever is happening in this carotid tissue — the vasculature in your eye — is also happening in the rest of your body, as the carotid is the most vascular tissue in your entire body.

“Whereas the brain uses 10 times more oxygen than most tissue on a per mass basis, the retina, which is constantly converting photons to electrons, uses even more oxygen on a per mass basis. If you're vulnerable, the eye is potentially a canary for that vulnerability,” he explains.

“That's why we use this test. It's so simple to see if there are life risks that are translating into physiological risk and then changing into pathological risks. When you're changing into pathological risk, a bad ending is getting closer because you have tissue damage, basically.”

The COVID Connection

Many common lab tests can also tell you a lot about your health and the state of your immune system. When COVID-19 broke out, Chinese researchers reported patients had elevated ferritin and erythrocyte sedimentation (SED) rate, among other things. Lewis compared the COVID-19 lab panels with the work he’d been doing for the past 15 years, and found they matched up nicely.

“It's not about treating COVID-19, it's about measuring how full your vessel is towards these markers that create the cytokine storm, high inflammation, and kill you, and try to modulate that,” Lewis says.

"Why does the Z-Pak treat COVID-19? It doesn't. It treats bacterial infection, but we all have a subclinical bacterial infectious burden, and that burden is taking up immune system bandwidth, which makes you less able to fight something as virial as COVID-19. That's why Z-Pak works …

There's nothing really special about COVID-19 and our immune response, because our immune response is innate and adaptive. It's [about] being able to more accurately measure your immune compromised status. And almost everything we measure is reversible through very simple processes, supplementation, lifestyle activities, treating the infection, treating the pre-existing virus.”

Understanding Cytokines

One of the most lethal aspects of COVID-19 is the cytokine or bradykinin storm that can develop. A cytokine is a short-lived signaling protein that has regulatory properties on nearby cells. It could be beneficial or it could be detrimental. It could be proinflammatory, or it could be anti-inflammatory.

So, it's not so much that cytokines are bad — they're absolutely necessary and you'd be dead in a few heartbeats without them — but when they get out of control, they can kill you. That's what’s known as a cytokine storm, which I have discussed extensively in previous newsletters. It is one of the reasons why vitamin D works so well; it aborts most cytokine storms through its modulation of your immune response.

Risk Score Versus Diagnosis

What the retinal assessment and various lab assays can do is identify a brewing problem, which can then be addressed using strategies such as nutritional supplementation and lifestyle changes.

“For the average person, knowing where you are on that continuum would be extraordinarily valuable,” Lewis says, “and that's the testing we're doing and trying to promote more broadly.”

The key, however, is not to be within the “normal” reference ranges for disease markers, examples of which include fibrinogen, D-dimer, SED rate or C-reactive protein. What Lewis has done is determine the point at which there’s a statistical increase in early mortality. “That sets a completely different set of normal ranges for biomarkers, which is what we use. These ranges are much tighter compared to normal reference ranges, so you are amplifying the signal your body is projecting about your health. We're not diagnosing people, we're risk scoring people,” he explains.

Helpful Lab Tests

Screening tests that can help assess the state of your health and immune system include:

1-25 Dihydroxy vitamin D — This is the activated form of vitamin D. Vitamin D increases antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and improves the activity of neutrophils (white blood cells that fight bacteria).

RBC magnesium — Magnesium is an important cofactor for the activation of vitamin D. Taking magnesium can actually reduce the amount of oral vitamin D you require to optimize your vitamin D level.

Neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) — This marker alone determines prognosis in most solid tumor cancers. Neutrophils go up when there’s a bacterial infection, while lymphocytes are suppressed by viruses. As explained by Lewis, “The NLR is sort of an amplified barometer for your stealth infectious burden. The absolute count should be 1.5 or below.” Anything above 55% neutrophils is indicative of a chronic, likely bacterial, infection.

Red blood cell distribution width (RDW) — Red blood cells are born small and die large. If your RDW is wide, you likely have plaques and inflamed carotid arteries. Above 16 or 17, RDW could be a sign of anemia, but between 12.5 and 16, it’s a pure sign of inflammation.

C-reactive protein — A marker of inflammation. This should be 0.6 or below.

Fibrinogen — As a signaling molecule for tissue repair, fibrinogen is a good marker for how well your body is able to repair itself. If your fibrinogen is between 150 and 285, your repair and recovery is probably meeting or outpacing wear and tear, allowing you to properly heal and recover. Above 285, you are probably deteriorating more rapidly than you're repairing. Fibrinogen is also a clotting factor marker, so in COVID-19 and sepsis, for example, high fibrinogen is indicative of a cytokine storm. Pre-cytokine storm levels are also indicative of several chronic diseases, including heart attack and cancer.

Ferritin — Ferritin is an iron transport protein that becomes elevated in COVID-19 and other serious illnesses. Iron catalyzes growth of bacterial pathogens. Typically, when your blood cells are under attack by a pathogen, your body responds by hiding the iron from the antigen (the infection) in the ferritin protein, thereby resulting in anemia (low iron) and high ferritin. If you have elevated ferritin, the iron may not be available to the pathogen, but it is still available to the cells of your body. Iron is a powerful oxidant stressor that will radically increase oxidized species, reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species, which activates the NRLP3 inflammasome and radically increases inflammatory mediators and cytokines. The solution for high ferritin is to donate blood. If your ferritin is above 100, consider giving blood periodically.

