Dr. Mark and Dr. Chip's Healthy Blogs

  STORY AT-A-GLANCE Vitamin B1 (thiamine) is used by nearly all your cells, metabolizing the carbohydrates and lipids in the foods you eat, helping to convert food into energy and boosting the flow of electrolytes in and out of your nerves and muscles Thiamine is important for healthy immune function, and may actually be crucial to protect against infectious respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19 While thiamine deficiency is often the result of alcohol misuse, chronic infections, poor nutrition and/or malabsorption, recent research suggests vitamin B1 has dramatically declined throughout the food chain in recent years The transfer of thiamine up the food chain may be blocked by a number of factors, including the overabundance of thiaminase, an enzyme that destroys thiamine. Thiaminase is naturally present in certain microorganisms, plants and fish that have adapted to use it to their advantage Thiamine deficiency has been identified in dozens of animal species and is now suspected ...

Hi Natural Health Family. I hope everyone stayed cool during the warm and humid weekend. There is of course much talk about the virus still and what to do about it. We have been told to do and not to do something many times and people seem to get confused. I wanted today to talk about a key word that is related to not only the Corona Virus but many other illnesses and infections around the world. The key word is opportunistic .  What does opportunistic mean? In relation to a bacteria, virus or other “bugs” out there it means that those bugs must have an opportunity to infect their host such as a person. How do they get the opportunity to infect a host? When a person’s body becomes weakened and the immune system loses the capacity to fight off the bugs or keep things in balance, then we start to have an infection. This goes for many infections and illnesses. When we hear about the virus we hear about all the things you can do to prevent getting the virus such as social distancing ...