Tag Archive for: COVID

Does Your Weight Affect Disease?

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Researchers from Finland investigated the relationship between being overweight/obese and infectious diseases. Not any one specific disease—all 925 of the known microbes that cause infectious diseases. They used data from two Finnish studies and the UK Biobank Study. They obtained the height and weight to calculate BMI and examined hospital and death records from the electronic medical records of both countries.

They used data from 2018 through 2020, deemed before COVID, 2021 during COVID, and 2023 after COVID; they looked for hospitalizations and death due to infections. There were about 47,700 Finnish subjects and 479,500 UK subjects. The researchers used the standard definitions of normal, overweight, and the four classes of obesity: normal BMI less than 24.9 kg/m2, overweight as 25.0 – 29.9, grade I obesity as 30.0 – 34.9, grade II obesity as 35.0 – 39.9, and greater than 40.0 as grade III obesity.

Comparing grade III obesity with normal-weight subjects, they found the risk of infections and deaths was three times greater in the obese subjects. Combining all the data, the risk of infectious diseases contributing to hospitalizations and death increased in a stepwise manner. Simply put, as the level of obesity rose, so did the risk of infectious diseases. One more thing? The hazard ratio increased dramatically during the COVID epidemic and returned close to baseline after the pandemic ended.

The Bottom Line

This is just one study and because it’s an observational study, no cause and effect can be determined. But my feeling is that this should give pause to everyone who carries extra body fat. The very nature of being overweight or obese compromises the immune system; that means the person is at risk for an infectious disease from any one of 925 potential microbes and maybe more by now. This is the time to work toward getting to a normal weight for your height. Increase your healthspan: Eat less. Eat better. Move more.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Lancet 2026; 407:951–62

Vitamin D vs. Long COVID

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Returning to the vitamin D study, the rest of the headline suggested that taking vitamin D upon getting COVID may reduce symptoms of long-term COVID (LTCOVID), a serious aftereffect of a COVID infection that can impact the nervous and muscular system. Brain fog, chronic fatigue, and pain are some of the common symptoms.

The reason for hope with LTCOVID symptoms is that those subjects who continued to supplement with vitamin D showed a lower propensity for LTCOVID symptoms than the placebo group. It was not statistically significant with 21% of the vitamin D group showing symptoms of LTCOVID versus 25% in the placebo group, but it provided hope for further research; there were no differences in serious adverse events between the placebo and vitamin D groups.

Two things I found interesting: first, those subjects in either group who had normal vitamin D levels in their blood didn’t have an advantage over those who had very low or low levels of vitamin D. That surprised me as one would think that having a good baseline would be protective in some way. Maybe not.

Second, whether vitamin D impacted COVID as to length of symptoms, it showed that vitamin D supplementation at the first symptom of COVID may be protective. The amounts used in the study were two days at 9,600 IU and then 3,200 IU daily for eight weeks or more, based on the length of the study.

Why would vitamin D be beneficial after a person contracted the virus? Speculation by two researchers, one of the authors and a scientist from another lab, was that vitamin D boosts the immune system by reducing inflammation during the infection. The only way we’ll know for sure is by doing more research.

For now, it’s up to you and your healthcare professionals how best to deal with your next COVID infection. Vitamin D seems to be a viable option.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: J Nutr. 2026. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2026.101398

Does Vitamin D Beat COVID?

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My Monday morning news feed contained at least three referrals to a recent article published in the Journal of Nutrition. The headlines were all about the same: vitamin D supplementation is ineffective in the short term as a treatment for COVID but provides insight into how to reduce the risk of long-term COVID symptoms. I think it deserves a look.

Researchers selected a large group of potential subjects in the US and Mongolia. Subjects were notified of the trial by the testing companies within seven days after a positive COVID test. If the subjects passed criteria for inclusion in the trial, they were assigned to a placebo or vitamin D supplement group. The subjects were required to perform surveys periodically about symptoms with the primary outcome being further professional treatment or death. There were a number of secondary criteria related to worsening symptoms requiring more than a single visit to a healthcare professional or hospital.

