We’re all looking for ways to optimize our health and especially our immunity “ things we tend to take for granted when we’re feeling good and there isn’t a pandemic going on.
The basic ways we strengthen our immune response are the same, whether we’re worried about COVID-19 or the flu or staying healthier through menopause: wash hands often, don’t touch your face, eat well, sleep well, exercise.
However, we live in world of pre-packaged food that’s high in sugar, bad fats, salt, and calories, but low in nutrients “ and it’s easy to get, doesn’t require much prep time, and let’s admit it, it tastes pretty good. That can make getting the right nutrients in the right amounts at the right times more challenging.
To help women ensure they fill nutritional gaps, Gennev Director of Health Coaching Stasi Kasianchuk and Naturopathic Physician Wendy Ellis teamed up on a webinar all about how to supplement. See the video of their conversation on YouTube.
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Of course, there’s no substitute for a healthy, balanced diet, but when that’s just not possible, supplements can help. And stay turned for Gennev’s supplement pack for women “ created by Dr. Ellis to provide nutritional support but also to help manage menopause symptoms in this challenging time of life. Coming soon!
Also, check out Dr. Ellis’ article on how to choose the right supplements, so you know what you’re getting!
TRANSCRIPT:
Stasi Kasianchuk
I am Stasi Kasianchuk. I’m a registered dietician, nutritionist, exercise physiologist, and Director of Gennev’s Health Coaching Program. And today I’m really excited to have one of our consulting physicians Dr. Wendy Ellis. She’s a naturopath and she also has her own practice in Seattle and I’m going to give her a chance to talk about her role with Gennev and a little bit more about herself. So Wendy, go ahead and introduce yourself.
Dr. Wendy Ellis
Sure, thank you. As Stasi mentioned, actually Stasi and I had the opportunity to work at another wellness company a couple of years back. So it’s really nice to be working with people who already have a shared interest. I’ve been in practice since 2002, which is a long time and really focused more on menopause starting in 2005. So I’ve taken my practice really along the way. I’ve done work in genetics and I’ve done work with other physicians, but I’m currently in my own practice primarily focusing on menopause. But it’s been really great to consult with Gennev since last summer with some of our products, which we’ll talk about that are specific for menopause.
But we’ll also soon be doing telemedicine consultations for menopausal women as well. It’s something that I feel very passionate about, especially as I approach menopause myself. But I really like menopause in practice because I feel like it’s, it really doesn’t just involve giving someone hormone replacement. It involves every aspect of their health, whether it be how well they’re sleeping or are they exercising, are they, you know, we are at increased risks for so many things just by going into menopause. And so I feel like it’s really great to hit on all the many aspects of health while helping them through menopause.
Stasi Kasianchuk
Excellent. Well, we, and I, are very glad to have you as a part of Gennev and excited about this topic today. You mentioned menopause puts women at greater risk or there are different challenges women face during menopause. And right now as we’re going, as we’re in this pandemic with COVID19, I’m getting a lot of questions from women of “What can I take? What can I do?” And I know you have a background with your medical training around supplements. So we brought you on today to really discuss the supplements. And just could you start off by talking about immune function COVID19 and how do supplements play a role here if they do? But give the audience just a basis on some of the things to be thinking about this virus and our immune system.
Dr. Wendy Ellis
Right? So if we think about the public in general, like what we’ve really noted with the data that’s been collected thus far and Coronaviruses are not a new virus, although this is a new strain of Coronavirus that’s new to all of us. And so when it comes to viruses like that, it really depends. I really liked a quote that I heard the other day that really said, we need to not so much focus on the virus so much as we need to focus on the host, which is, you know, which is us. And so whether we have a host that is a five-year-old person or an 85-year-old person, I think one of the most important things that we can do is have a, have good foundational health to be able to fight viruses off because the data there’s a study out of Italy now that suggests that 80 are actually 43% of people that are infected have no symptoms.
And so, you know, we can’t just, you know, as especially as we start to unfold our rollout of re-introduction to life, we’re going to be exposed to people and what we can do to reduce our own risk as to the most important thing. And so that’s when supplements come in.
