Posted on 11/13/2009 3:00:50 PM PST by STARWISE
I can tell you it saved my 92 yr old Mom from death's doorstep a year ago. I had already seen how it helped me. I would regularly get at least one or two severe bronchial infections in the winter. Since I've been taking it the last two years, I've had none.
I provided the research to the nursing home doc and nearly begged him to get her on it daily. She's been on Vit. D3 daily since then.
Mentally, physically . . she's improved in every way, her spirits are great, and God love her, she's hanging in there .. even though she's in a wheelchair due to disabling arthritis, has severely distorted vision from macular degeneration, and has a pacemaker.
The benefits of it for cardiac issues, MS, cancer and SO many illnesses are becoming more stunning every day.
Last week, docs in the UK have began giving their breast cancer patients the vitamin, because it's shown so much promise.
Now with all this sickness and swine flu around, I take between 6-10 IU a day to keep my immune system strong .. especially with the gloomy winter days upon us for months and little sunlight on my skin to create it naturally.
Needless to say: I'M A TRUE BELIEVER!
Starwise,
I was tested in an executive physical program
and told by the doctor that I am the only person
he has ever tested in his career that has adequate
D3 levels. I supplement 5,000 IU/day.
rock on,
ampu
Technically not a “vitamin,” vitamin D is in a class by itself. Its metabolic product, calcitriol, is actually a secosteroid hormone that targets over 2000 genes (about 10% of the human genome) in the human body.
Current research has implicated vitamin D deficiency as a major factor in the pathology of at least 17 varieties of cancer as well as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, and more.
Vitamin D’s influence on key biological functions vital to one’s health and well-being mandates that vitamin D no longer be ignored by the health care industry nor by individuals striving to achieve and maintain a greater state of health.
Sunshine and Your Health
If well adults and adolescents regularly avoid sunlight exposure, research indicates a necessity to supplement with at least 5,000 units (IU) of vitamin D daily. To obtain this amount from milk one would need to consume 50 glasses. With a multivitamin more than 10 tablets would be necessary. Neither is advisable.
The skin produces approximately 10,000 IU vitamin D in response 20–30 minutes summer sun exposure—50 times more than the US government’s recommendation of 200 IU per day!
How To Get Enough Vitamin D
There are 3 ways for adults to insure adequate levels of vitamin D:
* regularly receive midday sun exposure in the late spring, summer, and early fall, exposing as much of the skin as possible.
* regularly use a sun bed (avoiding sunburn) during the colder months.
* take 5,000 IU per day for three months, then obtain a 25-hydroxyvitamin D test. Adjust your dosage so that blood levels are between 50–80 ng/mL (or 125–200 nM/L) year-round.
~~~
Noteworthy News
H1N1 Swine Flu and Vitamin D
Dr. Cannell receives crucial emails from two physicians who have evidence vitamin D is protective against H1N1 Swine Flu.
Read the emails in our September 2009 “Special Report” edition of our Vitamin D Newsletter: Vitamin D and H1N1 Swine Flu.
Learn about the profound effects vitamin D has on the immune system and why it could potentially be a potent ally this coming swine flu season!
Read the May 2009 H1N1 Flu and Vitamin D edition of our Vitamin D Newsletter (subscription form at top of page).
Watch this video of an interview with Vitamin D Council Executive Director Dr. John Cannell,
http://blogs.healthfreedomalliance.org/blog/2009/07/30/dr-john-cannell-on-vitamin-d/
where he explains vitamin D’s effect on innate and adaptive immunity and what that means in relation to viral infections, such as the flu or the common cold
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vitamin D News
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/news.shtml
________________________________________________________
Benefits of vitamin D for cancer prevention
Excerpt:
A new study looking at the relationship between vitamin D serum levels and the risk of colon and breast cancer across the globe has estimated the number of cases of cancer that could be prevented each year if vitamin D3 levels met the target proposed by researchers.
Cedric F. Garland, Dr.P.H., cancer prevention specialist at the Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and colleagues estimate that 250,000 cases of colorectal cancer and 350,000 cases of breast cancer could be prevented worldwide by increasing intake of vitamin D3, particularly in countries north of the equator. Vitamin D3 is available through diet, supplements and exposure of the skin to sunlight.
