Dr Ron Ehrlich:

Hi, Dr Ron Ehrlich here and welcome to Good Byte. What an interesting time. What an interesting, challenging time and what a unique time in, well I guess, human history because globally whether I speak to a friend in the UK, my sister in law in France, whether I speak to anybody in America or anywhere in Australia, we are all feeling it everywhere around the world understands is affected by what's going on. In my book, I reference a statement that Professor Marc Cohen made to me on a podcast last year and that is we are all connected so we are all affected and if we were in any doubt about that, this crisis pandemic has reminded us of that. It's also interesting that for the last 40 years at least we have been constantly encouraged to be good consumers, but we haven't heard an awful lot about being a good citizen and I think that's what we're going to be learning in the coming weeks and months.

And it's a time I believe for a period of sustained global reflection and it's already happening. With the amount of time that you have to yourself to just stop and think about what is important in life, is something I think we're all experiencing. It's also interesting that after all the medical breakthroughs, and I have been the recipients of some amazing medical technology in my life and so have members of my family, many of myself included would not be alive if it wasn't for that. But here we are faced with a global pandemic and what we are told we have the best available to us is to wash our hands and for us to isolate ourselves. And I think that's good advice. I'm not denying that that's good advice, but one could almost feel a little disempowered by that.

And I believe there are plenty of things that you can be doing to improve your health and bolster your immune system and improve your chances of A, not getting the infection and B, if you do, do not suffer from it as badly as clearly you could. And so, I've got a short video that I got. Now, I have the privilege of being the president of the Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine and that college has access to a whole lot of other groups internationally and the International Society of Orthomolecular Medicine produced this wonderful three minutes or so video animation, which I'm going to share with you right now. And hang onto it because at the end of it I share with you my own supplement regime that I'm undertaking at the moment because to suggest that that's all we can do, wash our hands and stay isolated, I'm sorry I don't buy that.

I think we can be doing a whole lot more and in the process improve our health. I think we could come out of this, well, I'm sure we will come out of this if we can overcome the financial pressures that everyone is feeling and I hope we can continue to provide food and shelter for those that need it and jobs for those that have it when this is all over and we all emerge from it a better planet. But here's this video that I'll share with you now.

Now, these are those recommendations and this group has been around since 1994 and it's made up of some amazing clinicians and it's basically talking about vitamin C, D and minerals in supporting the coronavirus. So, what can we do? Well, apart from hand-washing and gargling and social distancing? Yes, that's important. They are all very important. We should be following that advice. There are other things we can do. We can enhance our health, we can minimize our symptoms and we could even avoid the infection.

Now, the idea that all we can do is wash our hands and gargling is not all that empowering and this is about personal empowerment. Good nutrition, keeping your hands clean, keeping your body warm, resting, sleep still the number one thing to be doing to build your immune system, but there is, even more, you can do. You can be even more proactive and try to build a healthy immune system and vitamin C's important and there are plenty of resea...