An article crossed my desk yesterday that I want to summarize and explain to you. It's about the antiviral properties of an herb called artemisinin. Common name would be sweet wormwood, but you see it as artemisinin quite a bit when you're looking at it in its herbal form. How does it have antiviral properties? Why do we care?
Artemisinin has been used for decades as an antiviral treatment, anti-malaria treatment in other parts of the world. We know it works. It has a good history, good reputation. Lots of people use it. It's very safe. But mechanistically, how does it do that? That's more what this article is dealing with. We know it works. Now we have a better idea how, but let me give you a real quick virology 101.
The way a virus works. First of all, it's not alive. You can't kill it like a bacteria. Antibiotics don't do anything for it. It doesn't work that way. It is a box that delivers genetic material. It lands on the outside of a cell, injects its genetic mate...
Next on our list of the foundational five is vitamin D. I've done videos on vitamin D in the past. Please go find them. Um, they're gonna have more information than I can put in this video here, but I'm gonna give you kind of a, a, a rapid overview on vitamin D. So, vitamin D, anti-inflammatory, anti autoimmune, immune regulating, anti-cancer, um, not directly, but helps our body do all these things, right? It supports our body's natural mechanisms for doing all these things. Um, so very important to have. It's generally considered the most, if not in the top two. Uh, magnesium being the other, uh, nutritional deficiencies in our bodies. Uh, we make vitamin D from the sun. Sun has to hit our skin, not really showing your skin there and interact with cholesterol. And that makes the first conversion that it has to go to the liver, get converted to the kidneys, get converted, then you finally get active vitamin D.
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So it's a multi-step process. Um, and there'...
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