Deep Insights into COVID-19 with Dr. Peter D’Adamo: Rational Wellness Podcast 153
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Dr. Peter D’Adamo, gives us some Deep Insights into COVID-19 and which Natural Strategies can be Beneficial with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
4:45 The Spanish influenza of 1918-19 came in the spring of 1918, faded in the summer, raged even worse in the fall, and then the following summer it just went away. But that’s because close to 80% of people were infected and 50 million people died and it created a herd immunity. On the other hand, viruses tend to mutate to become less deadly because it is better for the virus is if doesn’t kill the host. So this virus may become less deadly over time.
7:11 We should be asking how can we modulate the situation so that we can improve our chances besides staying home and doing nothing and going to the hospital when you are really sick? What can we do to increase our chances of having a favorable outcome if we do get infected, so we don’t end up in an Intensive Care Unit at a hospital? Our health care system isn’t designed for prevention or to help us develop some strategies for strengthening our immune system, unless its been shown in a double blind, placebo controlled trial, which can take years. A lot of the clinical trials going on in China now are including antiviral drugs plus vitamin C or antiviral drugs plus Chinese herbs. But that does not seem to be happening here in the US.
11:10 There are a lot of crazy ideas on social media these days, such as that elderberry could cause a cytokine storm because it is an immune stimulating herb, which is really ridiculous. If Elderberry was a strong enough immune stimulator to produce a cytokine storm, it would be a great anti-cancer nutrient. But in fact, it’s immune strengthening properties are not strong enough to cause a significant release of interleukins and cytokines.
14:12 This may be similar to the fears among oncologists that taking antioxidant vitamins will interfere with chemotherapy. Dr. D’Adamo pointed out that this concept really started with a letter to the editor from Dr. Robert Watson of Watson and Crick who figured out the structure of DNA who argued that since chemotherapy kills cancer cells partially by inducing free radicals, then taking antioxidants like vitamin C would block the chemo effectiveness. But this may be partially because Dr. Watson was very competitive with Linus Pauling, who pioneered the benefits of vitamin C, since Pauling was working on a different model of DNA from the model that Watson developed. The idea that some vitamin C will uncouple the effectiveness of powerful chemotherapeutic drugs like Cisplatin or Taxotere is like thinking that putting your lunch on the train tracks will cause the train to derail.
17:28 Older folks are more affected by COVID-19 than younger and it is typically attributed to the fact that older people tend to have a weaker immune system but Dr. D’Adamo thinks it is more related to a drop in antioxidant function. The coronavirus has a spike protein that interacts with the ACE2 receptors, which are part of the renin system that regulates blood pressure and controls the vasculature. There is a separate gene known as TMPRSS2 that’s related to the effectiveness of the SARS COVID virus to activate the ACE2 receptor and to reproduce. TMPRSS2 is affected by our internal antioxidants, including SOD and catalase, as well as affected by sulforaphane, which comes from cruciferous vegetables, esp. broccoli sprouts. Sulforaphane dampens the capacity of this TRMSS2 thing to participate in ACE2, so we should increase our consumption of sulforaphane whether through foods or supplements or both. Green tea can also help to modulate TMPRSS2.
24:58 Some Functional Medicine practitioners have cautioned against taking too much vitamin D and vitamin A since it might increase the expression of the ACE2 receptors. The first problem with this idea is that even if taking a lot of vitamin D does increase the ACE2 receptor, since the ACE2 receptor is already ubiquitous in the body, how much could it really be increased? If at all, it will be by an insignificant amount. And this is theoretical. But studies show that if you are vitamin D deficient, you have a much higher rate of progressing to ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is the progression that kills you. Additionally, higher levels of vitamin D are protective against cytokine storms and patients who end up on a ventilator are more likely to survive with higher levels of vitamin D.
29:53 Chloroquine, zinc, and quercetin. Dr. D’Adamo wrote a blog post, COVID-19: Chloroquine, zinc, and quercetin. Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are an antimalarial drugs that are quinine analogues and come from the same cinchona tree that quinine comes from. Quinine can only contain 83 mg of quinine and to get a therapeutic dosage you would need 600-800 mg, so quinine water will not be therapeutic. There are two mechanisms by which chloroquine could help fight the coronavirus. 1. The virus gets into the cells through the ACE2 receptors and then convinces the ribosome to make virus proteins so it can proliferate. The viral proteins then create a bubble called an endosome which then gets released to the outside of the cell. Chloroquine raises the pH of these endosomes, which require a low pH to reproduce, thus reducing viral replication. A natural substance that also does this is a Chinese herb, Scutellaria baicalensis, also called Chinese skullcap. 2. Chloroquine is a zinc ionophore, which means it facilitates getting zinc into the cells. Zinc has an electric charge that makes it very difficult to get into our cells. When the zinc concentration goes up inside the cell, the ability of the virus to reproduce is diminished. A natural substance that is also a zinc ionophore is quercetin. Dr. D’Adamo recommends 15-20 mg of zinc per day along with 25-500 mg of quercetin and 500 mg of Chinese scute taken twice per day. Dr. D’Adamo does not recommend taking high dosages of zinc, since it can interfere with other things.
39:00 Melatonin is a nutrient that many people take to help with sleep. When a patient with COVID-19 gets into an acute stage it is because there is rampaging inflammation due to our primitive, innate immune system that we share with lizards. This is in contrast to our acquired, adaptive immune system that involves us forming antibodies to fight off viruses and bacteria. Our innate immune system involves immediate responses and is like a shoot-first-ask-questions-later-type immunity. It releases these inflammasomes, including NLRP3, which is the functional inflammasome involved in things like the cytokine storm that can occur in COVID-19 that lands patients in Intensive Care. Melatonin has been shown to keep NLRP3 levels low and this can be accomplished with low levels of melatonin, such as 1-3 mg.
44:12 Stinging Nettle Root. Stinging Nettle Root (not the leaves) is beneficial for reducing elevated levels of Sex Hormone Binding Globulin in men, while stinging nettle leaves helps with allergies. Stinging nettle root contains a lectin that interacts with the ACE2 receptor and with the spike protein on the coronavirus and may potentially help to reduce the viral proliferation of COVID-19. The recommended amount is 500 mg of stinging nettle root twice per day. The lectin in leeks also inhibits the ability of the spike protein from bonding to the ACE2 receptors. The stinging nettle lectin and the leek lectin are like naturally-occurring, targeted monoclonal antibodies.
