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As I write this the world is experiencing a global pandemic known as COVID-19, or coronavirus. The media has stated that it will be 12-18 months until a vaccine is available. Even if you’re reading this after the pandemic you can still learn how a ketogenic diet improves your immune system. Heck, people are finding success by using a ketogenic or carnivore diet during cancer treatment. From my personal experiences, the fewer carbs I eat the less I get sick. I live with a paramedic and a little boy who bring germs home all the time yet I rarely get sick. When I do get sick it’s barely noticeable. The last cold I had I remember blowing my nose more than normal but that was about it.
For decades we’ve been told to avoid saturated fat and cholesterol and that simply isn’t true. Most of the cholesterol circulating through the body is made by the liver because it is such a critical molecule.
The Importance of Cholesterol & The Immune System
If you want to boost the potency of your antiviral antibodies you’re going to want cholesterol. Cholesterol appears to be a general strategy to boost the potency of antiviral antibodies. (1) When a virus enters the body and attacks a cell, it uses the cell to replicate the virus. There was a study that found that cholesterol conjugated peptides could halt the merging of a viral and cellular membrane. (2) That is, if the virus can’t merge with the cell it’s going to have a difficult time replicating.
The role of cholesterol and its role in the immune system is important not just for fighting coronavirus, but also for influenza A & B, as well as metapneumoviruses, filoviruses (Ebola), and falvivirus. (2)
A low carb ketogenic diet definitely doesn’t fear dietary cholesterol. Conversely, the typical dietary guidelines have people avoiding cholesterol and eating far too many carbohydrates. Cholesterol can be a powerful ally in the fight against viral infection.
Vitamin C On A Low Carb Diet
Whenever people get sick this is the vitamin they always tend to reach for first. While Vitamin C is beneficial to the immune system reaching for it in a bottle of fruit juice isn’t the best approach. See, Vitamin C and Insulin compete for the same receptor site on immune cells. You drink the juice with Vitamin C but because there is also a load of sugar your body will produce insulin too. There’s a better way.
Years ago sailors would develop scurvy due to a Vitamin C deficiency. However, did you know that carnivores never develop scurvy even though they only eat animals? When you’re not continuously loading your body with a ton of carbohydrates the Vitamin C actually gets recycled, plus there’s very little insulin for it to compete with. It isn’t common knowledge but fresh meat does actually contain Vitamin C. (The sailors developed scurvy because they were eating dried, salted meats combined with carbohydrate-rich foods.) The key takeaway is that your body will need more Vitamin C as you eat more carbohydrates. (Side Note & Blog Post: 2 slices of wheat bread raises your blood sugar more than a Snickers bar or white table sugar.
Trials using 24,000 mg of Vitamin C daily are currently underway in China to look at the benefits of Vitamin C in patients infected with COVID-19. What they’ve discovered in Wuhan was that the patients who could still produce lymphocytes (important infection-fighting white blood cells) in the third week of infection generally could eventually recover from the infection. (3)
Those who could not produce lymphocytes usually died. Vitamin C has been found to be very important in the production and maturation of T-lymphocytes and natural killer cells. Natural Killer cells are another type of lymphocyte that is aided by Vitamin C. (3)
Intermittent Fasting, mTOR, & Immunity
The more time you spend eating a low carbohydrate diet the better your body will become at using stored body fat for fuel. As your body remembers how to access fat for fuel you’ll find that you’ll get off of the carbohydrate, frequent hunger rollercoaster. You’ll also discover that intermittent fasting becomes easy. Fasting is important because any time we ingest protein or carbohydrates the body releases mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin).
After SARS-CoV-2 gains access to the host cell, it uses the enzyme mTOR in order to replicate. mTOR is a central controller of cell growth in the cell. After SARS-CoV-2 takes control of mTOR, it can replicate rapidly, until filling the cell, at which time the cell bursts, releasing many more viral copies to infect other cells. (3)
There was a study where they looked at the effects of various sugars and how they affected phagocytosis by neutrophils. Phagocytosis is the process where immune cells essentially eat other cells and foreign particles in the body. Neutrophils are one of the many types of cells that make up our immune system. Their job is phagocytosis. The study showed:
Oral 100-g portions of carbohydrate from glucose, fructose, sucrose, honey, or orange juice all significantly decreased the capacity of neutrophils to engulf bacteria…The decrease in phagocytic index was rapid following the ingestion of simple carbohydrates. The greatest effects occurred between 1 and 2 hrs after eating.
