Health and Wellness: Ask Me Anything with Bryce Wylde

Health and wellness expert Bryce Wylde answered all your questions about how to stay healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic and through flu season in a LIVE video interview with Dilshad Burman.

By Dilshad Burman

We know you have questions about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and we’re working to get you the answers, straight from the most trusted sources.

Health and wellness expert Bryce Wylde answered all your questions about how to stay healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic and through flu season in a LIVE video interview on our Facebook page as well as here on our website.

Wylde has been in clinical practice for over 21 years and specializes in functional medicine which uses eastern traditions from India and China as well as western botanicals.

“In the beginning we often referred to ourselves as alternative medicine experts. That quickly evolved into something called ‘complementary alternative’, kind of looking to bridge between conventional westernized knowledge and the East,” he says. “We [now] call this functional because it leverages the best in laboratory sciences along with best medicine. So for example, if you need a course of antibiotics and that’s what’s indicated, we are going to prescribe that to you, but we won’t let you forget how important it is to take a course of probiotics following that course.”

Here are some of the questions he addressed:

Q: What are your daily must have vitamin supplements?
A:  Here’s my list:

  • Vitamin D — 4,000 IUs a day (benefits discussed below)
  • Vitamin C —The research is not so promising around just taking 100 to 300 milligrams a day. For these viruses, actually what we’re needing is a few thousand, or what we call the bowel tolerance.
  • N-Acetyl Cysteine, otherwise known as NAC – this is an amino acid and really interesting research shows that possibly what it’s doing is preventing the adherence of this novel coronavirus into the ACE-2 receptor in the back of our nasal cavity and in our lungs.

  • Quercetin may work in a similar way to NAC. This is a bioflavonoid or pigment found in certain fruits and vegetables, especially orange and yellow varieties. You can’t eat yourself to the therapeutic levels which is why we have to supplement with it.

  • Echinacea — I like it in spray form.
    This has now been proven, by work out of Switzerland, [that it works] against this COVID virus, but in-vitro. I have to underscore in-vitro there — not necessarily person studies yet, but they’re working on it.
    Health Canada label claims that it will help to prevent and even shorten the duration of cold and flu.

 

Q: What can we do to get enough vitamin D? Should we take supplements and if so, what kind?

A: More often north of the 40 degree latitude where we live here, we are very much deficient [in Vitamin D], but here’s what might shock you — most of the planet is. And certainly in this day and age, as we’ve been asked to stay indoors more often than our bodies and our skin is used to, we are even that much more deficient.

What’s really interesting is that this is no longer even classified as a vitamin. Vitamin D is now understood as a hormone. A pro-hormone, a good for you hormone. And of course, it’s the sunshine vitamin. We get it when we’re outdoors and we’re exposed to sun, not so much on cloudy days, not so much during the winter. That sun will convert through our skin for better or for worse, depending on your ethnicity and skin pigmentation, it will convert through the cholesterol in your skin to vitamin D — that’s a natural exposure.

If you’re not exposed to the sun, you need to take it. So here’s the test to ask your doctor for — it’s called 25 OHD or hydroxy vitamin D. You want to get this test because you actually want to know, not only how deficient you might be but how much vitamin D you should be taking on the regular.

So as an aside, the Counsel for Responsible Nutrition recommends an upper end limit of 4,000 IUs a day if you don’t know your levels, but there’s probably even higher levels that some people need.

Here’s what we’re seeing as it relates to colds, flus, the current COVID scenario — most ER, scenarios, most healthcare facilities of individuals who have come down with COVID are actually recommending vitamin D in treatment. But here’s the thing that the research is showing us — it’s not so effective giving somebody vitamin D once they’ve been infected with flu, with a cold, or even for that matter COVID. What’s really important is we get our levels optimized early on. And what that means is by supplementing, even with that 4,000 IUs a day, without knowing what your blood levels are, it takes weeks to months before those levels get systemically high enough that now you’re actually preventing the susceptibility, you’re preventing infection.

Vitamin D deficiency causes immune system deficiency, point blank. It’s responsible for over 200 other factors and enzymes in the body. So get your levels high enough so that, especially during winter months, you’re actually literally defending from viruses and for that matter bacteria.

To summarize the immune system — the immune system is made up of two different components. It’s the frontline immune system that we’re born with — this is called innate. It doesn’t need to adapt or learn. And then there’s the adapted or the learned. This is the part of the system that needs to learn and create memory of exposure. Vitamin D actually works to enhance both those aspects of the immune system.

The easiest thing to do is take it in a liquid form where on the label, it says per drop, it’s a thousand IUs. You want to take about 4,000 IUs if you don’t know your levels. I like that better than a pill because typically pills have a lot of binders and fillers and solvents and all kinds of things to make them a pill. And they’re not necessarily as bioavailable or as absorbed.

Now, keep in mind, vitamin D along with vitamin a vitamin K and vitamin E is fat soluble. So you want to take this either with your fish oil or a teaspoon of olive oil, or with your meal — if your meal contains a piece of fatty fish or something in it with oil.

That’ll ensure that you’re actually getting that vitamin D3, not D2 — D2 is not very well absorbed by the body.

Q: I’ve heard that ashwagandha supplements help people with anxiety. Do you think it works?
A: Love ashwagandha. It’s one of those ayurvedic herbs that we use often in clinical practice part and parcel to a realm of botanicals that we know as adaptogens, along with ginseng and rhodiola.

But I especially like ashwagandha because not only will it help with stress and anxiety, but it also has immune enhancing properties.

So this works in a number of different ways. First of all, if we’re overly anxious and stressed, which we all are in this day and age, that actually depresses our immune system. Among other things, too much cortisol — which is pumped out from these adrenal glands that sit on top of our kidneys — they issue out cortisol and, adrenaline, noradrenaline which are the stress hormones, the fight or flight hormones. But too much of that, chronic amounts of that, ultimately is going to depress your immune system. So ashwagandha can help with that.

It’s also been shown in clinical studies to enhance wellness — the feeling of wellness reduces that feeling of impending doom. It also reduces the cortisol and also upregulates the natural killer cells.

So you can see in natural medicine there’s a lot that we can draw from. Often it confuses scientists because natural medicine is not all about one chemical with one specific outcome. Often we can use an herb with a multitude of benefits and ashwagandha’s got to be one of my favorites to be honest.

Q: What are the benefits of a good night’s sleep when it comes to immunity?

A: Watch below

 

Watch the full interview with web writer Dilshad Burman in conversation with Bryce Wylde in the video above.


Scroll through the questions submitted to this session below.

Note: questions were moderated before appearing in the chat window

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