Episode 16: Vaccines? Vitamins? or Both?

 

Now for the big question: should you take the COVID vaccine or not? It can be a polarizing choice for many people, but for those who have autoimmune disorders, it’s not even an option. Whether you choose to vaccinate or not, Haylie Pomroy respects your decision, but she has a big caveat to all of that. Haylie believes that the most important thing you can do for yourself now is to double down on your foundational health. That means putting power on your plate and doubling down on the right food and supplementation so that your body can be in its healthiest state to fight off the virus, vaccine or no vaccine. Listen in as she shares some tips in which you can start to build that protection for yourself.

---

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

Vaccines? Vitamins? or Both?

I am looking forward to us touching base about some things we have going on, you might have going on, and that is going on in our community. There are a couple of things that I wanted to talk about. There are a lot of questions that I'm getting in our private community, in our membership community, and from my clients. I feel like it would be a good time for us to gather together, come together, and have some discussions. For a minute, I’ll put on the hat that I wear a lot in my practice. I'm encouraging you to be curious about your body, curious about the information, ask lots of questions, and prepare for the engagements that you may be having with your doctors, your family, or your loved ones.

I wanted to talk about a few things. As many of you know, we have a lot of virtual and interactive community events. For 2021, we have made the commitment that we're going to double down on those events. They are wonderful, fun and interactive. We make toilet bombs and do face masks together. Now more than ever, one of the things that we do together and what I'm hoping we can do together now is have an open mind to being in awe of your body, no matter what phase or stage you're in, and looking for subtle cues and being interested in what your body is trying to share and communicate with you. I'm getting a lot of questions from my clients, from people in the clinical world, from my community, from a lot of the doctors that I consult for about to vaccinate, to not vaccinate, to do vitamins, to not do vitamins, “What do you wash your hands with?” Things that are affecting everybody and that we're all being pushed to the brink or the comfort level of decision-making for our own health, for our kids' health, for our family member’s health.

I wanted to come together and have some conversations. Please feel free to ask me anything here. A lot of times I don't know the answers, but I do have great relationships through my many years of clinical practice with a lot of people that are smart, and that will collaborate with me to get answers for you. Maybe I’m not the smartest person in the room, but what I can tell you is that I have been through a lot from a health perspective, and I know a lot of things to be true in my health because I went through it and I lived it every day. I wanted to broach the subject of the COVID vaccine. I know a lot of you are going, “Oh my gosh.” There are a lot of strong opinions for and against. People have a lot of strong convictions on both sides. I always admire strong conviction, even if I don't agree with an opinion.

Put Power On Your Plate

What I want you guys to feel like is that you have a different perspective or more data or more information to make the decision that's right for you and your family. A couple of things that I wanted to talk about around that is you will always know me say, one of the most important things that you can do is put power on your plate, eat to treat, and consume things that are going to promote your health. During stress, I wish I had a magic wand that I could make all of your stress go away. I am going to keep searching for that, but to this time, I don't have it. What I can say and what we do know that science says is true is that our bodies can deal with stress the more nourished we are. However, so many of us, when we're under stress, that's when we step away, we eat junk food or we don't do things that are healthy for us. We step away from some of our commitments, the alignment that we made with ourselves and our cells to nourish, feed, and promote health in our bodies.

It's important to double down on your core or foundational health for yourself and your body. Food is huge in that. The funny thing is that everything that we are made of, from our cells to our collagen, to our elastin, to our bones, to our immune response, to our hormone response, is micronutrient dependent. Those come from food and supplementation. What I'm hoping that we can march forward on is that healthy food can support, create, and manifest health within your body. I'd like to take it a step further and say that micronutrients, so supplementation, herbals, maybe using a particular food in a large quantity can help change the trajectory of your health for a positive reason. We've had many family members, dear family friends, and loved ones that have been affected by COVID, and many clients and community members. I want to see if I can give you a couple of simple little tidbits that I feel with strong conviction. I love someone that has strong conviction, but I feel strong conviction is going to empower you during these times.

First and foremost, we've got to double down on our food. Secondly, I've been consuming supplements for myself since I was two. Needless to say, that was many moons ago, and I'm a huge advocate for quality supplementation. So much so that extremely reluctantly, after formulating for many companies, I put my toe into the supplement world myself. When I first started, I did it because I was having a difficult time finding quality supplements that could maintain and evoke the lifesaving change that I had for my own body. As many of you know, I have an autoimmune disorder called ITP. It’s is where your body's platelets will attack themselves. My platelets, which help you not hemorrhage and have functional clotting, also play a large role in inflammation in the body and the metabolism. My body will attack its own platelets. I was looking for personal success and getting off of Prednisone. I had gone through Imuran, CellCept, and a lot of different medications to try to keep my systemic eczema and my autoimmune disorder under control.

