Is red meat good for the immune system?
There’s a question that definitely was not “trending” five years ago, though a community of people have been saying this for decades. So why would beef be good for immunity? One reason is that it has Vitamin D.
In lab-speak, “Red meat and meat products can contribute meaningfully to the mean daily intake of vitamin D. Beef and lamb can contain vitamin D3 and 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 but also potentially vitamin D2 and 25-hydroxyvitamin D2, all of which contribute to meat’s vitamin D activity.” That said, the quality of beef and the way it is farmed greatly changes the content of the meat as far as vitamins and other health-promoting compounds.
For more on why pasture-raised beef is different from what goes from the feedlot to the grocery store, see our post or learn more from the Bionutrient Institute’s upcoming study on the impact of farming practices and soil microbial life on the nutrients in beef.
Does vitamin D have a potential role against Covid 19?
The short answer is probably yes. As Professor Martineau, lead researcher on the CORONAVIT trial in the UK says, it’s possible that Vitamin D is just a “bystander” or that low Vitamin D levels are actually caused by the infection and not the other way around, but it is clear that people with very low levels of vitamin D tend to have more severe cases. That study will be completed on the 28th of this month so we will have some stronger clinical data.
Another study using data from the US veterans administration system showed that “Vitamin D2 and D3 fills were associated with reductions in COVID-19 infection of 28% and 20%, respectively. Mortality within 30-days of COVID-19 infection was similarly 33% lower with Vitamin D3 and 25% lower with D2.”
One way that Vitamin D can help improve outcomes is through its link to reduced inflammation. Meanwhile, healthy whole foods contain a complex web of vitamins and other compounds that can improve overall health. A strong basis of health generally will help the body respond in a healthy way to a respiratory virus.
While Zach Bush with Intelligence of Nature and doctors like Nasha Winters at the Metabolic Terrain Institute for Health are part of the new wave of health care professionals recognizing the solid link between diet and health, including the influence of farming practices on food quality, this is an old story.
One man telling this story a century ago was Weston A Price, a dentist from Cleveland in the 1890s and early 1900s. After his uncle helped him through a personal health crisis by eating directly from the land, mimicking hunter gatherers, he became convinced that industrial food was the source of most chronic health issues and dental problems he was seeing in his practice.
Around about 1930 he set off on a steamer ship and traveled around the world gathering nutritional evidence to support eating whole foods like in any traditional culture, including foods that you could have gotten from the farms of the early 1900s in the USA. In short, the message of Weston A Price and the two . foundations who maintain his legacy:
Join us in our journey to recognize the links between the health of the land and the health of the people!