47:00 Lectins are also very similar to blood types because each blood type forms antibodies to some of the other blood types. Every infectious disease has a prediliction to one blood type over another and COVID-19 prefers blood type A, while type O is better protected against coronavirus.
52:23 Vitamin C is very protective and Dr. D’Adamo said that he takes 2-3 gms twice per day.
53:23 Resveratrol has some similar benefits as quercetin and may help the heart as well, since myocarditis occurs in some acute patients. Dr. D’Amato said that he if he were an ER doctor he might add some taurine into the IV bag, since it can be helpful for myocarditis.
56:00 Larch arabinogalactin may also be able to help control inflammasome activity, since arabinogalactan is one of the components of the viral membrane that the BCG vaccine is composed of, which seems to provide some protection against COVID-19.
Dr. Peter D’Adamo is a naturopathic physician who is also an author, researcher, and educator. He is considered a world expert in glycobiology, principally the ABO (ABH) blood groups and the secretor (FUT2) polymorphisms. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Clinical Sciences at the University of Bridgeport Connecticut. Dr. D’Adamo wrote the NY Times best selling book, Eat Right For Your Blood Type, followed by a long series of books on the connections between blood type and many of our nation’s most serious health problems, including diabetes, cancer, arthritis, and heart disease. Dr. D’Adamo is the chief science advisor and head formulator at D’Adamo Personalized Nutrition. He has recently been writing a series of blog posts about the current coronavirus pandemic that tend to focus on a natural perspective on it. His website is DADAMO.com and there is a yellow banner across the top with his articles about COVID-19.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for nutrition consultations, including remote consults via video or phone, specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111 or go to www.drweitz.com. Phone or video consulting with Dr. Weitz is available.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Weitz: Hey. This is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting-edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates. To learn more, check out my website, drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me and let’s jump into the podcast. Hello, Rational Wellness Podcasters. For those of you who enjoy listening to our podcast, please give us a ratings and review on Apple Podcast. If you’d like to see the video version of this podcast, please go to my YouTube page and if you go to my website, drweitz.com, you can find detailed show notes and a complete transcript.
Today, I will be speaking to Dr. Peter D’Adamo, who’s best known as the author of The New York Times best-selling book Eat Right 4 Your Blood Type that has launched a franchise movement, but today, most of our discussion will not be focused on blood types. We are recording this while we’re in the midst of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. I plan to discuss with Dr. D’Adamo some integrative strategies for reducing the risks of contracting the coronavirus and for increasing the likelihood of having a minimal response if we do get infected.
Dr. Peter D’Adamo’s a naturopathic physician who’s also an author, researcher, educator. He’s considered a world expert in glycobiology, principally the ABO blood types and the secretor FUT2 polymorphisms. He’s currently a distinguished professor of clinical sciences at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. In 1996, Dr. D’Adamo wrote The New York Times bestseller Eat Right 4 Your Blood Type, followed by a long series of books on the connections between blood type and many of our nation’s most serious health problems including diabetes, cancer, arthritis, and heart disease. Dr. D’Adamo is the chief science advisor and head formulator at D’Adamo Personalized Nutrition and he’s recently been writing a series of fascinating blog posts about the current coronavirus pandemic that we will focus on today. So, Dr. D’Adamo, thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr. D’Adamo: Thank you for having me, Ben. It’s a pleasure.
Dr. Weitz: Good. So, why don’t we start with perhaps. I definitely want to get into some of these fascinating blog posts you’ve written as well as maybe some of the ideas you expressed in that incredible webinar you did with doctors Brady and LePine, but do you have any sort of overall thoughts on where we are in terms of this coronavirus pandemic right now?
Dr. D’Adamo: Well, we’re definitely at a tipping point. The question’s going to be essentially how effective the strategies that people have adopted with regard to the social distancing and whether or not that can drop the infection rate down and whether or not they can get it right with regard to when they guess about the idea of being able to bring people back into society, but I think a lot of that’s still optimistic. Unfortunately, I think under the best of all the models, you’re looking at something that could be like maybe middle July, but you still are not looking at things like sporting events and movie theaters and things like that. There’s actually no date that’s actually has been put forward for that kind of a group-type thing, but I think-
Dr. Weitz: And it would probably have to be different for different parts of the country, I would think, as well.
Dr. D’Adamo: It really does. Then, the other side is going to be the quality of the testing that is done, the antibody testing has a fairly good reliability, but put in combination with actual PCR testing for the virus, it gets a lot better, but you’re still going to have situations where there are going to be hot spots that are going to pop out here and there. The only thing that would be saving grace for that would be that if the numbers are low enough, you can go back to doing the contact tracing that they got wrong the first time. Then, basically go and kind of do an Ebola thing where they sort of just put a perimeter around it, get all the people and get them into quarantine and then let that localized thing burn itself out.
Dr. Weitz: Is it possible that this virus might just sort of peter out the way other viruses have? I know the Spanish influenza of 1918-’19 raged, it came in the spring. It kind of faded a little bit in the summer. The second wave was even worse. Then, the following summer it just went away and that was it. They didn’t have a vaccine or anything. SARS kind of just sort of faded out, too, after about six months.
Dr. D’Adamo: See, the difference with the Spanish influenza is that they got a brute-force type of herd immunity because they had no real public health measures, so they just took their lumps. I mean, you have millions of people who died from that. Then, after two or three rounds of exposures, you had enough herd immunity, which it has to be, I think, about 80% of the population.
Dr. Weitz: Oh! 80%. Wow!
Dr. D’Adamo: 80% population has to have a prior exposure in order for herd immunity to work, but reality is that, yeah, there are factors that can sometimes come into play. We notice that, with certain viruses, they tend to attenuate over time, that the-
Dr. Weitz: What happened to the first SARS virus, that it just sort of went away?
