Dr Sanjay Gupta: Protecting Your Life From A Pandemic Isn’t What You Think

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In the midst of a global pandemic, we have all changed. I joke that you have become a hunk, a monk, a hunk or a drunkard. But seriously, what surprised me about my research on how we can prevent serious illness and death – and prepare for the next plague of globetrotters – is the key role that diets play in our immune systems. and our response to any infection, not just Covid.

As we all know, Covid has shed light on the difference between people who already contract the virus with underlying conditions and those who are otherwise healthy. But the conversation often unfairly turns around obesity, which has the unfortunate result of objectifying and stigmatizing people. The recent outcry over the comments from the CEO of salad chain Sweetgreen is testament to how this conversation can be divisive. More importantly, it does him a disservice as the link between obesity and Covid mortality is complicated.

To be clear, suggesting that eradicating obesity will somehow be easier than mass vaccination, which the CEO of Sweetgreen appeared to be doing, is blatantly wrong. But a deeper dive into nearly two years of data tells an important story that doesn’t need to focus on body weight or size; and this one that doesn’t get enough attention.

More than a third of Americans suffer from what’s called metabolic syndrome, and that number reaches almost half of people 60 and over. That’s a lot of vulnerable hosts for a stealthy pathogen. You don’t even have to be a pound overweight to suffer from metabolic syndrome, which refers to a set of common illnesses that increase your risk for heart disease, stroke, diabetes, sleep apnea, liver and kidney disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and dying from infection. In addition to excess body mass, these conditions include high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol levels, and high blood sugar – the invisible signs of an unhealthy body. And if you can tick all three of these boxes regardless of your weight, you are called a syndrome, which is easily stirred up and perpetuated by diet. Many medical experts say Metabolic Syndrome is perhaps the most common and serious illness you’ve never heard of, and yet it plays a powerful role in people’s outcomes for Covid.
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So how does your diet negatively affect immune function? Some are straightforward. Food can trigger or, conversely, reduce inflammation levels. Our daily diet also constantly serves and regulates your gut microbiome – the “friendly” internal germ factory in the gut that plays a powerful role in immunity.

Studies in the past year alone have highlighted the importance of the microbiome in the prognosis of people with Covid. The associations found between the composition of the gut microbiota (i.e. strains and volume of species) and the levels of inflammatory markers in patients with Covid suggest that the gut microbiome is involved in determining extent of infection. In other words, the state of your gut microbiome at the time you are infected is an important predictor of your degree of illness. And, there is no doubt that metabolic dysfunction is associated with an imbalanced gut flora.

This also appears to be true for what happens to people after Covid-19 cleanses the body.

The health of the gut biome could be a major cause of long-haul or post-Covid symptoms – brain fog, fatigue, and other lingering symptoms that persist after the initial infection ends. All of this means that one of the easiest and most effective tips to boost your immunity and protect yourself against disease in general is to eat healthier to control your weight, nourish your microbiome, and support a buzzing metabolism.

No, salads won’t replace vaccines or masks, but they are a great addition to any other preventative measures we can take to stay safe. Pretty painless for a big gain.

I know deep down you already understand that eating muffins or donuts with a mochaccino every morning for breakfast is unlikely to get you where you really need to go. The diets can seem confusing, but the food is not. The key to rebuilding your metabolism is to change the way you think about food in the first place. Food is at the center of a great intersection: it can hurt and it can heal. For most of my life I have just thought of food as fuel, just calories for energy, made up of micronutrients and macronutrients (“building blocks”). Over the past decade, however, I have come to understand and appreciate food as a tool of epigenetic expression, or how my diet and my genome interact. Because food is the only information we all need to give our bodies every day, we need to make sure that we are sending the right information that works with it and supports healthy pathways – not harmful or self-destructive pathways.

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It’s no surprise that the typical Western diet – high in salt, sugar, calories, and saturated fat – is not respectful of our physiology. As research concludes, a plant-based diet rich in a variety of whole fresh fruits and vegetables, especially berries and green leafy vegetables, is associated with better health. I know you’ve heard this countless times, and you can be insensitive to it. I’m too.

But there are a few simple statistics that I often share with my patients to take stock. For example, if you increase your fruit intake by just one serving per day, it can reduce your risk of dying from a cardiovascular event by 8%, the equivalent of 60,000 fewer deaths per year in the United States and 1.6 million fewer deaths worldwide. There are few drugs that deliver so much impact so easily. And, now you can be sure that a regular handful of berries or a juicy apple can also lower your risk of getting serious illness from infection like Covid and its future siblings.

I realize that changing your diet in an effort to optimize your health will take some time – and it should. I kept a food journal a few years ago to find new foods that I could add to my diet to diversify my microbiome. I’ve learned that fermented foods like pickles are my secret weapon. I now snack on them regularly to increase my productivity and energy. Find something similar for you.

Don’t start by trying to break a bad habit and deprive yourself of the foods you love even if they don’t have health halos; instead, just start by introducing a good new habit, like choosing foods that are higher in nutrients and minimally processed with less refined sugars and flours. This will automatically keep you away from ultra-processed foods full of preservatives and additives that bombard the good bacteria in your gut, while allowing harmful bacteria to thrive. Find a new food, something different, and make it part of your routine today. (And you’ll probably have an easier time walking up stairs, waking up with more energy, and feeling better tomorrow, too.)

For too long we have been lulled into the false belief that wealth can buy health. That is why we are waiting for the vaccine instead of adopting simple strategies more fully to protect ourselves the best we can every day. In the wake of this pandemic, we will need to analyze how we nourish ourselves on a deeper level than we have ever done in the past. Think about it. The food you eat today can lay the foundation for your body’s protection against pandemics in the future.

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