In short, there were no observable differences between those who used vitamin D supplements for the four-week trial or the placebo group in those who required additional treatment. A disappointment for vitamin D users? We’ll dig a little deeper on Saturday.

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What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: J Nutrition. 2026. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2026.101398

Choosing to Live Longer

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The researchers from the study I reviewed in Tuesday’s Memo had their thoughts on why the U.S. may experience excess deaths compared to other high-income countries. They also suggested that our healthcare system isn’t serving the American people as well as it might. That may be part of the answer. Let me give you my thoughts, before the anti-seed oil gurus and vaccination opponents get started.

Healthcare Systems

Every other country in the comparison had some form of universal healthcare or a combination of public and private healthcare plans—think Medicare with more coverage for an additional purchase. While we’ve all heard stories about hip replacements taking a year to get scheduled, they provide care to everyone without considering payment first. I’m not suggesting I have any answers to the healthcare dilemma, but it’s a part of the problem.

Vaccinations

I decided to look at the vaccination rates during the COVID epidemic because the U.S. mortality rate really skyrocketed during those couple of years, far above what happened in other high-income countries. When compared to other countries’ vaccination rates, we were near the bottom of the list. I know, and hear every day, about many people who are concerned about vaccinations being problematic, but the COVID vaccine may have contributed to the lower mortality rates in other countries.

The Bottom Line

Remember the final reasons that the researchers speculated about—cardiometabolic disease? Heart disease, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes are the top killers in the U.S. along with cancer. We could dramatically reduce mortality and morbidity if we took better care of our bodies. That’s where we fail: we eat too much and we move too little. If we could change those, I’m convinced the death rates would start to tumble.

Eat less. Eat better. Move more. Today.

So, what are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: JAMA Health Forum. 2025;6(5):doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2025.1118

Too Many Deaths

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Recently I read an interesting study that examined the mortality rates in the United States between 1980 through 2023, including the time before, during, and after the COVID epidemic. Researchers took it one step further: they obtained mortality data from other high-income countries to compare the mortality rates between the countries while accounting for the differences in population size. The countries included Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

This comparison illustrated that beginning about 1985, the U.S. had more deaths per 100 people than the average of all the other countries. In 2005, the difference increased even more to the point that the U.S. had more deaths per 100 people than every other country in the study. Over the course of the years of observation, that came to an extra 14.5 million Americans who died.

While this was an observational study, it leaves us with the question: why? We certainly spend more on healthcare per capita than any other high-income country, coming in at just over $12,000 per person, while the average of other high-income countries comes in at half that—and yet somehow they’re healthier. The researchers cited drug overdose, shooting deaths, and cardiometabolic disease as the most likely contributing factors. I’ll give you my thoughts on Saturday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: JAMA Health Forum. 2025;6(5):doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2025.1118

Help for Long-Haulers

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Many people suffer from a myriad of symptoms after contracting a COVID infection. Muscle and mental fatigue seem to be common among these “long-haulers”—more technically called post-viral fatigue syndrome. Based on prior research by the investigators, they randomly selected twelve subjects with long-haul COVID symptoms. Half the subjects took four grams of creatine monohydrate for six months; the control subjects took inulin fiber.

Every measure of energy production in muscle and brain demonstrated improvement. Questionnaires on fatigue and muscular pain matched the improvement in energy production in the tissues that were tested. Did increased energy account for the benefit? While the study was small, mostly due to the complexity of the research methods, it appears that’s a reasonable conclusion, although larger studies should be done.

Creatine is just one of the modalities I’m going to cover in this weekend’s Managing Pain webinar. Pain can be the result of several body systems that are not working properly; the objective is to use a step-by-step approach considering many systems to manage pain. Sign-up today for the live webinar Sunday at 3 p.m. Eastern.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Food Science & Nutrition. 2023. 11(11):6899-6908

Cancelled!

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Thank you all for the prayers, good thoughts, and well wishes. I’m going to hang on to them for a while. My surgery was cancelled for this morning; Paula and I didn’t find out until we arrived at the hospital at 7:30 to check in. I was not alone. My surgeon had three surgeries cancelled for today; multiply that by many surgeons times several days, and you get an idea of how many people were disappointed. The surgery will be rescheduled for a date to be determined.