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah, yeah. There’s a couple of things about this virus that gave it a kind of a special significance. We know that most people know that attaches to the ACE2 receptor in general, although there are other slight variations to that, but one of the things that makes that so particularly significant, there’s a virus developed what’s called a furin convertase or furin cleavage convertase. It also latches onto a chemical made by the cells called furin. That really ramps up the infectivity. That’s why, for instance, the infectivity index is high. It may be that something like that, which was gained surreptitiously, maybe lost surreptitiously, because parasites, they really don’t want to have to kill the host. I mean, my brother-in-law in your guest room, he wants you to live because you’re giving him a free room. So, viruses typically or most other parasites, they tend to become what they call saprophytic over time. They develop ways to not completely … Now, this might take a very long time and by that time we might have other solutions altogether, but really, you had kind of hit the nail on the head when you did the introduction, which is how do we modulate this in a way that the average person has the best possible chance to not have to go through the ICU and then into the whole respiratory arrest kind of thing. It’s an interesting place that we find ourselves with the government on this because their advice is comprised entirely of, “Stay home until you’re too sick and then go to the hospital.” Now, you think that there’s acres of opportunities in that time frame to be able to do things, to basically change your odds or moderate your odds or take yourself through this process, so that you get perhaps maybe a bad case of the flu and you hydrate and you take a few assistive-type preparations or maybe a nutraceutical or whatever, but the government doesn’t really have a plan for that, because our health care system isn’t designed to react to a new disease for which we have no cure. So, everybody can talk about, “Well, this is unscientific. We don’t have double-blind studies. We don’t have this and that.” The truth is, you remember, you seem old enough to be able to remember the AIDS things in the 80s. You had ACT UP back then who were saying like, “Hey. A double-blind, multicenter, placebo-controlled trial is great, but I’m going to be dead by then.”
Dr. Weitz: Right. And in fact, there’s hundreds of trials going on right now with new antivirals, existing antivirals, a whole series of other drugs that been on the market for other things.
Dr. D’Adamo: Look at our own particular blind spot in terms of integrative-type things. You go to clinicaltrials.gov and you look at the ones that were being done as a result onto Wuhan and they were all antiviral plus vitamin C, antiviral plus traditional Chinese medicine. When was the last time anybody here said, “Oh, we’re going to test a drug and, by the way, we’ll give you some Chinese herbs to go with that, too.” So, there’s just a real blind spot because we’re just so locked into this model that we have to have really, really clear, concise indications that the drug is effective and that we have the indications together, but this is an ad hoc situation. You can’t just go into a situation like this with your fists clenched. You’ve got to open them up because this is going to be a situation where you’re going to have to just move very fast.
It’s a perfect example of how we, as a society, we actually stop listening to the government at a certain point, because what the government was telling us, “Well. It’s nothing to worry about. The risk to the American public is low.” Remember Fauci saying that? “The risk to the American public is low.” Then, the next thing we know is masks don’t work. Don’t waste your time with those. Then, all of a sudden, how are we going to get people to isolate themselves? In every one of those cases, the American public outperformed the advice of the American health care experts and governmental health care experts. The American public started thinking for themselves and saying, “Hey. Wait a minute. You don’t seem to have a handle on this. You’re telling me that the virus is not going to be able to protect me from getting infected, but you seem to be neglecting the fact that an entire street full of people wearing masks has a different effect altogether. You’re actually now amplifying the effect of the protective thing because not only am I being covered myself. I’m being protected by all the other people.”
Well, that seemed to escape the government at a certain point and they sort of had to play catch-up with that. So, here you have people now, because of social media, you’ve got a…and here you got an entirely different discussion, which is, “What kind of a fresh hell is social media right now with regard to just all the crazy-ass stuff that people are actually sharing?” The general low quality control of what is going out there. We had the whole thing we were talking about just before the show started. Elderberry, who’s got a theory on elderberry? It’s going to give you a cytokine storm. It’s like, “Yeah.” If only that were true, we could use elderberry as an anti-cancer agent, because, I mean, if elderberry increased all those cytokines, like turmeric does, you’ve got-
Dr. Weitz: Okay. So maybe you should let everybody know. So, certain integrative practitioners had written some articles saying that elderberry can lead to a cytokine storm because it overstimulates the immune system and that when COVID-19, that when the infection becomes severe, you get this severe inflammatory cytokine storm in the lungs, which is why people end up having trouble breathing and end up being ventilated. So, that’s the context for what you’re talking about.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah. You wind up in a situation where people, again, extrapolate out. It’s easy to take a Petri dish full of a couple of cells and drop a dumpster worth of a chemical on top, after you’ve primed the cells to give you the response you were looking for. Then, you contrast this with another study that actually used the substance to treat the thing in question. So, you’re comparing a study that says, “Wow! We’ve used this in SARS and MERS,” which are the two coronavirus equivalents, and it had efficacy. Then, you have Joe new epidemiologist molecular biologist telling you that he found a study on PubMed that showed that it did this other thing.
Now, here’s a question that most people don’t realize. It’s also a question of amount. You can produce an increase in some inflammatory chemical in the cell culture. The question’s how much did you produce and how hard did you work to get it? Now, it turns out that the amount that elderberry produced of interleukins and cytokines was roughly about 6% of the amount that you would have produced if you ran a half-marathon. So, don’t run any half-marathons out there, folks, because your COVID’s going to get worse, especially if you’re on your way to the ICU, you do not want to run a half-marathon.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Is this a similar in my mind to this fear among oncologists that taking some vitamin C is going to completely uncouple your chemotherapy because one of the ways that chemotherapy kills cancer cells is by producing free radical reactions and antioxidants block free radical reactions.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah, except that that all started, strangely enough, not by studies, but rather letters to the editor. I can write a letter to the editor that says, “I think today’s Saturday,” but in fact it’s Tuesday.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I specifically remember one from Dr. Watson from Watson and Crick and he’s railing about why anybody would take antioxidants, but yet, nobody has any problems with cancer patients eating fruits and vegetables and the amount of antioxidant properties from eating a cup of blueberries is like 50,000 times what a 1,000 milligram vitamin C tablet contains.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah, but let’s lift the curtain a little bit on the whole Watson thing. He couldn’t stand Linus Pauling because they were working … Pauling had a different model of DNA that they were in a race against.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, really?
Dr. D’Adamo: If Pauling basically said that vitamin C was bad, I’m sure Watson would have said vitamin C was good.
Dr. Weitz: I didn’t know all that.
