Eat fish to help protect yourself from COVID-19?

[HowardR]

Many of the older religions include ritual practices that just happen to help their adherents survive plagues. Jews, for example, adopted ritual hand-washing and weekly baths which helped them survive the many plagues of the Middle Ages.

Both traditional Jews and Catholics tend to eat fish on Fridays, and Catholics eat a lot of fish during Lent. Fish are the best foods for several valuable nutrients including zinc, available Omega 3s and Vitamin D.

A new Belgian research paper explores the relationship between zinc deficiencies and COVID-19. The same groups of people who have zinc deficiencies (such as older people) have the worst mortality rates from COVID-19. Open the following pdf link to read it:

preprints.org/manuscript/20...

If you, like me, drink green tea or take EGCG for your CLL, eat your fish at the same time. It turns out that green tea contains two chemicals (EGCG and Quercetin) which help zinc get into cells where it can interfere with virus replication. Open the following pdf link to read one such study:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/250...

I just finished a 5 oz can of salmon which contains approximately 1mg of zinc. I prefer salmon and sardines to other fish because they are not only high in good nutrients, but they are low in toxic mercury. Here's an FDA publication which calculates the mercury concentrations of different kinds of fish:

fda.gov/food/metals-and-you...

If you start taking zinc pills, be careful. Zinc, at high concentrations over a long period of time, can deprive your body of copper, which is also a valuable nutrient. About 25mg of zinc per day is usually considered to be safe.

As always, consult your doctor or pharmacist if you are taking other medications, including antibiotics. It could be that taking zinc interferes with their effectiveness.

Also, if you are taking Curcumin for your CLL, don't drink your green tea or take your EGCG at the same time. It turns out that EGCG and Curcumin make each other less effective if taken within 4 hours of each other.

So you might want to consider adding more fish to your diet, especially those fish that are low in toxic mercury. Doing so could possibly help protect you from COVID-19.

[PlanetaryKim]

Good info, Howard! Thank you for posting.

[lexie]

When this Covid seemed to gaining momentum in the US I tried unsuccessfully to buy zinc at pharmacies or online. Thanks for providing this post with the pros and cons plus links.

[HowardR in reply to lexie]

I bought my zinc pills (25 mg) and my canned salmon from Amazon. It took over a week to get the zinc pills, but they finally came.

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator]

Hi Howard,

As I mentioned in a reply to your previous post healthunlocked.com/cllsuppo... , the reference you provided to support the use of EGCG and Quercetin, which help zinc get into cells where it can interfere with virus replication was a mouse model study. I referenced a more relevant human study which DID NOT find this effect. It's great that you are providing references, but please do use references to human studies where available, ideally from in vivo studies.

Evidence for zinc helping reduce respiratory infections is unfortunately inconclusive, but given the low risks and possible reward, I can understand the attraction of trying it. Do note however, that with the current pandemic, having blood tests to check for the development of a copper deficiency is problematic.

Neil

[HowardR in reply to AussieNeil]

Aussie Neil,

Thank you for taking the time to respond and for citing the test-tube Penn State human cell study which found no difference. I consider the two studies to be a draw. Which means that we need to find out what third factor may be involved.

It may be, as you say, that the third factor is the difference between mice and men. EGCG may help transport zinc across cell barriers in mouse cells but not human cells. But there may be another explanation. One possibility, for example, is that EGCG helps transport zinc into cells that are deficient in zinc, but not into cells that already have a surplus of zinc. Do you know of any other studies or any reviews of the literature which explore when EGCG works as a zinc transporter and when it doesn't?

There could be more than than just COVID-19 involved here: Old people tend to be deficient in zinc. Old people who are zinc deficient tend to get Alzheimer's. Old people tend to get CLL. Could zinc deficiency be associated with CLL? If so, then, maybe, if we had been eating more fish while drinking green tea, we wouldn't have gotten CLL!

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator in reply to HowardR]

I don't see how a trial on mice vs humans can be seen an as a draw, when we aren't mice!

You have made the first scientific step in proposing some hypotheses in your last paragraph. Remember that correlation does not equal causation. I'll leave it to you to do a literature search, select good quality papers and see if they support them. Remember the tips I gave you on your previous post about preferring in vivo human tries - ideally double blind.

Neil

[HowardR in reply to AussieNeil]

I will certainly continue to do more research. I am disappointed that you are not willing to look for additional info from your end as we have different resources. Also, I don't think the choice between the two is as clear cut as you suggest. In-vitro studies are sometimes considered to be more valid than test-tube studies.

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator in reply to HowardR]

1) In vitro (in glass) = In a test tube. What did you intend to say?

