Cabbage and fermented vegetables : From death rate heterogeneity in countries to candidates for mitigation strategies of severe COVID-19

Large differences in COVID-19 death rates exist between countries and between regions of the same country. Some very low death rate countries such as Eastern Asia, Central Europe, or the Balkans have a common feature of eating large quantities of fermented foods. Although biases exist when examining ecological studies, fermented vegetables or cabbage have been associated with low death rates in European countries. SARS-CoV-2 binds to its receptor, the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). As a result of SARS-CoV-2 binding, ACE2 downregulation enhances the angiotensin II receptor type 1 (AT(1)R) axis associated with oxidative stress. This leads to insulin resistance as well as lung and endothelial damage, two severe outcomes of COVID-19. The nuclear factor (erythroid-derived 2)-like 2 (Nrf2) is the most potent antioxidant in humans and can block in particular the AT(1)R axis. Cabbage contains precursors of sulforaphane, the most active natural activator of Nrf2. Fermented vegetables contain many lactobacilli, which are also potent Nrf2 activators. Three examples are: kimchi in Korea, westernized foods, and the slum paradox. It is proposed that fermented cabbage is a proof-of-concept of dietary manipulations that may enhance Nrf2-associated antioxidant effects, helpful in mitigating COVID-19 severity.Peer reviewe

Nrf2-interacting nutrients and COVID-19 : time for research to develop adaptation strategies

There are large between- and within-country variations in COVID-19 death rates. Some very low death rate settings such as Eastern Asia, Central Europe, the Balkans and Africa have a common feature of eating large quantities of fermented foods whose intake is associated with the activation of the Nrf2 (Nuclear factor (erythroid-derived 2)-like 2) anti-oxidant transcription factor. There are many Nrf2-interacting nutrients (berberine, curcumin, epigallocatechin gallate, genistein, quercetin, resveratrol, sulforaphane) that all act similarly to reduce insulin resistance, endothelial damage, lung injury and cytokine storm. They also act on the same mechanisms (mTOR: Mammalian target of rapamycin, PPAR gamma:Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor, NF kappa B: Nuclear factor kappa B, ERK: Extracellular signal-regulated kinases and eIF2 alpha:Elongation initiation factor 2 alpha). They may as a result be important in mitigating the severity of COVID-19, acting through the endoplasmic reticulum stress or ACE-Angiotensin-II-AT(1)R axis (AT(1)R) pathway. Many Nrf2-interacting nutrients are also interacting with TRPA1 and/or TRPV1. Interestingly, geographical areas with very low COVID-19 mortality are those with the lowest prevalence of obesity (Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia). It is tempting to propose that Nrf2-interacting foods and nutrients can re-balance insulin resistance and have a significant effect on COVID-19 severity. It is therefore possible that the intake of these foods may restore an optimal natural balance for the Nrf2 pathway and may be of interest in the mitigation of COVID-19 severity

Automatic Construction of a Hypernym-Labeled Noun Hierarchy From Text

Previous work has shown that automatic methods can be used in building semantic lexicons. This work goes a step further by automatically creating not just clusters of related words, but a hierarchy of nouns and their hypernyms, akin to the hand-built hierarchy in WordNet. 1 Introduction The purpose of this work is to build something like the hypernym-labeled noun hierarchy of WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998) automatically from text using no other lexical resources. WordNet has been an important research tool, but it is insufficient for domainspecific text, such as that encountered in the MUCs (Message Understanding Conferences) . Our work develops a labeled hierarchy based on a text corpus. In this project, nouns are clustered into a hierarchy using data on conjunctions and appositives appearing in the Wall Street Journal. The internal nodes of the resulting tree are then labeled with hypernyms for the nouns clustered underneath them, also based on data extracted from the Wall Street Journa..

Determining the Specificity of Nouns From Text

In this work, we use a large text corpus to order nouns by their level of specificity. This semantic information can for most nouns be determined with over 80% accuracy using simple statistics from a text corpus without using any additional sources of semantic knowledge. This kind of semantic information can be used to help in automatically constructing or augmenting a lexical database such as WordNet

Figures of Merit for Best-First Probabilistic Chart Parsing

Best-first parsing methods for natural language try to parse efficiently by considering the most likely constituents first. Some figure of merit is needed by which to compare the likelihood of constituents, and the choice of this figure has a substantial impact on the efficiency of the parser. While several parsers described in the literature have used such techniques, there is no published data on their efficacy, much less attempts to judge their relative merits. We propose and evaluate several figures of merit for best-first parsing