Reluctantly, I started formulating for myself and then formulating in the clinic because there were certain things that I couldn't find. A lot of the basic things like D and zinc, vitamin C. There are a lot of other companies that were doing a good job with those. When I first started, I used only strategic powders and supplementation that were targeted and pure to help evoke change in people that were struggling with their health. Since I've been in that world, it's changed drastically in sourcing raw ingredients and the cleanliness of the product that we get. Reluctantly, we started doing a D and zinc because we found that I couldn't for myself, my family, my community, my clinic find anything that was clean and effective.

PYP 16 | COVID Vaccine

 

Unfortunately, what happened was a lot of the supplement companies got bought out by a lot of the big pharma companies. It broke my heart. It's very frustrating because when a lot of that acquisition happened, the quality in a lot of companies that I used to love diminished significantly. We're going to put pins in those two things. We know that food and the source of supplementation are important. Fortunately, my nephew is out of the hospital. My nephew was in the hospital. One thing that I was very happy to see with COVID was that they were administering vitamin D and zinc while he was hospitalized. This is heartbreaking to say, but it has taken a pandemic to get everybody in line with the fact that strategic micronutrients in the form of supplementation can be lifesaving.

We're going to put a pin in that. This is a tough one for me to say. I'm getting asked a lot about my opinion if someone should take the vaccine or not. I sit in a weird spot here because for me, it's not an option. Because of my ITP and the type of vaccine that I have, myself together with my hematologist, my internal medicine doc who I love, and a couple of my great friends at UCLA have looked at my immune profile, and have decided that even if I wanted to, it's not an option for me.

When people ask me, “Would you get the vaccine? Would you do the vaccine?” I have a hard time putting a hat on of not bias input. I use another example. My family, my biological father specifically had a significant issue with addiction. A lot of times, people ask me questions about alcohol or marijuana or other recreational type drugs. My clients will ask me about, “What's the good balance? What's the strike balance?” I have a lot of history with that where for me, it had a very significant negative impact on our family. I have a tendency to be a lot more reserved in those decisions. I'm noticing that my opinion on the vaccine is colored with the fact that it's not even an option for me.

Sometimes I feel a little bit cynical like, “Isn't it nice that you have the option to or not to?” I then put that aside and think about what I would want for my mom, for my clients, and for our community. That one, I'm super clear on with this issue of whether or not to do the COVID vaccine. What I would want for either an individual that's struggling with their health or an individual that’s outrageously healthy is to have knowledge and peace in their decision. I support you in whatever you choose to do for your health and wellness. I want you to know that our community is here to support you in whatever you choose to do for your health and wellness. I have a caveat, which is I will be a cheerleader for you. I will never be a cheerleader in the destruction of you. That comes in the diet world a lot with keto and fasting, how harsh and terrible that is for a body that's struggling, under or dealing with stress.

I'm going to get upset if I hear that you've walked out the door without feeding your dog or you, my friend, was supposed to eat. It's the one thing that we've already agreed that's going to ensure our survival and our ability to thrive. The other thing is if I hear that you're putting yourself for a long period of time in a ketotic state, which is a state of metabolic dysfunction. Every article and we study the biochemistry of what happens in the body with long-term ketone production. We have destruction and a slowing of the metabolism. I'm not going to support you if you're going to do that. Isn't it funny though, I will support you if you choose to vaccinate and if you choose not to?

Three Simple Tips

How can I support you in, one, making that decision? I'm going to give you three simple tips, and two, in supporting whether you vaccinate or whether you don't vaccinate. You'll see that a lot of that overlaps. I'm going to give you three tips in helping you feel more solid, and realize that you can always change your mind. That's what I always tell about people. We're adaptive human beings or none of us would ever wake in the morning. One of my beefs about the whole fasting thing, people say, “We fast so that we can give our small intestines a rest.” No, people. Our small intestines don't ever want to rest.

They rest one time in our lives, and that's the end of our lives. That's odd. You don't want any of your organs to rest, to take a break, to check out for 8 to 16 hours a day. You want them all to be nourished, nurtured, and loved up. Three things when you're trying to decide. Number one is I would make sure that you look at the sources of the vaccine and there's some great data. Maybe we can post some of that. If any of you feel like you have some great data, feel free to post it here, but there are some great data on the options that are out there.