There are certain supplements that really help improve our immune system. And I know that if we look at data about, you know, traditional studies that have looked at supplements, oftentimes supplements fail. And it’s because they’ll take someone that’s in a full-blown outbreak of something or a full-blown health condition. And just by giving them a vitamin, it’s not going to just automatically take it away because you’re looking at years and years or decades of damage. And just by taking, for example, vitamin D or a B vitamin, it’s not going to undo that damage.
But what we can do is we can prepare our bodies with supplements to improve our immune systems. So our bodies are stronger and more able to actually fight off a virus because this more, this recent virus basically starts in the nose and it basically has all of the head symptoms. So people will have headaches, congestion, sore throats, you know, sometimes they’ll have body aches. But if we can stop the replication of the virus by taking things like vitamin a and vitamin D those are the things that can actually help ramp up your immune system to fight the virus. So the counts are reduced. So it doesn’t further travel down into the body and become a more aggressive viral illness.
Stasi Kasianchuk
Got it. So it’s about supporting, again going back to that host, it’s supporting what’s already there. Not creating something new and not completely, you know, eliminating any symptoms you may have. It’s more helping your body to fight the virus that’s in there.
Dr. Wendy Ellis
Exactly. And what I think the challenge is… yes, there are some antiviral medications, but very frequently those medications have to be started at the first onset of the virus before it replicates and invades all of our cells and starts mutating. And so if we can support the body while the virus is in its lower counts by taking things like vitamin D or vitamin a or herbs and we can talk about some of the most important things that we recommend then you can basically try to keep that at Bay and help the body’s innate ability to support this sort of immune system to work for us instead of against us. Exactly. Okay. So working with what you have, I guess is the summary of that piece of it. Yeah, exactly. And you know, it’s like the virus attacks our bodies, basically, it sort of goes undetected for sometimes a week or two before our bodies are able to, before the immune system is saying, “Hey wait, there’s something here that shouldn’t be here. I’m going to mount a response against it.”
So, to try not to get too technical, we have something called cytokines. And cytokines are there: they could either be pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory. So as most of us are on this webinar, we’re sitting here in a chair and our bodies are producing more interleukin six which is an inflammatory cytokine. But if we got up and we went for a run after this, then our body is in response to exercise, produce more of the anti-inflammatory cytokines like interleukin 10 and so, you know, I think the most important thing is to support our bodies, not only with supplements but also with lifestyle factors that create more of an anti-inflammatory response with our cytokines versus further producing more of those inflammatory cytokines. So the whole idea of, you know, some of the medications that are being recommended or suggested by sort of laypeople, some of those really work to reduce that cytokine storm that they’re discussing.
And basically, you know, we can, we can work on that with basic lifestyle things. And obviously, a cytokine storm is a very dangerous thing and that happens much further on in the, in the disease state. And also the people who are more susceptible to that are people who have high blood pressure. They already have lung conditions. They have. Actually I pulled some data on that and in some of the studies that have been done, I think one-third of patients who succumb to the disease had preexisting lung disease nearly as many had type two diabetes and then at least half as many as half have high blood pressure. So, of course, those are things that happen for a long time before. And so anything we can do at present to reduce our risk of those diseases is going to help us in the long run.
Stasi Kasianchuk
I love how you made that connection. It’s not, there’s no one-stop shopping. There’s not a one fix-all for this. And so much, again goes back to how can you make yourself the healthiest environment and those lifestyle things, which we’ll definitely talk about. You know, that’s my, that’s my favorite area to get into. On how that can help. How you can decrease blood pressure or improve blood pressure markers, improve blood sugar management, and then, in turn, decreases stress on your body and can support your immune system.