Dr. D’Adamo: But here’s another thing we have to realize is that vitamin C, it’s a redox reaction, so that, given the nature of how it works, vitamin C can certainly be a pro-oxidant a whole lot more than it can be an antioxidant. Then, the other side of the coin is that looking again at what are your associations? Let’s talk numbers. You have a drug like cisplatin or Taxotere, you want…
Dr. Weitz: These are common in chemotherapeutic agents.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah. Do you honestly think your multivitamin is going to … That’s like saying, “I’m going to put my lunch on the New Haven Line and I’m going to try and derail the next train.” It isn’t going to happen. I mean it’s just the whole … Now, but let’s even discuss it from an evidence standpoint. It turns out that if you do a reasonably good study, the evidence supports the fact that actually using these very same substances seem to enhance the effect of chemotherapy, not actually blunt it. So, this all became part of the standard silo-type mentality that you see in most places where this was not part of their curriculum. It’s not part of their water cooler discussions. It’s not part of their seminars. It’s foreign information. Medicine has one outstandingly unimpressive tendency, which is they paraphrase it as, “Don’t be the first and don’t be the last.”
Dr. Weitz: So, you mentioned vitamin C…
Dr. D’Adamo: So, now you could look at that and say to yourself, “Okay. Just, does that mean that everybody should take vitamin C for this?” No. It just means that this situation is far more complicated than an across-the-board statement.
Dr. Weitz: So, since you mention vitamin C, one of your blog posts, you explain why older folks are getting hit so much harder with COVID-19. Now, typically flus tend to hit the older and the very young. It’s generally thought that’s because they have a weaker immune system, but COVID-19 seems to spare young folks, but hits the older folks harder, but you don’t think that’s really because of a weakness in immune system, right?
Dr. D’Adamo: Well, not really. I think what we do see and there’s a gene that’s associated with the activity of … Most people know by now that the coronaviruses have a spike protein called the S protein. This interacts with a common receptor found pretty much throughout the body called ACE2. This is part of the renin system that regulates your blood pressure. What ACE2 does is it functions as part of a system that’s involved in controlling the vasculature. The fact that it’s found so uniformly all over the body allows the body to control the vasculature in different places without having it impact other places. So, it’s sort of almost a kind of a set of stoplights on the vasculature. This makes it very attractive, so there’s a lot of anti-hypertensive blood pressure medicines that are made in response to this.
It turns out that actually there is a separate gene that’s related to basically the effectiveness of how well the coronavirus can interact with ACE2. It’s another gene. It’s got a long name, TMPRSS2. With this particular molecule, it shows a massive increase in the capacity of the SARS COVID to activate it and reproduce. It turns out that actually the molecule itself is typically controlled by a system inside the body called antioxidants response elements. So these are your natural antioxidants that you make. So, we normally think, oh, vitamin E, beta-carotene, selenium. These are external antioxidants, but we make internal antioxidants that are part of our own mechanism of controlling oxidative reactions. These include things like SOD and catalase and those kind of things, but it turns out that one particular thing, which is a chemical that’s called sulforaphane, but that’s known to everybody else as sprouted stuff.
Dr. Weitz: Specifically broccoli, sprouts, or broccoli seed extract, right?
Dr. D’Adamo: Yes and you can put other kind of cruciferous things in there. Sulforaphane dampens the capacity of this TRMSS2 thing to participate in ACE, but the theory that I had was that if you look at this, you see almost a perfect curve that correlates with age-related functions. These antioxidant functions drop as we get older. So, in essence, you’re then basically not having the ability to dampen down this thing which then, instead of being able to go and behave itself, it now feeds into the other receptor, the ACE2. That makes the viral replication speed up. So, as you get older, your antioxidant defenses drop, their ability to tamp the other things down becomes compromised, the virus tends to take off more. So, sulforaphanes, you can buy these things in supplements, and actually it turns out that sulforaphanes are just fascinating molecules in their own right. I mean, they have big effects in terms of mitigating prostate cancer, they cause your genetic material to compress again so that cancer cells don’t get to read it as well as they could. It’s called a histone deacetylase function. It’s actually epigenetics. So, you wind up with this kind of stuff. You think to yourself, “Wow. Simple little thing.” Go out and go buy some sprouts and do that. Again, I mean, what’s the downside? There’s no downside to basically increasing your consumption of sulforaphanes.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, because you’re the first person I’ve heard in numerous articles recommending specific nutraceuticals to talk about sulforaphane as being something we ought to consider adding. Obviously, eating it in your food, but for those of us like myself who believe in not only eating as many healthy nutrients from fruits and vegetables and et cetera, but we’d rather top it off with some additional supplemental amounts. This is one to add to the stack, I think.
Dr. D’Adamo: I think so. Ultimately, you could take a lot of stuff and not get much done at all other than give yourself a bellyache.
Dr. Weitz: I’m somebody who really feels good about taking supplements. I think they’ve helped me. I’m 61 and I feel really good.
Dr. D’Adamo: No. I totally agree with you. It’s just, I think, when you’re going to do this kind of stuff, you should work with somebody who has your type of training or my type of training and be able to make sure that you’re taking the stuff that matters.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely. You’ve got to prioritize and take the things that are most important in the most appropriate dosages. Absolutely.
Dr. D’Adamo: There’s an interesting thing, too, is that I’ve tried to sprout these things. It’s not easy. I mean, you’ve got some guys who do this for a living and then you can get those amounts that are needed, but some other things are easier to get in the diet. For instance, one of the things that shows a lot of efficacy as well is green tea. Anybody can drink that. It’s actually a good protease inhibitor, which is kind of interesting. And so, there’s lots of other things that people can do as part of their own strategies. The blog has a lot of technical stuff about it, but I think what I try to do is take a step back and realize that a lot of times with the average person, they can understand something technical as long as you take a step far enough back to bring them into the story. The other thing I believe in is that if you’re actually onto something and you’re actually dealing with something that’s logical and science-based and truthful, it’s pretty much going to boil down to a piece of common sense. Ultimately, at the end of it all, when you distill it down, somebody’s going to be able to say, “So, in other words you mean that,” and you would say, “Yes. Exactly. We took the long way around because I wanted you to understand how it all connected, but in essence, yes. At the end of it all, it means this.”
Dr. Weitz: Right. So, since you did a little myth-busting with the idea that elderberry is a potentially beneficial herb to take at a time like this and that fears about creating a cytokine storm are completely unwarranted.
Dr. D’Adamo: And you should take some vitamin D, by the way. People get problems with that.
Dr. Weitz: There you go. I wanted you to comment on that. I’d seen several blog posts where functional medicine practitioners have cautioned against taking vitamin D or vitamin E because they might have a negative effect in this situation.