PYP 16 | COVID Vaccine

 

If you have any allergies like egg allergies or chicken allergies or sulfur allergies, make sure that you communicate those fronts, first and foremost to any healthcare practitioner that you're seeing because those play a role in vaccination. The other thing is to take a clear assessment of how you feel now. We have a self-assessment questionnaire. I want you to do a good assessment. Make sure that nobody's around, the house is quiet, you're in a quiet room. Make sure you have a nice snack and you have plenty of water to drink. Take a couple of nice deep breaths, maybe do some alternate nostril breathing, and do a true assessment of where your current health status is. It's important, if you're going to vaccinate or you're not going to vaccinate, that you have a clear line of communication with your body so that you know if anything changes or alters.

The third thing that I want you to do is in the book, the Fast Metabolism Food Rx. There is a chapter on autoimmune disorder and it's got a lot of components about inflammation. One of the things about C-19 or Coronavirus-19 is as more individuals are being treated for the disease or being observed during the disease, one of the things that we're talking a lot about is the inflammatory process that seems to happen in individuals that struggle with the disease, versus individuals that don't have a strong of a response to the disease.

In Food Rx in the autoimmune chapter, there is a section about labs to have run. In that section, we talk a lot about CRP, C-Reactive Protein, which is an inflammatory marker. We talk about CK, it's a kinase and a particular kind of inflammatory enzyme. We talk about ANA, Antinuclear Antibody, antibodies that are in your own cell. This profile is a great profile to look at in the blood before you do anything that is pro-inflammatory. That falls on both sides, whether you take the vaccine, which is pro-inflammatory so that the body creates antibodies to protect itself from potential COVID exposure, or you choose not to take the COVID vaccine and you are, in addition, at risk for exposure.

You want to see what your current chemistry is from an inflammatory perspective. Both ways we're seeing, which is cool. A lot of amazing things about taking zinc on both ends of the spectrum. We have zinc-rich foods on the website. We have the best zinc in the entire world on our website, HayliePomroy.com, but there is a component of how the body reacts from an immune perspective and in the autonomic nervous system that having enough readily available zinc seems to be beneficial both in individuals that vaccinate and individuals that choose not to vaccinate. We'll get a little bit of nomenclature here and please feel free to chime in.

When you vaccinate with this particular vaccine, you're not being administered the virus itself. The majority or the two that are being given are what's called an mRNA vaccine. It gives the sequencing of the genetic code as if the virus came it infuses into the cell through the messenger RNA. Your body creates antibodies that we can test in the blood and see if there are antibodies, as if that virus got there. There are a lot of metal exposure and immune catalysts with those. That's why you want to look at how your body is doing before. With my clients that are choosing to vaccinate, we're always running these labs ahead of time. We're looking to get their bodies in the best state possible to not go into a pro-inflammatory response.

With my clients that are choosing not to vaccinate, we are always running this lab profile on them, and we are preparing and getting their body to not have an out of balance strong inflammatory response to the virus. Things like essential fatty acids, especially with a vegetarian-based fatty acid that has Omega 3 and 6 ratios. Those are supportive to help the dignity of the cell wall so that if the body does get exposed to the actual virus, this would be like communicability, not like in the vaccine. Those fatty acids, there's a lot of research in this particular type of virus that shows that can help strengthen the cell wall, so that the virus doesn't overcome the body and replicate at a high rate.

Those of my clients that are both getting the vaccine and not getting the vaccine were either through labs, looking through lipid levels, or we're using our metabolism fatty acids which are food-based, vegan, not fish-based in this situation. There's a time and a place for that. In this situation, food-based and fatty acid. There are some labs that you can run that can look at your lipid permeability, that can look at the dignity of your cell wall. Those labs are also cool to run. Those labs and the C-reactive protein have a strong cardiovascular component. Some of you might be thinking this is interesting because a lot of the individuals that have a pro-inflammatory response when they're getting exposed to COVID are also having secondary cardiovascular blood clots, cardiovascular events, cardiac arrest even in some cases. How is that correlation? That's where we see a lot of the vitamin D, and the lipids or the fatty acids support in the research playing a significant role.

