Hi, it’s Dr. Jeffrey Mark here. You know that my practice has consisted of anti-aging and regenerative medicine, and we have a lot of programs. We also have people do supplements. And you might ask, Well, why do we need to do supplements. And that’s because if you’re thinking,” Well, I’m eating the right foods and doing the right diet and exercise program and getting a good variety of foods and nutrition. And the truth is for the past few years, the soil has not been the same today in terms of giving us adequate nutrition compared to hundreds of years ago in the hunter-gatherer societies .
Back then, there was quite a bit of an effort to eat a huge variety of berries, nuts, and all kinds of things out in the field, and the animals that were eaten also ate a lot of this variety of fruits and vegetables. So we don’t have this variety anymore and the soil is not very good as well. So the other thing about food nowadays is that we’re feeding even chicken corn and we’re not letting them eat what they usually would eat, which is finding those meal worms and finding those other things that they would look for themselves in nature, that’s available. And right now we’re actually feeding them in the farms with things that will help them grow faster: higher protein content, maybe some antibiotics. In certain areas, chicken are not giving antibiotics but they are encouraged to eat whatever food is available or cost effective ways which is usually corn. So sadly in the United States about 70% of all the carbon that’s in us is from corn. And we’re a carbon based life form of course. So Europeans only have about 5% of their carbon being derived from corn because they are not feeding their animals and harvesting and using corn like we are because we’re incentivized to use corn which is a political, economic, factor. So it’s kind of scary that none of us really ate corn until five hundred years ago when Christopher Columbus, came to the new new world and discovered maize or corn. So it’s incredibly new addition to our diet. And I think that 70% of what most of us eat are derived from this is corn based diet, either in what we eating directly or from the animals we consume. The other factor is grains. Most grains have lectins and gluten is a lectin as well, but most people don’t realize when they’re going gluten free, they’re actually eating other lectin containing foods, including brown rice ,corn, quinhuai, and some of the beans as well. Obviously the beans have the highest lectin content of any food. You can pressure cook the beans or lentils and make them safe but that’s quite a bit of an effort for some people to do. Then there’s nightshades, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants potatoes, and even goji berries, they all are part of the night shade family . So you have to be careful of these nightshade foods, because some of these foods are not easily digestible and they actually have a defensive mechanism from the plant which is not helping the animal do well so that the animal that consumes them won’t continue to feed on them.
So, people ask me, Okay, so I’m doing the right diet, avoiding the foods that I shouldn’t be eating and exercising. I’m getting enough sleep. So we teach the five things that they should be doing, including getting enough sleep, exercising, nutrition in terms of avoiding certain foods as I mentioned some of the, like, the gluten, lectins, nightshades for some, and then having a sense of community balancing the hormones,. I’m asked what else is there to do especially on the nutritional side of things. We are not able to get as much nutrition as we once have been in the past. And that’s partially because of the soil and the way we’re farming. The contents of the nutrients is a lot less. Looking a the content of iron in spinich as a epresentative nutrient 40 years ago compared to today’s iron content. Some of the things that are involved include using petroleum based products as nitrate fertilizers. The other issues are we don’t rotate crops and we don’t allow our crops to lay fallow or to regenerate their nitrogen naturally by growing certain plants like alfalfa that can regenerate some of the nutrients in the soil.
So the first supplement that I tell people they should be on is vitamin D. The number two supplement that I tell people that they definitely should be on is a form of long chain, omega three fatty acids that particularly contain DHA There’s very good data that people who have the highest omega three index which is actually a measure of how much omega threes that you have in your blood for the two months prior to the test. If you have a high omega three index, this usually correlates with the bigger brains in the area of memory, which is namely the hippocampus, so people who have the lowest levels of omega three index have smaller brains that are somewhat shrunken in the areas of the memory. So this obviously means their capabilities of memory and function may be less, and definitely less than optimal. So, it is true that when we are told to eat a lot of fish which is brain food. That’s because of all the omega threes and the long chain fatty acids that are present. So as you know our brain is about 60% fat and the other fat in our brain is DHA.
So even with children we know that mothers who supplement with DHA during pregnancy have actually smarter kids and kids who are supplemented with DHA actually perform better in school. So essentially DHA is brain food. There’s several new studies on the COVID update front. As you know we’re getting new information weekly, and the latest one that I’m going to be talking about is that free fatty acids bind to a pocket located in the structure of the SARS COV-2 spike protein. So the title of this article is called free fatty acid binding pocket in the locked structure of SARS Cove to spike protein by Christine Tozer as the primary author or lead author.
The abstract is summarized as follows: It has been founded on examination of the structure of the SARS COV-2 spike (S) glycoprotein that the receptor binding domains (RBDs) tightly bind the essential free fatty acid (FFA) linoleic acid (LA) in three composite binding pockets. The pocket also appears to be present in the highly pathogenic coronaviruses SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV. LA binding stabilizes a locked S conformation, giving rise to reduced ACE2 interaction in vitro. In human cells, LA supplementation synergizes with the COVID-19 drug remdesivir, suppressing SARS-CoV-2 replication. Our structure directly links LA and S, setting the stage for intervention strategies targeting LA binding by SARS-CoV-2.
So what this means is that linoleic acid binds in such a way to the SARS CoV -2 virus that it cannot adequately bind very well to the ACE two receptor. The Ace two receptors in the bronchial linings in the lungs. The ACE two receptor is the key or the gateway that the virus gets into the cells. So if it can’t bind to it, it can get into the cells very easily. Therefore, we may have a simple way of using a fatty acid which is linoleic acid which is actually found in things like walnuts, to be able to perhaps decrease the risk of getting infected once exposed to SARS CoV 2. Now there are other aspects of the linoleic acid that you have to be careful about and that you don’t want to just take an excessive amount of linoleic acid. Linoleic as is an omega 6 fatty acid and can promote an inflammatory response. So we’ll continue our discussion with supplements next week.
If you want to learn about how functional medicine can help you with gut health, brain health, or immune health, you can contact us at info@jeffreymarkmd.com or call (925) 736-9828.
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