Dr. Wendy Ellis
Yeah, and I think there’s a lot too. There’s a lot to be said about, you know, we’re working on things like a vaccine, right? But viruses, they mutate. So when they go into the cell, they start to replicate and they replicate at a very rapid pace. And then mistakes get made in the, in the RNA to, to would that replication. And so with this virus, it’s actually a slow, a slower mutation. So a vaccine will be helpful for us. However, I always tell patients that, you know, this year it’s the Covid-19 virus. In the next coming years, there will be other viruses that were not vaccinated against because they’re new. And so vaccines, although are very important, just like flu vaccines, can be very important. We can’t predict what viruses are going to come in the future. And so we need to prepare our bodies as best we can to help our bodies innately fight that off instead of trying to think of all the vaccinations that we could possibly need. Cause we just don’t know.
Stasi Kasianchuk
Yeah, absolutely. And what a great way just to be more proactive than reactive. So we’re setting ourselves up for success. Yep, exactly. Well, let’s start talking with some of those supplements that can help with that. I know I’ve received questions from clients just tell me what supplements to take, what should I be buying? And it looks like the supplement industry is doing very well right now. So it’s kind of interesting to see what’s marketed out there. It would love to hear how you approach this as a credentialed, experienced practitioner with training and expertise around supplements. How do you approach this with your patients and what would you recommend right now?
Dr. Wendy Ellis
Well, when this first rolled out in March in the state of Washington I put a newsletter out that really was trying to help patients know which supplements are the best for this. And this was independent of any health condition that someone might already have. And so for those of us in the Pacific Northwest, actually, you know, most of the US, we’re low in vitamin D. Most of us are low in vitamin D because we have jobs that have us working inside most of the time. And even when we’re out in the sun, I mean, in Washington, read a latitude that even when we’re out in the sun, we don’t get a whole lot of vitamin D except for a few months of the year. And so because of that, and, and even when we’re outside, we’re covering ourselves with sunscreen because we’re trying to avoid skin cancer.
So we’re basically at risk of having low vitamin D levels. And I think that people who have darker skin pigment or even at more a higher risk of having vitamin D deficiency. And then as we’re, we’re a society with a lot of obesity and obesity also decreases our vitamin D levels. We just automatically, you know, are, have reduced vitamin D and so we have a lot of risk factors that are innately built-in. So vitamin D. If there was one supplement that I would recommend taking across the board, it’s vitamin D and vitamin D is a very important antiviral. It’s anti-inflammatory. Again, vitamin D is not, you know, you can’t get a virus and just take a bunch of vitamin D and expect that it’s going to cure everything. But it’s a really important vitamin for our immune system, for mental health, for our bones.
There is just so much that vitamin D does for us. There’s a lot of information about vitamin D and cancers and how it reduces cancer risk. And again, you can’t get cancer and take a bunch of vitamin D and expect it to go away. But if you have a long history, or a longer history, of taking vitamin D that is protective for you and then the dose of how much to take. Of course, this depends on how old you are, what your skin color is, whether you are overweight, whether you’re pre- or post-menopausal. And it’s not so much, I think a lot of the data, it makes me a little crazy because it says, well, you know, it used to be 400 IUs, which was definitely not enough to get us up to a healthy blood level. So it really depends on your blood level more than it depends on the dose that you take. So when it comes to vitamins like vitamin D, it is a fat-soluble vitamin. You can take too much of it, which can be detrimental. But the sort of one of the most stringent it’s the, it used to be, let’s see. Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this is my perimenopause moment. It makes her participants feel better.
But the endocrine society used to recommend like, you know, 400 units. And then it was like, well, our vitamin D levels in the blood need to be at least at 30. But they’re safer. The upper limit is 4,000 units and that’s across the board. And so most of my patients, I do recommend that they take 4,000 units per day. And what this does is it gets the blood level up to a point where usually around 40 to 50, which is a level that is sort of going to help our immune system help our bone density, reduce association with certain cancer risks. So I’d say 2000 to 4,000 I use depending on, you know, depending on the patient, but you can test your vitamin D in the blood. It tends to be a more expensive test. Insurance companies are very stringent on what health conditions it will pay vitamin D for. And so a lot of doctors just won’t order it. So I would say that two to 4,000 units would be recommended, not only for longterm general health but also for helping avoid viruses.