PYP 16 | COVID Vaccine

If you are like me and you struggle with autoimmune issues, that is a candid conversation that you want to have, not only with the rheumatologists but with a hematologist. Do you want to have that conversation about where your markers are if you have Hashimoto's? What's your thyroid peroxidase look like? What's your antithyroid antibody look like? If you have lupus, you’d want to watch kidney function, and look at what we need to look, monitor, and track in your body. The other thing that I want you to think about is that a lot of people are walking around the world now using a lot of disinfectants. This is one of my favorite ones. This is Dr. Bronner's. We're putting it on our hands. This one smells good. It's lavender. We're using a lot of disinfectants. This is a natural one, but some of them have a lot of harsh chemicals in them. It's hard on the liver. It can be very pro-inflammatory. A lot of the antibacterial soaps, which we're using can break down our healthy gut bacteria, which puts us in an immune-compromised state. We want to be very careful that we're not using that. I have Dr. Bronner's hand soap. I have Seventh Generation hand soap. Those are great ones to think of.

When you're using your disinfectant though, realize that this is not as effective as washing your hands with soap. This virus, in particular, has a lipid layer. We need to use something like a surfactant, something that will break down that lipid layer because the virus cannot live when that lipid layer is gone. Alcohol or a lot of these disinfectants can help disintegrate that lipid layer, but nothing does it faster than soap and hot soapy water. One of the other tricks that we use in our family is we have Free and Clear diaper wipes. In your car, at your house, use these because they have a surfactant in them. It is not like a Clorox wipe. We're not looking to put Clorox all over your body or all over your hands, but we're looking to have a small amount of surfactant like what we find in soaps that'll help break down that lipid layer when you do have exposure to the virus.

The goal is that you are in the healthiest state possible to either fight the virus effectively. What is required of that is to keep your inflammation in check, to keep your cell walls strong, to have antivirals readily available on board, and to make sure that you reduce your degree of exposure. By using hot soapy water, by using diaper wipes, things like that, these are tricks that you can use. You should also look at your immune profile. That's why I grabbed this chapter in this book because you want to know what you're coming to the table with. Whether that is coming to the table to mount a natural immune response to this, whether that is coming to the table to use a vaccine so that you create an antibody response to this, we want to watch this carefully.

When individuals do the vaccine, clients of mine, we are running these labs prior to the vaccine. We are then running the labs again prior to the second inoculation. When my clients ask me, “What's the best protocol for success with that?” If we see any inflammation, we use the metabolism free radicals. What you're looking for this is Boswellia and what they call Skelaxin. They're like a white Willow bark extract. Boswellias are natural anti-inflammatories. We've got inflammation that’s huge cascading, but you want something that's anti-inflammatory that works on the cytokines or this particular type of inflammation that the body's response has to this virus. Remember, the virus does not cause an inflammatory response. It's our body that creates the inflammatory response when it is struggling to destroy and get rid of the virus.

We want to try to get rid of the virus with hot soapy water. We want to do things like a lot of my clients are using. I'm a scientist. I'm sorry guys, say what you want. I'm a big mass proponent. I love you all for your opinion. Please love me for mine, but also we are having a lot of individuals that are extremely immune-compromised. We are doing things like barrier like almond oil in the nose and we're rinsing with the metabolism probiotics regularly. Whenever individuals get home before they go to bed at night, we're having an open capsule of metabolism, probiotics, rinsing with those to help promote immune health and the mouth, and the mucosal lining with either sesame oil or almond oil to help support for that, and then wash your hands.

These kinds of conversations are things that we want you to keep going. I want to hear your opinions and your questions. We have community events every month. Make sure that you're signed up. If you're having a hard time getting kickstarted, making some decisions for your health, I want you to know that we're here for you, that we have all kinds of support for you. We 100% support you being curious, making the best darn decision that you can, and feeling like you have access to as much data as you would like. I wanted to dip my toe into this conversation. I hope that it's helpful. If you want more conversations like this or if you'd like me to dive a little deeper into some aspect of the conversation, I surely will.

---

Legal Disclaimer:

By signing up via text, you agree to receive recurring automated promotional and personalized marketing text messages (e.g. cart reminders) from Haylie Pomroy at the cell number used when signing up. Consent is not a condition of any purchase. Reply HELP for help and STOP to cancel. Msg frequency varies. Msg & data rates may apply. View Terms Privacy

Sign up for Podcast Alerts : Text PODCAST to 18338341850

 Important Links:

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

Join the Power On Your Plate Community today:

Categories
GETTING STARTED BREAKING A PLATEAU FAST METABOLISM DIET METABOLISM REVOLUTION METABOLISM PRODUCTS METABOLISM LIFESTYLE PRESS