Is nutraceutical supplementation appropriate for COVID-19 management?

Recently, now that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines are becoming available for the ultimate prevention of COVID-19 infection, a discussion has begun on another level of global management of the disease based on the hypothesis that an individual’s dietary status may play an important adjunctive role in protective immunity against this devastating disease.1 Populations in European countries with lower death rates were found to have diets that consisted of fermented vegetables or cabbage.2,3 Presented in Fig. 1 are the current death rates per million people of various western and eastern European countries that show lower rates in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, the Baltic states, and Finland, countries with populations that have a common feature of eating large quantities of fermented foods in contrast to Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, with populations whose diets contain lower quantities of fermented foods and with higher mortality rates.1