Fasting insulin — Insulin resistance is a foundational contributor to most chronic disease and significantly increases your risk of complications and death from SARS-CoV-2 infection. Fasting glucose is also a useful test that you can easily do at home.

Uric acid — Uric acid is a multifactorial inflammatory marker. It also helps protect against hypoxia.

Homocysteine — Homocysteine is a vascular toxin associated with heart disease that is influenced by your vitamin B levels. As explained by Lewis: “LabCorp keeps changing their reference normals, and now they're as high as 17. But the Framingham's study shows that with a baseline of 9, every five points higher homocysteine leads to a 40% increase in dementia because it's a vascular toxicity.”

SED rate — The SED rate is a measurement of how fast your red blood cells settle in a test tube. Red blood cells have a repulsive charge on the outside of their membranes (zeta potential) that allow them to remain buoyant. When this repulsive charge is lacking, they settle faster. As explained by Lewis: “SED rate is a surrogate for how good your electrical system is working, which I then use as a surrogate for your gut and how well it's doing at digesting and making minerals bioavailable, because it's the sodium potassium pump that drives the electric potential of cells, among other minerals.” Ideally, if your zeta potential is good and high, your SED rate should be close to zero. The lower, the better. The higher your SED rate, the worse off you are, as this means the “battery” of your red blood cells are discharged, which will result in systemic problems and overall low energy levels. Typically, your SED rate will improve once you start to heal and rebalance your gut.

Where to Get These Tests

Your primary care doctor can order any and all of these lab tests for you. However, they may not be able to thoroughly guide your treatment based on your results, which is what Lewis and his team specialize in. So, for testing and a comprehensive analysis, consider turning to www.healthrevivalpartners.com.

“Come through us and we'll help you solve your problem,” Lewis says. “Under our services tab, we have a COVID-19 service, and there we have five different levels of panels, from just a population screening to a very deep dive. Basically, every marker we talked about today, and more.

Looking at the lipids, the chemistry, liver function, metabolic, all that stuff, is included. We don't take insurance, but I can order these labs. My team can order these labs anywhere in the country …

We couple the lab test with a highly functional intake survey. What we've done, and we were publishing a paper on this, is we've created a risk score for every single question and answer that is typically on a functional intake questionnaire, and made it digitized, so it's online. You take it.

We give you a letter grade, which is sort of a reflection of your total risk portfolio, and then subsections of grades. Then we give you a very detailed color-code report, which really turns into your treatment plan, if you will. We want to ameliorate these different things. And we have health coaches to help you organize them because some things you want to do in series, other things you want to do in parallel. We call this the hierarchy of health.

Anybody who does a blood test gets that. And then our team is trained on how to help you understand your labs from a very detailed chronic perspective, but also look back at the risk factors and show you what risk factors could potentially have led to an elevation in that lab. So, you see a very clear one-to-one correlation.

We give you a letter grade, but there's a score underneath it. And then we give you what we call our chronic disease temperature, which is the amalgamation of 20 of these important biomarkers into a single score. We have a plot of our chronic disease temperature versus our chronic disease assessment.

It's a fairly linear thing, showing you that your risks are tied to your physiological health. And then we've shown, in populations that we work with, that when we lower their risk grade — just the lifestyle things, cleaning up the teeth, improving the gut, cleaning the diet up, detoxification — as their risk rate goes down, their physiological score goes down, which is a good thing because we want your score as low as possible.

That's the essence of what we do. We have functional doctors, regular doctors, health coaches.”

Managing Your Expectations

While most health problems can be successfully addressed with nutritional and other lifestyle changes, it’s important to manage your expectations of how long it’s going to take. As noted by Lewis:

“I have a very simple explanation to set expectations up. If it took you 10 years to get into something chronic, it's going to take you at least 10 months to get out of it. And that's with diligence, consistency and the proper treatment. When we have really compliant people [working on healing] rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, brain fog, we get this major inflection of health improvement at five months.

Why is that? Because everything in nature is log linear. We are wired to understand that implicitly, but society has taught us instantaneous gratification. We think if we do one thing, we'll get one result. But really everything is an asymptote, going into disease is an asymptote, so you're incubating, incubating, incubating, and then suddenly things go wrong.

While getting out of that state is the reverse of that, it takes you a long time to move the needle and start feeling better. Then all of a sudden, you reach that inflection point and you feel better.

Everything in nature, including health, it’s a log linear relationship to get to where you want to be … When people understand that and buy into that concept, then they can stay the course and we can actually make them better. It's not an overnight thing. That's the only point I'm trying to make.”

More Information

Again, HealthRevivalPartners.com is where you can sign up for your biomarker panel and receive the guidance you need to address whatever problems you may be having. For more information about the eye-brain connection and what your eye health can tell you about your Alzheimer’s risk, which we touched on at the beginning of this interview, see RealHealthClinics.com.

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