by the Physicians Committee.

Hi, I'm The Weight Loss Champion Chuck Carroll here

at the International Conference on Nutrition and Medicine.

And today, I want to talk to somebody who has really,

over the past two and a half years, been taking a close

look at the pandemic, COVID 19 and diet.

How does what it is

you're eating affect your risk, your outcomes of COVID 19?

This particular doctor has done more in the past

25 years than you

or I probably will have done in a lifetime, many lifetimes.

As a matter of fact,

it's such an honor to be sitting here with Dr.

Sara Seidlemann.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

I'm happy to be here.

I'm happy that you are here as well.

We still are very much in the throes of this pandemic.

Obviously, back in person return to normal more or less.

But you still look at the numbers.

Last I saw, we're still here in the U.S.

looking at roughly 100,000 cases every day.

That's a lot of people still getting sick.

What do we know about the connection between what it is

we are eating and COVID 19 and what we're seeing there?

Sure.

Well, I think we could take it back

even further to the relationship between nutrition

and infectious disease, which,

you know, anecdotally for hundreds of years,

we've seen this relationship between malnutrition

and risk of developing an infectious disease.

We would see this in times of war and times of famine, right?

When suddenly food supplies were cut off and

infectious disease disease would flourish.

Right.

So we've known that for

a long, long periods of time.

How many stories have we heard about that?

So there are parts of this that are obvious.

I think

the part that isn't so obvious is that as you move forward,

that as you take that into current times,

the way that we think about malnutrition

and historically has been in the under nourished.

Right, right.

Right.

There underfed undernourished and now we have the opposite.

We have the overfed,

but undernourished.

So, you know, according to the CDC, currently

a third of all Americans, children and adults are,

you know, have at least one basic nutrient deficiency.

The United States of America now, one.

Out of three.

One out of. Three in the U.S.. In the U.S..

And I love the way that you put it, overfed and undernourished.

That's such a foreign concept.

I think that a lot of times

people can go wrong thinking about, well, it's food.

If I just put something

in my belly, I'm going to be okay, right?

As long as I feel full

or put something in there, I'm getting everything I need.

Clearly, nothing could be further from the truth.

Clearly. So,

you know, we're we're in quite a state here

where very early on in the pandemic, we were seeing

the association between obesity, type two diabetes,

atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease,

hypertension, increasing risk for COVID 19.

All of those illnesses are nutritionally driven illnesses.

Right.

You know, as a cardiologist

battling the primary type of heart disease,

which is atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease,

this is almost entirely a nutritionally driven illness.

Right.

And so in retrospect, it seems kind of obvious

that nutrition would be very important in COVID risk,

because all these nutritionally related illnesses

put us at risk.

The study that I carried out, it was very

early in the pandemic.

We really needed to try to

get at health care workers that were exposed to the virus.

That was a challenge because

there weren't that many cases at the time that we launched it.

There were about 1.8

million cases globally at the time of its inception.

Yeah, less than that. Right.

And so we really focused on frontline health care workers.

We had to go bigger than the United States.

A lot of those cases were in Europe at the time.

And so we looked at five countries in Europe

as well as the U.S.

and we really had to use a large network of 1.5

million physicians in order to capture

some of those that were most at risk.

How did you reach 1.5 million?

I mean, that's that's that's the study, right?

That's an undertaking.

So I'll I like to think of it as a very

creative, kind of scrappy COVID story,

where it was a collaboration

between academics and the private sector.

So we approached a company called Survey Health Care.

Globally, they had this large network of physicians

in order to do market research.

And we said, Hey, would you ever consider letting us do

academic research with your population?

And they were amazing.

They were incredibly supportive.

Not only were they open to it, but they funded it.

So I'm you know, I'm so grateful to them for doing it.

And I'm grateful to the healthcare workers

who took the time out

from there,

from what they were doing, which is battling the pandemic.

Yeah, yeah.

To take part in this.

Do you think they took the time out to do that?

Because they knew

the importance of the data that was being accumulated?

I think

I think, you know, physicians in general and particularly

these physicians, I mean, they're true heroes.

You know, they we are always thinking about and

there's a certain,

you know, part of you that has to let yourself go

when you become a physician

because you're thinking about the greater good, right?

You're you've

you've committed yourself to helping people in general.

And and so there's

something that naturally, I think physicians, nurses,

physician assistants, you know, that health care workers

do because they believe in the greater good.

So what did the data kind of bore out here?

What were some of the things that you discovered?

Well, so there were there were some things that were obvious,

like more exposure to the virus

put you at risk for getting the virus.

And so

that's great because we saw things that we expected to see

greater access to PPE at the time

that we were doing this study, there were many physicians

who didn't have access to PPE and they were still showing up

to take care of patients.

So the better access that they had,

the more types of PPE that they had protected them.

And then we looked at lifestyle factors and what sleep

and stress were a big component here.

You know, the better rested,

the less work stress, personal stress

that they had, the better that they did.

And then diet was a big component as well. So

we looked at plant based eaters,

we looked at plant based

and pescatarian eaters, and we looked at the other

end of the spectrum,

which was the low carb, high protein diets.

And what we found was that plant based diets

were extremely protective from developing severe COVID.

So those health care workers that followed those types of

diets had a 73% lower odds of getting severe COVID.

When you compared those to the meat eaters,

the meat eaters had a four fold higher risk of

developing severe COVID.

The risk of becoming infected.

That was pretty much

a level playing field or a level across the board.

But once in fact, that the risk of severity

that's where there was the huge difference, right?

Yeah.