Role of sugars in human neutrophilic phagocytosis (4)
They saw that the rate of phagocytosis decreased while the number of neutrophils did not. The effects from eating glucose were observed for 5 hours after sugar was eaten! Alternately, fasting for 36-60 hours was shown to increase the rate of phagocytosis. I’ve said it before, we’re not meant to eat around the clock if we want to be healthy. Imagine yourself as a hunter-gatherer. We didn’t have food available 24/7 on every corner. Our innate programming is a low carbohydrate lifestyle where we can easily dip in and out of ketosis and intermittently fast with ease.
What about sugar and viruses such as the flu? Patients with higher blood glucose levels also have higher levels of cytokines. Cytokines play a role in the immune response and they’re responsible for handling cell to cell communications. Studying the correlation between inflammatory cytokines and glucose it has been shown that elevated inflammatory cytokine expression levels influenza A infected patients were tightly correlated with high levels of blood glucose. (5)
Influenza-induced cytokine storm has been linked to aggressive proinflammatory responses and insufficient control of anti-inflammatory responses (6). Several experimental studies and clinical trials suggested that cytokine storm correlates directly with widespread tissue damage and unfavorable prognosis of severe influenza (7).
The Role of Vitamin D & The Immune System
Vitamin D is another key factor in a healthy immune response, including fewer respiratory diseases. Looking at COVID-19 cases this is what they found:
Of all COVID-19 cases
- 49 (23%) cases were categorized as mild, with an average vitamin D level of 31 ng/ml (78 nmol/L)
- 59 (28%) were categorized as ordinary, with an average vitamin D level of 27 ng/ml (68 nmol/L)
- 56 (26%) were categorized as severe, with an average vitamin D level of 21 ng/ml (53 nmol/L)
- 48 (23%) were critical, with an average vitamin D level of 17 ng/ml (43 nmol/L)
- 86% of all cases among patients with normal vitamin D levels were mild, while 73% of cases among patients with vitamin D deficiency were severe or critical
- For each standard deviation increase in vitamin D level, the odds of having a mild case compared to a severe case were 7.94 times more, and the odds of having a mild case compared to a critical case were 19.61 times more
- All outcomes were statistically significant (8)
In another study, they found a correlation between Vitamin D deficiency and ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome).
dietary-induced vitamin D deficiency resulted in exaggerated alveolar inflammation, epithelial damage and hypoxia. In vitro, vitamin D has trophic effects on primary human alveolar epithelial cells affecting >600 genes. In a clinical setting, pharmacological repletion of vitamin D prior to oesophagectomy reduced the observed changes of in vivo measurements of alveolar capillary damage seen in deficient patients. (9)
What that means is that a vitamin D deficiency resulted in inflamed cells of the lungs, tissue damage, and a lack of oxygen. In a laboratory setting, Vitamin D has been shown to affect lung tissue via more than 600 genes. In humans, those who were given sufficient Vitamin D had less lung tissue damage.
There are very few foods that contain Vitamin D. Fish is the most plentiful and eggs have a little bit. Your best source of Vitamin D outside of your diet is sunlight. The body makes Vitamin D when the skin is exposed to sunlight. That is, sunlight without sunscreen. People who live at higher latitudes are more susceptible to vitamin D deficiencies because they don’t get sunlight on large areas of the body during the winter months. I’m not advocating for you to go out and get a sunburn but 15-20 minutes a day over a large area of your body definitely won’t hurt.
Keep in mind that the darker your skin is the greater the challenge can be, especially if you live closer to the poles of the Earth. Melanin (responsible for skin color) acts as a natural sunscreen. (Fun Fact: everyone has the same number of melanocytes – cells that make melanin – some are simply more active.)
What dietary nutrient is necessary for the body to make Vitamin D? Cholesterol. Despite what we’ve been told for decades cholesterol is critical to normal body functions. Did you know that your cell walls are able to maintain their structure due to cholesterol?
