During this challenging year, we have learned how to cope and change our day to day life during this global health crisis. COVID-19 has a socio-economic impact making us really vulnerable and unstable during this difficult time. Measures were taken to limit the spread of the virus, and we all know how important and necessary those measurements are to save lives.
Today we want to talk on recent research in the field of alternative therapies and the possible use of food as medicine for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 post symptoms as inflammation and oxidative stress.
Recently a review on the Journal of Food Biochemistry of Carmen Lammi and Anna Arnoldi from Department of Pharmaceutical Science, University of Milan (1) reported how the use of food-derived compounds as antioxidants and polyphenols could be used for the treatment and prevention of COVID-19 post symptoms like inflammation and oxidative stress.
The use of Vitamin D to prevent complications and long terms COVID-19 post symptoms was explored early in the summer and in some country supplements of vitamin D are already available for people that are at high risk of infections (2).
Compounds as polyphenols and vitamin C were studied since the early 90s and their anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activity reported widely. In the last 20 years, antioxidants compounds were used as supplements on various foods and cosmetics products increasing the market for nutraceuticals and the idea to use food as medicine.
The major COVID-19 post symptoms are associated with inflammations and oxidative stress especially in the presence of chronic diseases associated with increased production of oxidant products. The previous studies on the antioxidant activity of food-derived products suggested that the use of food as medicine could be to prevent inflammation and oxidative stress in people with COVID-19 post symptoms.
Interestingly an article from Chen et al. (3) published in March 2020 showed as a combination of vitamin C, curcumin (turmeric) and glycyrrhizic acid (liquorice), potentially regulates immune and inflammatory response associated with coronavirus infections.
This is exciting news especially now that the entire world is waiting for a vaccine to be released. It is reasonable to believe that the consumption of a diet rich in antioxidants and essential nutrients as vitamins and minerals could help in strengthening the immune defences against pathogenic attacks, however, robust clinical research data are required to support any such claim.
We hope you enjoyed this update and we hope we were able to give you guys some more information about how you can keep your body healthy and strengthen your immune system to prevent and treat COVID-19 post symptoms using food as medicine. Please feel free to have a look at the articles and links that we have provided in the reference section if interested and remember to keep safe.
We are in it together and together we will get through it.
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