Diet and Lifestyle Driving the Risks for COVID-19

Written by Dallas Vein Specialists on July 11, 2020

Diet and Lifestyle Driving the Risks of COVID-19

What changes can be made to improve our general health and fitness and perhaps reduce the chances of complications and death if we should contract the epidemic coronavirus?

As for DIET the answers are straightforward:

1. Reduce the intake of sugar and highly refined carbohydrates, which are together with industrial vegetable seed oils, the most important factors causing the increasing rate of obesity, diabetes and prediabetes.
2. Increase the daily consumption of nutrient dense whole foods; eliminate the sugary drinks and reduce the breads, pasta and other highly refined carbohydrate foods. Think of the healthy diet our grandparents and great grandparents consumed on the farm.
3. Eliminate all foods that contain high fructose corn syrup (start reading food ingredient labels). Cut out snacks.
4. Eliminate the highly refined vegetable/seed oils, such as canola oil, that undergo 30 plus chemical processes in manufacture. Use healthy fats/oils like olive oil and grass-fed butter.

(According to the National Diabetes Statistical Report, 2020, more than 34 million Americans have diabetes; that’s over 1 in 10, and 88 million have prediabetes; that’s 1 in 3. Over 40% of Americans are obese.)

As for LIFESTYLE:

1. Move daily. While exercise is good, not everyone will go to a gym for a daily work out, but most of us can take walks, climb the stairs, lift heavy things and intermittently remain active throughout the day
2. Try to get some outdoor time every day; sunshine for a few minutes every day boosts our Vitamin D, which has been shown to help prevent respiratory infections. (in a study in Ireland of COVID-19 patients, Vit D reduced the incidence of chest infections by 50%.)
3. Get enough good quality SLEEP. Sleep is linked to good immune status. Sleep deprived subjects were shown to have a poor antibody response to influenza vaccination compared to those who were not sleep deprived. Adults who show a poor response to vaccines have a higher rate of illness. In another study subjects inoculated with rhinovirus, a frequent cause of the common cold, who had less than 7 hours of sleep were 2.93 times more likely to develop a cold than those with 8 or more hours of sleep. In the same study sleep efficiency was also important in that those with less than 92% efficiency were 5.5 times more likely to develop a cold than those with sleep efficiency scores of 98% or more. At the cellular level, sleep has been shown to boost the body’s immunity by enhancing the action of the T cell response to virus infected cells resulting in the destruction of those cells. So, turn off the TV, close the book, and go to SLEEP.