Can you boost your immune system to fight COVID-19?
This is the question on everyone’s mind as we face a worldwide crisis. We don’t yet know how to fully prevent or manage the damage caused by COVID-19, the disease caused by a coronavirus that is new to us all.
We see online claims that we can “boost” our immune system with just about everything from Vitamin C or Vitamin D to essential oils and silver nanoparticles. But how do we know which of these recommendations, if any, really work?
That’s a tough question to answer, mainly because the immune system is not “one thing” that we can easily measure. It’s an intricate and delicate system with many different components. Helping one section might impair another, or boosting a certain section may have nothing to do with fighting viruses.
That makes knowing what to do challenging. Plus, how do we know if something that helps with another virus will help with this new coronavirus? As you can see, there is much we simply cannot know.
Finally, if you are older or have an underlying health condition (including diabetes and high blood pressure), you have an increased risk of severe symptoms, and potentially, loss of life from COVID-19. We recommend taking every precaution to avoid it.
If you’re young and otherwise healthy, your risk of complications is much lower. If you do contract the virus, you’ll probably have mild symptoms and fully recover within a couple of weeks.
However, it’s possible that you may be infected with the virus without showing any symptoms. So maintaining excellent hygiene and practicing social isolation are crucial to avoid spreading it to high-risk individuals.
As you may have read at Diet Doctor, we believe the evidence is strong to support the many health benefits of eating low-carb diets.
In fact, it may be more important now than ever to maintain a healthy lifestyle, including a long-term healthy eating pattern. That means an eating pattern that provides essential nourishment and also keeps your blood sugar and weight in check.
It appears that individuals with type 2 diabetes and other metabolic conditions are at higher risk of complications from COVID-19. The evidence is clear that low-carb and ketogenic diets can be effective tools for treating and reversing these metabolic conditions.
While we can’t prove that low-carb nutrition boosts immune function per se, it makes sense to limit the conditions (e.g. high blood pressure or high blood sugar) that might make things worse.
In addition, one recent study showed that a keto diet reduces the risk for mice infected with influenza. That’s a far cry from saying a keto diet will do the same for influenza in humans or for COVID-19. But one question we should ask is, if we follow a diet that is proven to help with weight loss and metabolic health and may also beneficially affect immune function, what do we have to lose?
With that in mind, here are some of our top tips to decrease your risk for catching the virus or having complications from COVID-19.
