How Zinc Lozenges and Glutamine Relate to Immune Support

Mike is mentioning in the chat about effective strategies during cold and flu season, mentioning NAC and zinc. I think some more effective strategies are liposomal vitamin C. So, that really increases the bioavailability of vitamin C. I think zinc lozenges because you're getting a local effect in your epithelial cells, in your throat, in your airways, in addition to a systemic effect to zinc getting into circulation. So those 2 effects sort of are additive in terms of helping reduce the risk of infection, but also reducing the severity of symptoms if you get infected. The doses of zinc typically need to be around 80 milligrams a day.

At least that's what we've seen in a lot of randomized controlled trials for improving, you know, reducing the symptoms or essentially helping people not get sick. We have a topic page on FoundMyFitness on zinc. You can look that up also on vitamin C. Talking all about cold and flu seasons, but something else that I haven't really talked about a lot, but I've been doing myself, and I've—it's made a really big difference in my susceptibility to illness during cold and flu season—is glutamine supplementation. So glutamine is an essential amino acid that is important for a lot of things, but what's probably not really well known is that it's really important for immune function, especially when you have active immune cells. I did a lot of research in this in graduate school.

Glutamine, your immune cells are just consuming glutamine. They prefer it over any source of energy. They love it. And there's a few small randomized controlled trials looking at respiratory illness susceptibility in endurance athletes. So endurance athletes, you know, these elite athletes that are running multiple marathons a year, their training makes them really susceptible to respiratory illness and for a variety of reasons. And it's not like exercise itself is going to do that to someone. It's really you have to get to that highly elite level where you're just clocking in like 20 to 30 hours a week of training, very, very high volume training. Those individuals, if they supplement, supplement with glutamine, it reduces their incidence of respiratory illness.

And I came across some of those studies recently, and I remembered my research in graduate school, and I thought, oh my goodness, why am I not supplementing with glutamine? You know, especially if you're someone that has a child that's bringing home all kinds of illnesses left and right, month after month. So, um, it's made a big difference in my susceptibility. So getting infections way, way down, but also severity. So if I do ultimately end up getting sick, it's really, really mild. And I really do believe the glutamine has made a huge difference, L-glutamine. And I do supplement with about one scoop of it, which I believe is 5 grams. I don't, I don't quite remember the dose, but I take the Thorne version of it and I do one scoop a day of it. And it's really made a difference.

I put it in my coffee in the morning. Erin's talking about glutamine and cancer. So glutamine can play a role in cancer. So can glucose. So can other amino acids. So can ketones. It all depends on the cancer type. Essentially, if you don't have active colon cancer or active liver cancer, it's not something to really worry about, in my opinion.