Dr. D’Adamo: Well, vitamin D and vitamin E we can kind of dispense with because I see no evidence that it’s beneficial. Now, vitamin A.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, vitamin D and A, they mentioned. Yeah.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah. A might have some slight benefit as far as mucosal immunity, but again, there’s no, as far as I could find, any direct indications that it would play a role in the mechanistic basis or the mechanism behind this whole thing. Vitamin D, on the other hand, there are things called sins of omission. You know what they are? You made a sin because you left something out. Then, there’s what are called sins of misrepresentation. Now, your sin was that you just got the whole thing wrong. It turns out that if you ask me sins of misrepresentation are worse than sins of omission. It goes back to what my third grade nun said. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” So, the reality here is that you have really the worst of all possible types of things. When people take a hypothetical and use that in a fearful population, a population that’s looking for things to confirm fears, then you’re kind of in a way you’re stunting how we can basically take hold of this. Vitamin D is a perfect example. It has some indications that, yeah, it possibly might be, I don’t know. What was the counter-argument there, that there was some increase? Well, I mean, I’ve seen it increases vascular endothelial factors and all sorts of-
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. They were saying it might increase the expression of the ACE2 receptors.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah. Well, it turns out that, actually by a factor of fill in the blank, the ACE2 receptor is ubiquitous in the body. So, how are you going to increase this receptor all that much when it’s basically found everywhere to start off with? The second problem with this is theoretically you’re looking at saying that, but then what does the literature say? It’s clear people who are vitamin D deficient have a much higher rate of progressing to ARDS, acute respiratory distress syndrome. That’s the thing that kills you with COVID-19. So, by being vitamin D deficient, there’s a clear link to the progression of the thing that kills you.
So, here’s the hypothetical. Here’s the actual, and you can’t compare the two. It turns out that what do you define as a vitamin D deficiency? Well, those people might say, “A number that’s maybe below 25,” but I would say, “Vitamin D deficiency to me is the number below 50.” So, in many respects … Then, look how many people get vitamin D. They put on sunblock like it’s an extra set of clothing. They never go outside. They take [crosstalk 00:28:19]-
Dr. Weitz: And they’re taking statin medications to drive their cholesterol lower, which is how your body makes the vitamin D.
Dr. D’Adamo: And they take four baths a day. So, there’s never any stuff on the skin to get converted in the first place. So, the reality is that, how do you respond to somebody who’s just made that degree of misrepresentation? You just try it. And this, of course [crosstalk 00:28:46]-
Dr. Weitz: Right. The bottom line is vitamin D is a super healthy nutrient to take at all times that we probably ought to strive to get our vitamin D levels up to a range of, say, for example, 50 to 70 nanograms per milliliter, not just above the minimal of, say, 25 or 30 and especially in a situation like this, it actually has absolute beneficial effects in preventing this ARDS, which is how people die. There’s also quite a bit of data showing that if patients do end up on a ventilator, if they have higher levels of vitamin D, they’ll do much better and survive.
Dr. D’Adamo: Right. There’s another study that I’ve put up on the Facebook group that showed that actually high levels of vitamin D were protective against cytokine storms. So, I mean, what are you going to do? Take somebody who’s been playing with their Legos in their mind and take their word for it or you going to go look at the science and see where the direct connections are?
Dr. Weitz: Right. So, I want to come to this blog post you wrote about chloroquine, zinc, and Quercetin. What do you think about this chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine, which some people are touting, some people are skeptical of? I’ve seen Functional Medicine doctors recommending it for everybody as part of their protocol or even using quinine water. What’s the truth about chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine, which traditionally has been used for malaria?
Dr. D’Adamo: Right. Well, the drug, which has been around forever, is Plaquenil, which people take for lupus and some autoimmune diseases. It’s cheap as all hell and chloroquine phosphate is one of the WHO essential medicines. It’s considered to be one of a small number of medicines that the production cost is so cheap that it’s considered to be mandatory for all the participants to keep that, because we live in a malarial world. So, to step back, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are what are known as quinine analogues, that they come from the same family as quinine, which is the Jesuit Bark that was found in the cinchona tree that was the first official treatment for malaria. Yes, people have felt that this was an indication that they should drink lots of tonic water because, since it is a quinine analogue, maybe if I drink tonic water, I’ll have the same effect. Quinine may very well act in a manner similar to the other drugs because there is some evidence that it does. The difficulty is thinking that you could get anywhere near a dose sufficient by drinking tonic water because, by government law, your tonic water can only have a maximum of 83 milligrams of quinine per liter. To get up at a therapeutic dose, you would need maybe about 600 to 800 milligrams. So, you’d have to drink about 10 liters a day of tonic.
Dr. Weitz: What else are you going to do?
Dr. D’Adamo: That’s a lot of gin. So, the reality is that would it have somewhat of an effect? Well, I don’t know, but the mechanism is we understand that there’s a lot of politics caught up in this drug because the administration kind of jumped the gun on it and kind of started promulgating for it, but mechanistically we understand it does work in certain areas that would certainly be interesting and possibly effective. It tends to cause an alkaline reaction in places in the cell where the virus reproduces itself. They’re like little blebules called endosomes. Inside those endosomes, the virus actually is convincing the cell to make more virus, but those endosomes require very low pH, a very acidic environment. Most of these chloroquine quinine drugs raise the pH in those endosomes,
Dr. Weitz: So, just to clarify for one second. The virus with the spike protein attaches to the ACE2 receptor, then it gets into the cell and it ends up in one of these endosomes first, right?
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah after basically, it … Well, the first thing it does is an RNA virus, so it goes into the body of the cell, the cytoplasm, and convinces the ribosomes, which are the things that make proteins, to make a few virus proteins. Then, those virus proteins set up the next stage, which is to make a new virus. That takes place in the … Well, generally, they have to find a way out of the cell once they get made so they kind of make a bubble. Then, that bubble heads towards the outside and fuses outside and releases the virus.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, okay. So, that’s the endosome. Okay.