2) I am 1 of 3 admins, managing this community of 15,000 members and I've already spent a fair bit of time investigating zinc and respiratory infection research, something I first looked at about 20 years ago. Having found that the research is still inconclusive, I consider that my research time is better spent in other areas which are likely to be more promising.

Neil

[HowardR in reply to AussieNeil]

Sorry, I meant "in-vivo", not "in-vitro". I'm new to medical research and my Latin is not so good, so I do occasionally use the wrong words.

I'm just starting to look into zinc. The new Belgian research paper I cited connecting populations known to have zinc deficiencies with populations known to have high COVID-19 mortality rates is intriguing.

I'm going to start looking up that studies' reference list this weekend. When I do so, I'd also like to look at the important contrary studies. Can you point me toward a research review regarding zinc deficiencies that I should know about?

Also, in your opinion, why is it that zinc remediation fails despite the high correlations between zinc deficiencies and various diseases? I can think of a few possibilities:

1. Maybe there is another factor that is also absent when zinc is absent? (After all zinc, Vitamin D and Omega 3s appear together in fish.)

2. Maybe some populations just cannot absorb zinc as well as others, so remediation is hopeless.

3. Maybe zinc deficiencies are a result of these diseases, not their cause.

I'm just brainstorming here. I'd really like to hear what you think.

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator in reply to HowardR]

Perhaps someone else who is not so involved in supporting this community can help you. I don't have my research files with me, as I'm away from home for treatment. Plus, as I said before, I would prefer to invest my time researching matters more promising and relevant.

Enjoy your research,

Neil

[HowardR in reply to AussieNeil]

Aussie Neil,

I hope your treatment goes well. I will no longer try to get you to do my homework for me. I promise!

Instead, I'll help you by giving you some recreational reading that you could find interesting -- the just published preprint of the Belgian paper about the relationship between zinc deficiency and COVID19. Here's the link again:

preprints.org/manuscript/20...

The authors have a hypothesis which explains discrepancies in the studies of HCQ (hydroxychloroquine) and COVID-19:

1. If a patient is zinc deficient and receives HCQ without receiving a zinc supplement at the same time, then the HCQ is likely to reduce the zinc that is available in the body and could actually prove harmful.

2. If the patient is either *not* zinc deficient, of if HCQ and zinc are given together at the same time, then the HCQ is likely to help get the zinc into the cells where it can help the HCQ fight the virus.

By the way, there is contradictory evidence of whether HCQ and CQ are actually zinc ionophores, just as there is contradictory evidence of whether EGCG and QCT (Quercetin) are zinc ionophores. The authors discuss two studies that appear to contradict each other on this question:

1. In the Chinese study (Xue et al, 2014), CQ (Chloroquine, a relative of HCQ that has worse side-effects) "increases zinc uptake in ovarian cancer cells and mediates zinc accumulation into the lysosomes of these cells."

2. In the Korean study (Seo et al., 2015), CQ increased the amount of zinc within cells but decreased the free zinc levels in lysosomes.

So in the Chinese study CQ is a zinc ionophore, while in the Korean study the evidence is mixed. Sounds just like the discussion we have been having regarding EGCG, doesn't it?

The authors hypothesized that this difference may depend upon whether the patients had lots of zinc or had zinc deficiencies in their bodies at the time the CQ was administered. If the patients already had lots of zinc, then zinc functioned as an ionophore. If patients had zinc deficiencies, CQ would waste zinc, so less would be available to get into the lysosomes even though CQ would help it get into the cells.

Whether or not CQ and HCQ are zinc ionophores, the authors concluded that CQ or HCQ should be administered with zinc supplements:

1. "If further data suggests that CQ/HCQ are zinc ionophores mediating zinc uptake into the [COVID-19] infected cells, one can postulate combining zinc supplements with CQ/HCQ or at least zinc correction in zinc-deficient patients could be beneficial."

2. "However, if the new data suggest that CQ/HCQ is interfering with zinc uptake into the [COVID-19] infected cells or in an organelle such as lysosomes- in line with findings of Seo et al. combining zinc correction or zinc supplementation with CQ/HCQ might be even highly essential."

This paper is about HCQ and CQ, not EGCG. However, two constituents of green tea (EGCG and QCT) have also been found to sometimes act as zinc ionophores. So by analogy we get the possibility that EGCG only helps those CLL patients who are not zinc deficient or who are taking zinc supplements at the same time. Since most of us CLL sufferers are old people, and thus probably zinc deficient, if we are taking EGCG, we probably should be taking zinc at the same time.