Ask any of the local LifeLab phlebotomists that work in proximity to our office and they're likely to tell you that I order lots of serum zinc tests. Ask our staff and you'll also find that there is hardly an IV bag administered that doesn't contain it.
So why am I so bullish on zinc?
It's vital for growth and development. It's critical to wound healing. It helps maintain healthy bones, skin, hair, and nails. It's absolutely vital to optimizing neurotransmitter function and neuropsychology. It impacts digestive and cardiovascular health. It plays a role in visual function, hearing, and taste.
Zinc is also absolutely critical in helping optimize immune function.
Acting as second messengers, zinc helps modulate and control virtually all aspects of our immune response. Second messengers are intracellular signalling molecules and without them, the immune system effectively shuts down. Beyond this vital role in cell-mediated immunity, zinc also acts as an antioxidant and as an anti-inflammatory.
According to the World Health Organisation, one-third of the entire global population is mildly to moderately deficient in zinc.
As COVID cases continue to escalate globally, it's easy to see why the interest in zinc has also piqued.
The correlation between zinc and immune function first came to light in the 1960s when doctors found underdeveloped people in small villages in rural Iran who were dying of intercurrent infections before the age of 25. One of the principal culprits was a zinc deficiency due to the high phytates (zinc-binding) present in their wheat dominant diet.
Zinc deficiency was a controversial medical idea in the 1960s, and it wasn't until 1974 that zinc was deemed an essential nutrient for human health by the Academy of Sciences.
My lab tests would suggest the problem with zinc deficiency hasn't gone away.
What the research shows
There is no direct clinical data supporting the use of zinc with COVID-19 specifically. In conducting a literature review hoping to corroborate the hypotheses linking "Zinc and COVID-19," I found a whopping zero published clinical case studies and a further zero meta-analyses examining the two.
So clearly our ability to overly project benefit should be radically tempered.
But here's what the research does show, according to a published article in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases:
- Patients with COVID-19 had significantly low zinc levels in comparison to healthy controls.
- Zinc-deficient patients developed more complications (70.4% vs 30.0%, p = 0.009).
- Zinc-deficient COVID-19 patients had a prolonged hospital stay (7.9 vs 5.7 days, p = 0.048).
So where does that leave us?
The answer is simple. Check zinc status. Improve zinc status.
What about vitamin D or vitamin C status? What about sleep or stress? What about obesity or diabetes? What about…
Stay tuned, more to come.
