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by Marion Nestle

Jan 18 2021

Annals of nutritional epidemiology: Can cabbage mitigate the severity of Covid-19?

Why, you must be asking, am I even asking a question like this?

Because of this study, obviously, which I somehow missed when it came out in August (thanks to toxicologist Marc Stifelman for sending it to me).

The study: Cabbage and fermented vegetables: From death rate heterogeneity in countries to candidates for mitigation strategies of severe COVID‐19. Bousquet U, et al. Allergy. 2020 Aug 6;10.1111/all.14549. Online ahead of print.

The hypothesis:

The basic observation behind this study is that countries differ in death rates from Covid-19, and death rates differ between regions in the same country.
Differences in diet could account for differing death rates.
People in countries with low death rates typically eat cabbage and fermented vegetables.
Cabbage and fermented vegetables contain precursors of sulforaphane, the most active natural activator of an antioxidant in the metabolic pathway most affected by Covid-19. They also promote a healthy microbiome.

The nutritional epidemiology:

CAUTION: Correlation does not necessarily mean causation. The diets—and other lifestyle characteristics—of people in Romania and Latvia differ from those in the UK and Italy in other ways besides diet; other differences might well account for these variations.

Personally, I love cabbage in any form.

But for prevention of bad outcomes from Covid-19, I’m counting on vaccination, not kimchi or sauerkraut.

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Tags: Coronavirus, Epidemiology, Microbiome, Vegetables

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Next public appearance

Dec 15 2022

Online: CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute

This Zoom session is from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST: Combining Scholarship and Activism: An Intergenerational Exchange. Information about the session and registration is HERE. Bob Gottlieb and I will address how to combine food policy scholarship and activism in discussion with two much younger colleagues, Ivonne Quiroz and Lo Anderson.