Dr. D’Adamo: So, basically, that has to be very acidic because the virus is going through a finishing school in terms of its protein. It’s getting carbohydrates glommed on and to make what are called glycoproteins and things. As soon as you raise the pH, that comes to a halt. We know that the class of drugs that are the chloroquines, they cause an alkalinization of the endosome. So, there’s a mechanistic aspect there as well, but there’s another thing there that actually implies that there may be an even second mechanism about why these things work. That has to do with what are known as zinc ionophores. Generally, zinc is very critical to the cell, but it can cause a lot of disruption so the cell likes to keep the zinc outside. Zinc has an electrical charge that makes it very difficult for it to penetrate the cell. So, the body has to produce what’s called an ionophore, which is almost like a little gate that causes the zinc to come into the cell. They know that actually when the zinc concentration rises inside the cell, the capacity of the virus to manufacture copies of itself by using the protein machinery, reading its RNA, it goes down to zero. But we can’t get enough zinc inside the cell by itself because the body has a built-in mechanism to prohibit that. So, you have other chemicals that actually act to open up those gates. Those are called zinc ionophores and chloroquine is one of those. So, there’s a second mechanism behind how it could possibly work, but it also points the way to a natural product that does the same exact thing, which is about flavin and Quercetin, which people take for allergies and stuff.
Dr. D’Adamo: So, you can look at how you could kind of hot rod. For instance, let’s say, I mean, I was telling somebody the other day that actually, I don’t want to get too into the woods here, but there’s a very famous powerful Chinese herb called Chinese scute, Scutellaria baicalensis it’s called, Chinese skullcap. Use it a lot in cancer management, wonderful plant and well, well studied. You could go into PubMed. There’s hundreds of articles on this plant because two ingredients are really, really, profoundly powerful, baicalin and wogonin. I won’t go there, but it turns out that Chinese scute has the effect of actually doing that same thing to the endosome that chloroquine does. So, in essence, if you can’t get your hands on any chloroquine or quinine, you could actually make your own cocktail of Quercetin and Chinese scute and you would have both of those functions covered by those two.
Dr. Weitz: Wow! Cool! How much zinc do you think we should probably be taking per day?
Dr. D’Adamo: Well, it’s a great question because it turns out that you don’t really have to take any extra zinc because most of us have fairly adequate levels of zinc in our bloodstream, but a little background probably wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Eat a couple of oysters or take a 15 milligram zinc or whatever, 20 milligram. I don’t like high doses of zinc, because it just starts messing up other stuff. Also, too, it’s interesting because it’ll stay in your bloodstream for a quite a while, so even if you took it like 50 milligrams of zinc every couple of days, that would be sufficient because, there’s plenty of it out there in most of us, but…
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I know somebody like me, I traditionally have tested low on zinc and genetically, I have a couple of genes that make it difficult for my body to absorb zinc, so I-
Dr. D’Adamo: Well, that would be a good reason to basically add a little more.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I’ve normally been adding zinc and it made a huge difference in several other things going on.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah, so you have that basically. Again, there’s very little downside to taking the lower end of the spectrum on zinc supplementation, especially in the short term. So, then, what you’re doing is you’re kind of working the equation. You’re kind of saying, “Okay. I want to control for this variable, too.” In other words, I don’t want to leave that to chance.
Dr. Weitz: And what would be a good dosage for the Scutellaria to take?
Dr. D’Adamo: Good question. I can tell you, I take a couple of, I think the capsules are 500 milligrams, but they’re just the herb. They’re not anything special. I take a couple of those a day. But it’s an interesting thing, too, because I mean, you can do a whole show on Chinese scute in terms of its biochemistry and applications and things, but again another harmless, good anti-inflammatory herb, very good for cancer stuff, wonderful when given concurrently with chemotherapy because it acts to induce apoptosis. So, it kind of finishes the job that the chemotherapy’s doing.
Dr. Weitz: Cool. So, we’ve been talking about how older folks are more vulnerable. You wrote another blog post about melatonin and its potential benefits here. Maybe you can talk about that.
Dr. D’Adamo: Sure. Well, melatonin is sometimes a lot of people use to go to sleep. You have to pardon me if we get a little technical here, but that whole process of going down the road of a massive inflammatory consequences in end-stage COVID-19, it’s all due to rampaging inflammation. That’s courtesy of a very primitive part of our immune system that regulates chemicals that are known as inflammasomes. We think about immune system essentially is basically I get an antibody, I’m protected. That’s called acquired immunity or adaptive immunity, but we also have a very primitive part of our immune system that actually we share with lizards and all sorts of very primitive organisms. In other words, it’s been so good, they keep it around. So, that actually you get to even the higher organisms and they still haven’t found a reliable replacement.
So, we still got this same thing. What it is is it’s called innate immunity. The mechanism behind it is that it’s kind of like, it’s kind of a shoot-first-ask-questions-later-type immunity. Ultimately, the reason being that it’s set up to give you protection because all those other types of adaptive immunity, they require time in order for you to become sensitized, in order for those lymphocytes to promulgate and clone off, in order for them to make antibodies. There’s a temporal element there that sometimes back when you’re running through the jungle and you cut your foot on a rock, you don’t have two and a half weeks to do that. So there’s this primitive immune system that has like circulating battery acid and what happens is when it recognizes certain patterns that tell it that something bad has invaded the body, it activates these clusters of things and then they release all these corrosive enzymes.
So, this is called an inflammasome and a big one is NLRP3, which is the functional inflammasome involved in things like cytokine storms and a lot of the inflammatory stuff. Well, I mean, it’s a very effective if somewhat unprecise system. It’s one of the ways you can certainly wind up with your immune system going quite recklessly on you. So, the evidence suggests that melatonin tends to damp this down. It tends to actually keep NLRP3 levels low and that tends to somewhat decrease the odds that you’ll go into any sort of an advanced inflammatory blowout kind of thing. The nice part about it is that … Who was the guy who said, was it Newton? He says, “An object in motion is able to be maintained in motion with a minimal amount of effort”? It turns out that extraordinarily low doses of melatonin keep this thing happy. So, it isn’t even like the amounts that anybody would have to take anything, that sometimes the amounts that … The amounts that people take to go to sleep are probably overkill, but it turns out that a couple of milligrams of melatonin, actually again, and I would fit that with vitamin D. These are the things you can do to remove variability and risk out of any progression to anything other than just a bad flu. In other words, you want to stay out of the ICU. That’s the whole strategy. You can be miserable. You can be miserable at home.