Stasi Kasianchuk
Excellent. That’s a good recommendation. And gives, it gives a range for people to work with. We have a couple of questions on vitamin D. So one is that the accumulation of taking vitamin D is what matters. So should we start taking it now or for not if we leave that…
Dr. Wendy Ellis
Definitely. Absolutely. And you know, if you’re a post-menopausal female, vitamin D is one of the best things for your bone density as well. And there are pretty good studies on reducing breast cancer risk with adequate vitamin D intake. Of course, as with any health condition, it’s never just one thing. And so you always have to consider all the contributing factors that play into that.
Stasi Kasianchuk
Okay. So vitamin D is a piece of the puzzle. It’s not the be-all and end-all. Exactly. Another question here on vitamin D is, is there a supplement that you should not take with vitamin D at the same time if there are any counter counteractive effects?
Dr. Wendy Ellis
Not off the top of my head. It’s a, it’s a pretty well-known supplement that’s very safe. I do recommend women take it in the morning because it can interfere with sleep if taken at night for certain individuals.
Stasi Kasianchuk
That’s good to know. Alright, well vitamin D sounds like an important one to be starting with. And taking starting vitamin D if you aren’t looking at your dose if you are. And then considering getting your blood levels tested, if you can if that works with your physician. And once we’re able to go back to doctor’s offices and do lab tests, what else are there? Are there other vitamins, supplements, minerals, herbs that you think?
Dr. Wendy Ellis
And again, there are so many and so I chose my favorites. So the other one that I am using a lot of is vitamin C. There’s a lot of really good evidence for vitamin C as an antiviral. And so vitamin C is one of these nutrients that’s readily available. It’s easy to take if you take too much, you can get loose stools. There’s actually a website that I really encourage patients to check out. It’s the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon state university. And what I really like about it is that it’s really well-referenced and you can type in on the search at the top of the, at the top of the page and type in any nutrient and it gives you probably more than you ever wanted to know about every vitamin and mineral that we use.
And so vitamin C is, is being recommended generally below 2000 milligrams per day. They recommend that you should consult a doctor before taking any higher doses than that. Okay. There are some doctors that are using vitamin C, an IV form, for patients who are actively fighting the virus. And in IB form, you can use much higher values like 25 to 50 grams. However, most of us should be taking somewhere between 502,000 grams of vitamin C or milligrams of vitamin C per day. It’s, you know, we also have to think about all of those underlying some systems. Like we want it to be anti-inflammatory, we want it to be an antioxidant and we also want it to be antiviral. So vitamin C is another really great, really safe over the counter supplement that it’s really good at fighting viruses. There’s also a lot of research on zinc and you know, if we think about all of the things that you would take if trying to avoid a cold or flu, you know, we think vitamin C, vitamin D, we think zinc and zinc is one of those minerals that is very well-tolerated by people.
There’s one study that people developed a copper deficiency from taking too much zinc. It was actually people who were using Polident for putting their dentures in really high doses of zinc. But I’d say most multivitamins have 15 to 30 milligrams of zinc and usually they have one or two milligrams of copper. And zinc is also a very good antiviral. And then people who actually pulled some studies and it, it actually inadequate levels of zinc limited the individual’s response to fight infection. But when actually given oral supplementation in the study and actually found that it reduces the incidence of acute respiratory tract infections, of course, we’re worried about, we’re worried about lung health right now. It reduced it by 5% and it shortened the recovery. Wow. so, and again, a lot of these things I pulled from the Linus Pauling website and you can have, you can find references there. But zinc is one of those minerals that can really upset your stomach if you don’t take it with enough food. And so that is a big caveat for that is you have to take it with food.
Stasi Kasianchuk
All right. Good reminder there. And we’ll make sure to link that Linus Pauling in the followup email to all of our participants. So thank you for providing that resource.
Dr. Wendy Ellis
Yeah, it’s an excellent resource. And that’s, that’s the other thing, you have to be really careful about reading blogs and you have to know like, you know, just like we want good supplements and we can talk about how you find good supplements. You have to be really careful online. You know, what you read and where the data is coming from and you have to make sure it’s referenced. And for every study that supports something, there’s two studies that, that don’t support that. And so, fortunately, we have an epidemiologist on staff Dr. Rebecca, and so she’s really helpful in helping us determine, you know, is this a good study or is this not a good study? So that’s an important thing.
