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My New Favorite Way to Eat Organ Meats
Getting organ meats in isn’t easy for most of us who didn’t grow up eating them. I honestly have never liked the taste of liver, yet I consistently feel better when I eat it, so I try to eat it consistently. My difficulty finding a way to eat liver that I truly loved can be seen in …
Small RCT Suggests Gargling With Iodine Clears the Virus in 4 Days
September 11, 2020 A preprint* released two days ago reports a small randomized controlled trial suggesting that gargling with povidone-iodine clears the virus from the nose and throat within four days. 20 asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic COVID-19 patients from a Malaysian university hospital were randomly allocated into four groups: Group A gargled with 10 milliliters of …
Finally Confirmed! Vitamin D Nearly Abolishes ICU Risk in COVID-19
September 3, 2020 The first randomized controlled trial (RCT) of vitamin D in COVID-19 has just been published. The results are astounding: vitamin D nearly abolished the odds of requiring treatment in ICU. Although the number of deaths was too small to say for sure, vitamin D may actually abolish the risk of death from …
The First RCT Shows Blocking IL-6 Improves Hypoxia in COVID-19
September 1, 2020 We now have the strongest evidence to date that IL-6 plays a direct role in hypoxia in COVID-19, and as it turns out this is bullish for the use of vitamin D and lactoferrin. Background on IL-6 and COVID-19 I first reported on April 6 that interleukin-6 (IL-6) levels often rise to …
The Latest Vitamin D and COVID-19 Study
August 31, 2020 On August 14, I covered a Mendelian randomization study from the UK Biobank that found no association between genetics that impact vitamin D status and COVID-19. Mendelian randomization studies are thought to be one of the best “natural” substitutes for randomized controlled trials when trying to understand whether an association represents cause-and-effect …
Newly Updated: What I’m Doing for the Coronavirus
Newly updated (in fact, wholly rewritten) August 30, 2020. The original version of this article can be found here. I recently released Version 5.0 of The Food and Supplement Guide for the Coronavirus, with the largest overhaul being the use of three different protocols depending on whether one is in a low-risk, moderate-risk, or high-risk …
Are We Already Reaching Herd Immunity?
August 29, 2020 Two recent preprints* (here and here) suggest that herd immunity to COVID-19 is closer at hand than most of us, including myself, have thought, and that it has already been reached in New York City. I am not an epidemiologist, so critiquing the formulas and methods in these papers is beyond my …
Why would blood glucose go up on a low-carb diet? | Masterjohn Q&A Files #131
Question: Why would blood glucose go up on a low-carb diet? When you’re adapted to low insulin levels with lower GLUT expression, but you want to get glucose into muscle, you’re going to need higher blood glucose levels to do it. I think elevated blood glucose is sufficiently known to be pathological that it would …
Why do thyroid levels drop on a low-carb diet? | Masterjohn Q&A Files #130
Question: Why do thyroid levels drop on a low-carb diet? So insulin and leptin are both positive regulators of thyroid hormone, production, and conversion. And generally I do think there’s probably a larger effect from thyroid production than peripheral conversion. I’m not too sure about that, but insulin does directly regulate thyroid. It has TSH-like …