Dr. Weitz: On the other hand, potentially higher dosages like 20 to 40 milligrams could potentially be beneficial if that cytokine storm had already started and you are in the ICU. So, it’d be interesting for somebody to do a study of those patients with a higher dose of melatonin. Obviously that’s not something a person’s going to be doing while they’re on a ventilator, but …
Dr. D’Adamo: Right. And of course, there’s that whole hospital culture thing again. I mean, you can’t even get people sometimes to sign off to do some vitamin C and stuff. It’s a whole rigmarole.
Dr. Weitz: Now, aren’t some of the hospitals doing IV vitamin C?
Dr. D’Adamo: Yes, and certainly some of the protocols for chloroquine that are being used in a hospital are including zinc. So, there are little changes here and there. I think it’s kind of like, again, it’s really about being resourceful, being able to make the best possible decisions at the best possible time. I wrote a blog about another herb called stinging nettle. Some of your listeners probably take stinging nettle because it’s used a lot for allergies and stuff, the leaves.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I recommend it for men who have elevated levels of sex hormone binding globulin.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah. That’s precisely why the root is used because ultimately, in the root…
Dr. Weitz: That’s what we use.
Dr. D’Adamo: … that actually drops your SB …
Dr. Weitz: SHBG.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah. There you go. I’m not good with consonants. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that, but the reality is that there turns out to be a chemical inside the root of stinging nettle known as a lectin. Lectins are little molecular pieces of Velcro that actually fly around and interact with things. Sometimes they interact with things for the worse, but every occasionally, if you get the condition and the lectin right, they can actually do some good. It turns out that there’s a lectin in stinging nettle that actually interacts directly with the connection between the ACE2 receptor and the viral spike protein. There’s studies on this. As a matter of fact, someone told me after reading my blog, “You might be interested to know that NIH is extraordinarily interested in stinging nettle lectin right now.”
Dr. Weitz: Wow!
Dr. D’Adamo: Which also brings up another interesting thing which will get me to yet another interesting thing.
Dr. Weitz: Which, and of course, lectins have been in the functional medicine world by a prominent doctor who’s been telling everybody not to eat grains and beans and seeds and even any fruit or vegetable that has seeds because they contain lectins which are necessarily bad.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah, but if he would read my book, which I’m sure he did, he could have learned that most of these things are blood type specific. Of course, we have another conversation there. The interesting thing about stinging nettle, though, is actually you don’t have to have a lot. The root is … People go out and pick it or you can take the supplement. There’s another interesting lectin as well, which actually is worth also talking about here. It has to do with the lectin found in leeks. Leeks are, I mean, my wife is going to make some leek soup today. They studied all these lectins that had capacity to interact with SARS. They don’t have evidence on COVID-19, so they use MERS and they use the prior SARS or other coronaviruses. The lectin from leek has a fairly profound inhibitory effect, again, on the capacity of the viral spike antigen to actually bond to the ACE2 receptor. It’s very abundant in the part you make the soup from, which is the stock, the ball part. There’s another thing. Lectins are actually very similar in structure to the area that I spend most of my life studying, which are blood groups. You look at, for instance, remember from bio class, certain blood groups cannot get blood from other people. So, for instance, I’m blood type A. I can’t get blood from blood type B. Blood type B can’t get blood from blood type A. Blood type O can only get blood from blood type O and blood type AB can get blood from everybody, universal receiver. Well, it turns out that those antibodies that you make to the other blood types are one of the prime reasons we probably have blood types to this day, why hadn’t they ever kind of merged together? It’s because they convey a sort of built-in protection against pandemics. If you have an antibody against blood type B because you’re blood type A and the pandemic virus looks like blood type B, you’re protected so nature sort of hedged its bets by making these antibodies specific.
It turns out you can’t find an infectious disease that doesn’t have a predilection for one blood type or another. It turns out that the studies that have sort of got widely distributed was that, for instance, blood group A had much more of a tendency to have a severe case of COVID-19. Again, this has been actually shown again in a separate study in the United States. So, the Chinese observation was duplicated. But one thing that they didn’t pay attention to was that there were prior studies on the earlier versions of coronavirus that actually told us why this was the case. It turns out that the reason Type O is better protected against coronavirus from consequential type damage and severe ARDS is that they make an antibody to blood type A. It’s the antibody to blood type A that gives them the protection and it’s the inability to make an antibody to blood type A which is what gives the risk to people who are blood type A. You can’t make an antibody to yourself. So, it turns out that I wrote a blog and I said, “Well, even though you’re blood type A and you can’t make an antibody to A, you can use certain foods that contain anti-A-like lectins.” For instance, soybeans, fava beans, domestic mushrooms. These foods will actually act in a kind of a replacement way for the antibody that you can’t make because your system won’t do it.
Dr. D’Adamo: So, again, hypothetical, but all based on very, very sound molecular biology. We know these lectins get passed right through your gut. They do all sorts of interesting things and away we go. So, you have that. You have the leek leptin. You have the stinging nettle lectin. These are like naturally-occurring, targeted monoclonal antibodies. You just have to know where they go, who they react with, and how to get them in there.
Dr. Weitz: What would you think would be a reasonable dose of taking stinging nettle root? I’m thinking it typically is coming in 250 milligrams capsules, what I’ve seen.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah. It’s hard to say what the actual dose is because I actually ran some numbers on that and came to something like you needed 17 grams.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, wow!
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah, but before I totally alienate the audience, it turns out that that’s not the way they calculate. What it was, I was extrapolating out the amount from small animal studies and in vitro studies. It turns out that you just don’t simply multiply the amount by the difference in weight. So, it turns out that probably along the lines of about maybe a gram a day of the root would be …. But here’s the interesting thing.
Dr. Weitz: Which is typically, I’m usually recommending 500 milligrams twice a day so that would …
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah. The other thing about lectins, which makes them so fascinating and actually makes them why they killed that guy with ricin back in the 70s, is the lectins disassociate after they do their damage. So, for instance, after lectin gloms onto a sugar molecule, it initiates a phenomenon on the cell that’s called camping. It causes all the receptors to move to the north pole of the cell. Once they get all coalesced there, the lectins disassociate and they’re free to do it all over again. So, actually, it turns out that this is not a straightforward you need this amount in order to do this, because once you get them going, they just keep doing it again. They just attach and release, attach and release, attach and release.
Dr. Weitz: Fascinating. Good. So, to kind of sum up what we’ve talked about, we talked about why older folks are more vulnerable. It probably has to do with their weakened antioxidant defenses. So, therefore antioxidants, including sulforaphane potentially would be beneficial. I definitely think that vitamin C … Do you recommend vitamin C as a preventive for …
Dr. D’Adamo: I take four grams a day.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Yeah. So, you take 500 or a thousand at a time? Do you think it matters how much to take?