Stasi Kasianchuk
Yeah, I like that you pointed that out, that we’re here to support you. And when you’re working with your patients, I’m working with my clients. I want you to have information that’s going to help you. And that is really going to be reputable cause it can be easy to get bogged down by all the information that’s out there. And if you don’t have the background in health-related fields or the training that you and Dr. Rebecca have, you can get taken advantage of. And that’s not fair either.
Dr. Wendy Ellis
Right? Exactly. Exactly. The other supplement that I have been using not only for my family but recommending for patients is vitamin A. Vitamin A is found in fish. Which, you know, we also, we, we see Cod liver oil is generally a good way to get your vitamin an in there if you want it to also get your Omega-three fatty acids. But vitamin a is really important for the health of the nasal pharynx as well. And so the mucosal membrane actually produces retinoic acid and we know that it’s very antiviral and anti-inflammatory. You just like vitamin D, vitamin a is a fat-soluble vitamin and so you can overdose on that. So you don’t want to use high doses of that for long periods of time. There are some studies and recommendations that recommend taking like 50 to 100,000 units of vitamin a, but that’s something that a doctor should prescribe for you and something that you should be monitored for.
And the other thing is if you, obviously we’re dealing with mostly peri and post-menopausal women who are not trying for pregnancy, but vitamin A can be very dangerous and high doses for fetuses. So you want it. So generally what I recommend is 10,000 units, which is very safe across the board of vitamin a supplementation just as further immune support to, to aid in the immune system that you mentioned that we already have. We’re trying to, we’re not trying to replace something, we’re trying to give the nutrients to the body that it uses to actually improve and work our new system.
Stasi Kasianchuk
Excellent. Yeah. No, it’s such a good point of theirs. Again, balancing and that there’s not one pill that works. It’s how, how does this work in conjunction, and what is it looking to support? Exactly. Exactly. What question I get with my clients is, Oh, well especially with vitamin C actually, well if, if a thousand milligrams is good, then why do I stop at 2000? I was, should I take more? Is it okay to take 5,000? I hear it’s water-soluble. I’ll just pee it out. With the things you’ve mentioned with each of them, I heard vitamin C and the zinc and vitamin A more does not necessarily equate to better. Exactly. Is there a parameter or risk, an awareness that people should be?
Dr. Wendy Ellis
Yeah. And, and, and the thing is, if it’s water-soluble, you’ve urinated out with magnesium or vitamin C, it can give you very loose stools. And so obviously that’s a negative side effect. But some vitamins like vitamin a can be toxic to the liver if you take too much. And so we worry about toxicity and clinical studies actually, you know, there’s, there’s a threshold to when things are helpful. And so, you know, there’s a lot of research that hasn’t been done on supplements. And so, you know, it’s, if you, if you go to any major medical journal and you try to look up studies on nutrients, a lot of the studies will say, well, it’s thought to do this, but we’re really not sure. It’s the same with pharmaceuticals. And so if we look at what we typically take in a diet, supplements are above and beyond that, but we want to make sure that we’re not taking something that’s going to damage our kidneys or our liver or create a nutrient deficiency, like the zinc thing. If you take too much, think you can deplete copper. And so too much of one thing can absolutely create tissue damage but also create other nutrient deficiencies.
Stasi Kasianchuk
Okay, good to keep in mind that more is not always better and there’s a reason for those limitations. And then also from a cost standpoint, you don’t want to be taking more than you need, that’s going to cost more money and you’re going to run out of those supplements.
Dr. Wendy Ellis
Exactly. And I will say that I spend a lot of time talking people off supplements because we read things and we want to avoid Alzheimer’s or we want to avoid all these things. And so people take them presumptively, but your kidneys have to process those, your liver has to process those. And so I actually have seen liver enzymes or kidney issues secondary to people taking too many supplements. Yeah, that’s it.
