What is Long Covid Teaching Us About Our Health

Late last year, the University of Pennsylvania published an important new study citing research on long covid also called post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC). The study concluded that long covid sufferers appeared to have a deficiency in a specific very common compound, serotonin. The study notes this deficiency appears to be a result of inflammation impacting the production of serotonin. Many experts have since weighed in on how serotonin is produced and its implications for remedies.

Here, I wish to step back from the details in the study and look at the macro. Inflammation is not well understood. Most often it is all lumped into one thing - as in all inflammations are the same. Of course, we know there's a difference in an inflamed elbow and intestinal gut inflammation. But what do we think when we consider gut inflammation? When we consider antioxidants or anti-inflammatory products do we consider that not all inflammation in the gut is the same.

The study indicates that the covid virus creates a specific inflammation. What if we broaden this idea and suggest that every type of threat to the body, let’s call them pathogens, creates a different risk, a risk of a distinct inflammation. It stands to reason that the more we know about each type of inflammation, the more design that can be brought to solution building.

Taken a step further, this study indicated that a specific type of inflammation is causing the body to produce too little of something that is created metabolically. By this I mean the body creates serotonin automatically, where an input of one substance automatically creates a new substance. In this case, we are looking at an amino acid called tryptophan. We use this to make Serotonin. Tryptophan comes from food and there are foods with more tryptophan and food from which the tryptophan is more readily absorbed; what the experts call bioavailability.

Tryptophan is an essential amino acid for protein synthesis and contributes to the synthesis of neurotransmitters. The body uses tryptophan to help make melatonin and serotonin. Serotonin is thought to help regulate appetite, sleep, mood, and pain. The liver can also use tryptophan to produce vitamin B3, which is needed for energy metabolism and DNA production.

Amino acids are critical to the functioning of our body. 10 amino acids are produced by our body and 10 others, called essentially amino acids, only come from our food. This is one very clear area where what you eat forms who you are. If you are deficient in any essential amino acid, it is likely wrecking some havoc on your health. And likely, you will have no idea this is going on.

The study’s senior author Dr. Maayan Levy said. “Our findings may not only help to untangle some of the mechanisms that contribute to long covid but also provide us with biomarkers that can help clinicians diagnose patients and objectively measure their response to individual treatments.”

Sounds like food as medicine has found a home.

The Penn State study shines a light on serotonin deficiency and yet difficulty sleeping is another often reported long covid problem. Melatonin helps regulate the sleep-wake cycle, So, perhaps the melatonin balance is also impacted.?

At fermented natural health ingredient developer Clever Fruit Products, we pursue the same objective. We use fermentation to transform food into what the body needs. This is exactly what the body does every minute of every day. Our body’s digestion of food is fermentation. We digest food twice, once in the small intestine where we extract most nutrients, and again in the colon (large intestine) where we create the food that feeds our brains and manages other critical health functions such as cell regeneration. With each human generating 1.2 billion new cells a day, you can understand, that this is mission-critical to our health.

Fermentation is a metabolic process, which converts large complex food molecules into small and digestible molecules. When we ferment a superfruit like wild blueberry, we create critical bioactives such as microbial metabolites. A specific objective at Clever is to generate a broad array of phenolics and short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) metabolites. Phenolics protect us from pathogens and include most bioactive compounds commonly referred to as antioxidants. SCFAs have multiple functions: fuel sources, anti-inflammatory properties, immunity enhancement, and potential therapeutic effects. This is our health and the foundation of food as medicine.

Clever’s objective is to resupply the body with a response to deficiencies it might be experiencing.? That a lack of critical bioactives might be hammering away at our health. And as importantly, we are supplying a blend of protective and anti-inflammatory compounds to fight the underlying problem, inflammation, and better protect us.

Our fermented superfruit products, like our fermented wild blueberry product Bluotic, are designed to help bring the gut back into balance. We are adding a critical supply of bioactive compounds to negate the deficiency. This is something the industry is calling microbiome modulation.

None of this is to say our fermented products contain or indeed generate serotonin in any quantity. Most fruits do contain tryptophan, and some fruits like pineapple, plums, bananas, tomatoes, and plantain contain a high amount of tryptophan. Clever’s favorite fruit, the wild blueberry, the world’s #1 superfruit, does contain small amounts of Tryptophan, and one Canadian study, using just regular blueberry juice, showed it was enough to lessen postpartum depression. Perhaps eating more of these fruits will provide some relief from some long covid symptoms.

What does seem clear is that pathogens from our environment such as the COVID-19 viruses cause inflammation of which we are unaware. This inflammation may cause deficiencies in specific compounds that undermine our health. Some of these deficiencies can cause crippling medical conditions. Further, they likely represent a keystone in understanding chronic illnesses and degenerative diseases.