Dr. D’Adamo: I take two or three in the morning and two and three in the second dose later in the day.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, two to three grams? Okay. Okay.
Dr. D’Adamo: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I mean, I’m not going to say that these numbers are absolute. I have to say though since I’ve been taking it, my gums have never been happier.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I normally take two grams of vitamin C a day and now I’ve upped it to six to eight, basically every couple hours. I usually take some vitamin C and then take some of the immune-strengthening herbs like elderberry, echinacea. Then, periodically throughout the day, throw in some zinc and Quercetin and resveratrol. Resveratrol seems to be another nutrient that may have some benefit here.
Dr. D’Adamo: It may. Ultimately, it has similar actions in many ways to Quercetin.
Dr. Weitz: Right, and also may help to protect the heart and I guess there’s a percentage of patients who end up with myocarditis from coronavirus infection.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah. Now, if I was an emergency room guy, I would put a little taurine in the bag.
Dr. Weitz: Taurine, yeah. Throw some IV glutathione or NAC in there.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah. Well, certainly taurine, because there’s good literature that taurine basically … What happens is when you goes through myocarditis event, there’s something called a free amino acid pool in heart muscle. It’s like a motor pool in the army. There’s a bunch of cars anybody could use. It turns out that if you look at the free amino acid pool in cardiac muscle, taurine is number one and number two is a mile and a half away. So, there’s just so much … Myocardial tissue loves to just have extra levels of taurine. So, if you look at things like enlarged hearts and those kind of things like that, it’s very effective for that kind of stuff. So, if I was in a situation where I was looking at myocarditis as a possibility, it probably would be something, but again, these are types of things that they’re not going to penetrate hospital culture in the short-term.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Probably coenzyme Q10 wouldn’t be a bad idea either, which I understand also helps with zinc transport.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah and there’s actually one of the clinicaltrials.gov was looking at coenzyme Q10 with a few other things, so we’ll see.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Interesting and also antioxidant status there. So, sulforaphane, we talked about why elderberry is potentially beneficial and not a problem, zinc with Quercetin, and we talked about melatonin. You talked about maybe a couple of milligrams. I think, typically, a lot of the dosage is at three milligrams. That would probably be fine right before bed.
Dr. D’Adamo: That’s what we talked about like my time with Todd, but actually Todd and I were talking about that and David. They were like, “You don’t need a lot of that stuff in order to get this effect.”
Dr. Weitz: Right. Yeah. If you’re stressed out and getting a little help with sleep, it wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
Dr. D’Adamo: Sure, sure. There are other things that you can use to control inflammasome activity and most of those things are kind of like a little more esoteric. Another one I think I’m kind of keeping my eye on is arabinogalactan. It actually has some interesting properties as well, larch arabinogalactan. There were some studies that show that people who have gotten that BCG vaccine seemed to have some resistance to advancement of the advanced … It what turns out that if you look at what … BCG vaccine is a vaccine against tuberculosis. It turns out that what it is is the vaccine is created out of the viral membrane. It turns out that the viral membrane is made out of two chemicals. One of them’s tacoic acid, the other one is arabinogalactan. Alternately, arabinogalactan may give you an immunological step up that’s very similar to than what they’re seeing in people who get the repeated BCG vaccine.
Dr. Weitz: Wow! Interesting. Yeah. I typically take a mixture of herbs that includes that except these days it’s hard to get your hands on supplies of it. Everybody’s sold out.
Dr. D’Adamo: I find it these days. I’ll tell you how I got started in larch, because up until the moment that a 50-pound bag of it showed up in my clinic, nobody in our functional medicine group ever heard of this stuff. It was used mostly as a substitute for gum arabic and was manufactured by a paper company who wanted to have it used to glue the back of envelopes.
Dr. Weitz: Wow!
Dr. D’Adamo: Then, so, at one point, I get a 50-pound bag shows up in my office with a bunch of articles in Japanese that just go like, “Japanese, Japanese, Japanese, echinacea, Japanese, Japanese, Japanese, arabinogalactan,” and a phone number. So, and it was a guy at the Champion Paper Company. He sends me this bag of stuff. I said, “What did you send me this for?” “Well,” he goes, “We know you do a little bit of stuff with the immune system and you’re kind of well-versed in this kind of stuff.” I said, “So, it’s good for the immune system?” He goes, “Well, I can’t really say that.” So, what they did is they gave me this huge amount of stuff and I just started passing it out to people. Works great for otitis media and a few other things.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, really?
Dr. D’Adamo: It’s a real common nutraceutical, but if I didn’t get that 50-pound bag of larch, nobody’d be using it.
Dr. Weitz: That’s great. So, I think that’s a wrap for here. That was incredible discussion of some of the interesting mechanisms from an integrated perspective.
Dr. D’Adamo: It was very enjoyable and thank you for asking me. I enjoyed our chat very much.
Dr. Weitz: I did, too. So, for those listening, watching who’d like to get a hold of you and get your books or contact you for consultations, how would they get a hold of you and your products and your books?
Dr. D’Adamo: I think they can go to dadamo.com, which is my mega website. If they want to read the COVID-19 blogs
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Those are hard to find.
Dr. D’Adamo: Yeah. If they go to that main page, there’s an orange bar at the top. It says, “Click here to read Dr. D’Adamo’s COVID posts.”
Dr. Weitz: Ah! Okay.
Dr. D’Adamo: So, they can go, it’s my last name minus the apostrophe, D-A-D-A-M-O dot com. You can read all things blood type, but then also all the COVID stuff is there. I mean, I’ve since been mostly doing genetic stuff. I’ve written a lot of software now, so I don’t really see that many patients anymore. I’m mostly seeing my old patients, but I do have a telemedicine practice that I do do with other doctors that do use my software and stuff. They can go to, I think it’s dadamohousecall.com.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, okay. Excellent.
Dr. D’Adamo: All right?
Dr. Weitz: Thanks, doc.
Dr. D’Adamo: You’re quite welcome. It was nice chatting with you. Be safe and maybe our paths will cross physically one of these days in the new system to come.
Dr. Weitz: Sounds good.
Dr. D’Adamo: Take care now.