Stasi Kasianchuk
Great reminder. About some of those risks there. Are there any, if anything else that you would recommend, are those the three main favorites right now?
Dr. Wendy Ellis
Yeah, so there was some press about melatonin. And so I felt like I needed to bring up melatonin cause I thought someone would ask that. And melatonin is obviously what our bodies produce to help us sleep. And so our bodies are triggered to make melatonin when our rooms are dark. And so if you’ve gone through any of the, of the genetic programs especially the ones pertaining to sleep, we talk about melatonin, we talk about sleep habits and having lights off in your room and trying to go, go to bed, you know, when it’s nighttime and wake up in the morning and get as much daylight as we can. And so melatonin is something that I think we’re lacking because we’re living in a society where our rooms are often not that dark and people are sleeping less or they’re not sleeping enough because they’re having hot flashes.
And so they’re, the reason why sleep is beneficial to us is that it restores a lot of things, but we’re making a lot of melatonin that’s helping us sleep. But that melatonin is actually acting as an antiviral as well. So I pulled some data on this because it’s kind of new to me as something that you would use to actually reduce your viral risk. And actually it’s been shown to decrease some of the inflammatory markers that are, have been associated. So interleukin six is one of those cytokines that actually tends to be high and people who have coven and melatonin have been shown to reduce that. It also has been shown to reduce the reactive protein and also tumor necrosis factor, which is another inflammatory marker. So the studies have shown that at six milligrams this actually improved outcomes in people who are suffering from severe multiple sclerosis.
This was something that was 25 milligrams of melatonin. Okay. But also it’s been shown to lower blood pressure. It reduces proinflammatory cytokines. And actually there’s some research about whether it may help blood pressure, but again, too much, it’s not good. And so melatonin has some anticancer properties and so I’ll have, yesterday I had a patient who was self-diagnosing herself and was taking 60 milligrams and our bodies make about 0.3 to 0.8 milligrams when we’re sleeping. And so my tendency is to get that naturally through actually going to bed in a darkened room instead of taking melatonin. If you do take melatonin, it’s recommended to take three milligrams or less. Okay. Yeah. So that’s another one. That has gotten a lot of press. Well thanks for clarifying that. And again, going back to the more may not be better working with what your body has first and then you know, there’s the whole, there’s a lot of antiviral herbs.
And the thing about herbs is that we just haven’t done enough study about them to know what the safe profiles, safety profiles are. So if you go onto the generic website and you look at some of the herbs that we use for hot flashes, we really include the safety parameters. And any drug, drug, drug, herb interactions. Because I think a lot of herbs, we just don’t fully understand the mechanism of action and we don’t know how they interact with other medications. And we’re not sure if we’re taking a good formula though. A lot of herbs come from overseas and the FDA doesn’t regulate supplements. And so it’s, you don’t know whether you’re taking something that has been grown in pesticide, you don’t know whether it’s actually just cellulose in the capsule. A lot of people take [inaudible] other herbs because they have a high potency of berberine, which is you know, we, it’s almost like an antibiotic herb.
And so if we think about immune health and we think about antibiotics, like 90% of our immune systems and the GI tract. And so if you take an antibiotic and you basically decimate your microbiome temporarily, then your immune system is affected because of that. So if you take berberine long term to treat or prevent a virus, then you could be doing damage on the other side, with decreasing urinate and the other day by affecting the microbiome back to that balancing act. So I think the earth question is a really individual one and a hard one. And I think it needs to be discussed with your doctor because of all the potential side effects. Okay. Good reminder there. So the other thing is that certain health conditions or diseases or just living in this environment with depleted soil that we, we tend to have certain nutrient deficiencies as menopausal women not only because of life but also because of certain things that are increased over time secondary to, you know, just the aging female body.
And so some of those nutrients we’ve put together a vitality pack for women which is not a multivitamin. And I think it’s really important to stress that it’s not a multivitamin. It’s really more of a vitamin specific for the clinical nutrient deficiencies that have been noted in women who are approaching or in menopause. So it’s generally, it’s, it’s something that I created because I just kept supplementing th