A lot of my article ideas come up when I’m talking with friends. This one is no exception. Someone recently wanted to know what were some great ways to protect against viruses, particularly COVID, and was iron a good supplement to boost herself with?
What feels like a million years ago when first studying nutrition and Anatomy and Physiology at college and Uni, one of my holistic lecturers said; “Starve a Cold, Feed a Fever.” Meaning, when you have a cold or flu and naturally don’t feel like eating, do just that, starve that bug. Drink heaps of water, herbal teas, maybe some fresh vegetable juices with ginger, beta carotene and other natural antimicrobial and flush that sucker out. And particularly, she said “Avoid meats or high protein/iron foods.”
What does feed a fever mean? To tell you the truth, I never found out. I’ll come back to that in another article.
But guess what science has found? There’s wisdom in that saying, at least the first half.
Viruses, including COVID need our iron laden enzymes in order to replicate themselves.
They get into our body via whatever means they can, invade our human cells and set up shop, basically unpacking themselves, like a guest unpacking their suitcase, and then they use what’s available to them to make copies of themselves, over and over and over again.
As you can imagine, the more they replicate themselves, the more virus cells there are released into our system, the more this is happening on a larger scale and the sicker we become.
And guess what viruses love using for this copy-replicating factory they’ve got going inside our cells? Iron. Yep, that’s right, they’re using your own iron against you. Your iron is like their favourite ink in the copy machine they use in order to replicate their virus DNA/RNA. Yikes.
Now particularly women, who regularly lose iron on a monthly basis, can become low in this energy, oxygen carrying commodity, causing fatigue and heavier menstrual cycles, which long term, should be treated, but short term, science is saying that if you want to beat viruses, including COVID, low iron levels is preferable.
“a Sufficient intracellular iron levels support coronavirus replication, whereas b iron deficiency undermines its replication process by interfering with viral transcription, translation, assembly, and exocytosis.”
References: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40588-020-00140-w#citeas
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro1930
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1738320
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