Impaired Ketogenesis ties metabolism to T cell dysfunction in COVID-19

Vindicated yet again

So, today my posting would be a little different, I planned to cover both the fertilizer/food dynamics, and attempt to write my Kynurenine Part II, yet… this one made me smile in sheer smugness.

For close to 2 years I have been hammering about how most people, especially Covid-infected and Long Covid should adopt a low carbohydrate diet, or perhaps adding Beta Hydroxy Butyrate (an exogenous ketone, exogenous meaning produced outside of the body), maybe even both.

I have written an entire short piece about it.

Things Hidden Since the Splicing of SARS 2 S protein (part 3)

It is why I indicate fasting for some many people (one of the mechanism which fasting “fixes” you is the production of ketones). I could spend weeks writing daily posts on Ketones and the Ketogenic Diet alone. So now I am pleased to be, once again, proven right. Paper here.

Most of you might not know, but each type of T helper cell has a preferred metabolic pathway, with my favorite one Th17 being one addicted to glycolysis. Here authors show there is significant impairment of the ketogenic metabolic pathways in moderate to severe (I would argue in Long Covid too), which affects your immune system, in specific here the CD4 cells, while the authors cite another group who did the same with CD8 cells.

I would like people to pay attention to the second image, because it gives you lots of good information to understand how/why the dysfunctional immune system sets in, via infection or vaccination. By the sheer fact that it overwhelms you ability to keep stable levels of ROS, and why very early in the pandemic Glutathione was found to be one of the most important markers against developing severe outcomes or death.

Finding something that we covered recently, low levels of tryptophan (this comes into the Kynurenine pathway), bio energetic AA (mitochondrial function) and cysteine (antioxidantion, glutathione), all leading to poor cell function and excessive oxidation.

In this section we one of the most important aspects of this disease, one I covered rather extensively, the mitochondrial aspect of it (after all, to this day I still think this is mostly a metabolic disease in viral form). Authors argue because of this ketogenic impairment and lower levels of BHB and AA, there is not much room for proper mitochondrial function.

On the last highlighted section and underlined we see every type of longer term damage the virus does, inflammation, fibrosis, etc is halted and can be reverted with a Ketogenic diet, and supplementing with BHB as a oral drink had further enhancing effects, because the body had more circulating BHB supply.

Even though it took too long for researchers to start looking into this from this particular perspective, I am glad they are finally doing it, and we are getting evidence to the obvious.

And as a spoiler, it has been known for quite a long time that the Ketogenic Diet modulates the Kynurenine Pathway, basically limiting all of its damaging and immune suppressing effects. In fact, the Ketogenic Diet has been used as a first line treatment for neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson, and others.

As an FYI, a lot of other damaging mechanisms and pathways I covered are a lso either fixed, limited or halted by BHB/ketones, because at the very core they come from specific receptors and signaling, and after a while under a Keto diet your body will also start healing. In fact, here are a few of the important pathways where I directly cite BHB as a counteracting supplement.

SARS-CoV-2 - Antibody Dependent “Enhancement”

At least we have some good news =).

A very big thank you to all supporters here and those who use KoFi =) !