Why was it cancelled on such short notice? Because the hospital was overrun with COVID hospitalizations over the weekend. They have sufficient staff but no beds, even for an outpatient knee replacement surgery such as mine. I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but there’s a significant COVID resurgence in Michigan with no end in sight.

I’ll keep doing the prehab and be even better prepared when the knee replacement is rescheduled. I hope the reader who has had her aortic aneurism surgery postponed for the third time lives until her rescheduled surgery.

I looked at the data again since we got home: over 80% of those hospitalized haven’t been vaccinated. Take it from someone who understands the science—get vaccinated. It’s not a guarantee, but it puts the odds in your favor and helps all the people who need hospital beds.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

The Dog Will See You Now

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The Memo title is from Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast about canine screening of disease, and I would urge you to listen to it. While the focus is on prostate cancer, the logical question comes up: could dogs be used to screen people for COVID-19? The answer is yes. No one knows for certain whether they can they smell the virus, but they can smell the proteins that are being made when the virus replicates in the body. Maybe it’s the spike protein, maybe a different one, but the tests indicate dogs can smell a person’s mask and identify COVID infections immediately with an accuracy of 83% and higher; some dogs approached 99% accuracy.

Will we see dogs checking folks at the door any time soon? I doubt it, whether for COVID testing or any other type of disease. Why not? Let’s take a look.

The Problem with Dogs

Science has shown that dogs can detect odors down to 1.5 molecules per trillion. They don’t even have to be purebred dogs; mixed breeds can be taught to do it. Therein lies the problem: training. It takes time to train the dogs to be able to distinguish that one unique scent among the hundreds of thousands they may encounter in an airport, a school, or a place of business.

They also get tired, not physically but mentally. They’re still dogs that want to run, jump, and play. They love to work, but they’re not like an inanimate testing device that accepts samples and tests them all day long without needing to be fed and given bathroom breaks. Dogs get fatigued, and that means they could make mistakes.

Those are just details that can be worked out. Dogs can screen up to 250 people in an hour at an estimated cost (including their handlers) of about $2 per person. Compare that with a PCR test for COVID-19 that can cost $200 per person. The real problem lies with humans.

The Healthcare Complex

It would be easy to criticize the medical community for not wanting to endorse this unconventional approach to medicine. The papers I read thought it was impractical to train dogs to do such screenings.

What they would rather do is develop an artificial neural nose that could do the job instead. One big problem with that: they have no clue what the dogs actually detect when they perform the screening. They admit that “clinical diagnostic techniques, artificial intelligence, and molecular analysis remain difficult due to the significant divide between these disciplines.” It could take years to come up with such an artificial nose, and then you’d need humans to manufacture, operate, and maintain those devices; I don’t even want to think what the costs would be. Dogs are already being trained that can be ready in a couple of months.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to why the healthcare complex is resistant to pursuing the canine screening solutions. But I suspect health insurance companies and other organizations such as school districts that actually pay the bills will pay a lot of attention to the difference in price as well as the timeline.

The Bottom Line

If I could train a dog to identify a vitamin or mineral deficiency by sniffing the breath, the urine, or feces of humans, I wouldn’t waste time—I’d do it right now. It’s not a threat to what I do; it would be a powerful tool to use to help people address their nutritional deficiencies perhaps before they manifest in disease.

Do we want to get kids back in school? I’d love to know a dog was testing Riley and all his classmates, teachers, and staff every day before they walk in the building. Getting the subjects to not play with the testing equipment would probably be the biggest hurdle, but we’ve been teaching Riley to recognize dogs that are working and not to bother them. Yes, we’d need a lot of dogs, but we can get that done if we’re really committed.

Let’s hope the healthcare complex realizes they already have the noses they need to get the job done, and all the bearers of those noses want is to play with a ball as a reward for their hard work. I’ll say it again: it’s time to let the dogs out.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

References:
1. J Travel Med. 2020 Dec 23;27(8):taaa131. doi: 10.1093/jtm/taaa131.
2. PLoS One. 2021.16(2):e0245530. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.02455