Cholesterol is also necessary for hormone production (including testosterone and estrogen). It’s one of the ways that a low carb ketogenic diet works. You eat cholesterol and it allows the body to make fat-dissolving bile acids. Cholesterol production is so important that your liver and intestines make about 80% of the cholesterol you need to stay healthy. You’re also more likely to die from low cholesterol than high cholesterol. If you’re worried about heart disease ask for a coronary artery calcium scan. My friend Dr. Stephen Hussey has a blog that is almost entirely dedicated to cholesterol and heart disease.
A Low Carbohydrate / Ketogenic Diet For The Immune System
The reason I loaded this article up with science is that a ketogenic diet is the opposite of mainstream medicine. Hopefully, you’ll do your due diligence and see for yourself that paleo, primal, keto, low-carb, and even carnivore aren’t fads or trends. They’re variations of the original human diet and today’s science (that isn’t funded by industry) shows the health benefits. Everyone agrees that sugar is harmful right? Yet this is what you’d likely be served in a hospital:
Isn’t it interesting that we know what boosts the immune system and what hinders it? Why is it that instead of cleaning up our food system we’re told to take or inject something as our first response? Shouldn’t we use the modern science that we have to make a healthier world? Imagine a world where we nearly get rid of all chronic diseases. Ya know, like how it used to be. Ever since the government began dictating what was and wasn’t healthy our overall health has declined with each passing year.
It has been shown that high blood pressure is driven by insulin resistance. Diabetes is the very definition of insulin resistance. (10) A low carbohydrate, high saturated fat, ketogenic diet has been shown to correct insulin resistance. (11,12) Cholesterol in the diet does not cause heart disease and those with higher cholesterol live longer. (13,14) Still not convinced? Here are my 12 reasons to go grain-free.
Knowing what we know I wonder why our approach, what we see in the media, hasn’t made an aggressive attempt to address the root cause of these chronic diseases.
Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
Further Reading
1 Dramatic Potentiation of the Antiviral Activity of HIV Antibodies by Cholesterol Conjugation
3 Kenneth D. Wilgers, M.D., NOVEL INTERVENTIONS FOR A NOVEL VIRUS
4 Role of sugars in human neutrophilic phagocytosis
5 O-GlcNAc transferase promotes influenza A virus–induced cytokine storm by targeting interferon regulatory factor–5 BY QIMING WANG, PEINING FANG, RUI HE, MENGQI LI, HAISHENG YU, LI ZHOU, YU YI, FUBING WANG, YUAN RONG, YI ZHANG, AIDONG CHEN, NANFANG PENG, YONG LIN, MENGJI LU, YING ZHU, GUOPING PENG, LIQUN RAO, SHI LIU, SCIENCE ADVANCES15 APR 2020 : EAAZ7086
6 Liu, Q., Zhou, Y. & Yang, Z. The cytokine storm of severe influenza and development of immunomodulatory therapy. Cell Mol Immunol 13, 3–10 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/cmi.2015.74
8 First Data to be Published on COVID-19 Severity and Vitamin D Levels
10 Triglyceride and glucose (TyG) index as a predictor of incident hypertension: a 9-year longitudinal population-based study. Zheng R, Mao Y, Lipids Health Dis, 16(1):175, 12 Sep 2017, | PMID: 28903774 | PMCID: PMC5598027
11 Yancy, W.S., Foy, M., Chalecki, A.M. et al. A low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet to treat type 2 diabetes.Nutr Metab (Lond) 2, 34 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1186/1743-7075-2-34
12 Matthew J. Sharman, William J. Kraemer, Dawn M. Love, Neva G. Avery, Ana L. Gómez, Timothy P. Scheett, Jeff S. Volek, A Ketogenic Diet Favorably Affects Serum Biomarkers for Cardiovascular Disease in Normal-Weight Men, The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 132, Issue 7, July 2002, Pages 1879–1885, https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/132.7.1879
13 Ravnskov U, et al. LDL-C does not cause cardiovascular disease: a comprehensive review of the current literature., Expert Rev Clin Pharmacol. 2018 Oct;11(10):959-970. doi: 10.1080/17512433.2018.1519391. Epub 2018 Oct 11. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30198808
14 Ravnskov U, et al. Lack of an association or an inverse association between low-density-lipoprotein cholesterol and mortality in the elderly: a systematic review., BMJ Open. 2016 Jun 12;6(6):e010401. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2015-010401., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27292972
Originally posted on April 24, 2020 @ 15:05
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