“For the first time, we are saying that 600,000 cases of breast and colorectal cancer could be prevented each year worldwide, including nearly 150,000 in the United States alone,” said study co-author Garland. The paper, which looks at the dose-response relationship between vitamin D and cancer, will be published in the August edition of the journal Nutrition Reviews.
The study combined data from surveys of serum vitamin D levels during winter from 15 countries. It is the first such study to look at satellite measurements of sunshine and cloud cover in countries where actual blood serum levels of vitamin D3 had also been determined.
The data were then applied to 177 countries to estimate the average serum level of a vitamin D metabolite of people living there.
*snip*
The message is, depending on where you live, you may need to consider taking in considerably higher levels of vitamin D3 than those currently recommended,” said Garland. “I’d recommend discussing vitamin D needs with a health care professional, who may order and interpret a simple blood test for a vitamin D metabolite [25(OH)D], and provide a dosage recommendation that’s appropriate for the individual’s needs.”
http://www.news-medical.net/news/2007/08/22/28977.aspx
Rock on, for sure! Are you in a sunny climate
and outside a lot ?
I have two friends now who’ve had to go on
50K IU a week to fix their deficiencies.
Get your vitamin D3 levels measured.
Optimum blood levels are between 50-99 ng/mL.
ampu
Snips: Canada appears to be one of the first countries to literally “see the light.”
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has confirmed that it will be investigating the role of vitamin D in protection against swine flu.
The agency started a study last year on the role of vitamin D in severe seasonal influenza, which it said it will now adapt to the H1N1 swine flu virus.
Dr. John Cannell, founder of the Vitamin D Council, first introduced the hypothesis that influenza is merely a symptom of vitamin D deficiency in the paper Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D, published in the journal Epidemiology and Infection two years ago, followed up with another study published in the Virology Journal last year.
The findings were confirmed by a new study -- the largest and most nationally representative of its kind to date -- that involved about 19,000 Americans. It found that people with the lowest blood vitamin D levels reported having significantly more recent colds or cases of the flu.
Epidemic Influenza And Vitamin D
In early April of 2005, after a particularly rainy spring, an influenza epidemic (epi: upon, demic: people) exploded through the maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane where I have worked for the last ten years. It was not the pandemic (pan: all, demic: people) we all fear, just an epidemic. The world is waiting and governments are preparing for the next pandemic. A severe influenza pandemic will kill many more Americans than died in the World Trade Centers, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina combined, perhaps a million people in the USA alone. Such a disaster would tear the fabric of American society. Our entire country might resemble the Superdome or Bourbon Street after Hurricane Katrina.
It’s only a question of when a pandemic will come, not if it will come. Influenza A pandemics come every 30 years or so, severe ones every hundred years or so. The last pandemic, the Hong Kong flu, occurred in 1968 - killing 34,000 Americans. In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic killed more than 500,000 Americans. So many millions died in other countries, they couldn’t bury the bodies. Young healthy adults, in the prime of their lives in the morning, drowning in their own inflammation by noon, grossly discolored by sunset, were dead at midnight. Their body’s own broad-spectrum natural antibiotics, called antimicrobial peptides, seemed nowhere to be found. An overwhelming immune response to the influenza virus - white blood cells releasing large amounts of inflammatory agents called cytokines and chemokines into the lungs of the doomed - resulted in millions of deaths in 1918.
As I am now a psychiatrist, and no longer a general practitioner, I was not directly involved in fighting the influenza epidemic in our hospital. However, our internal medicine specialists worked overtime as they diagnosed and treated a rapidly increasing number of stricken patients. Our Chief Medical Officer quarantined one ward after another as more and more patients were gripped with the chills, fever, cough, and severe body aches that typifies the clinical presentation of influenza A.(continued at link)
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/51913.php
Bump to V D3.
I actually had a blood test a few years back that detected that I was at 11 when normal is like 20+ or some such 20 number.
Both of us take it and I have also read around here at FR that V D3 acts as the piggy back to other nutrients that need to be absorbed into the body.
And as KVs careprovider I was hands but to do it long enough (I am always like a kid in a hurry) instead of as the Govt suggested singing Happy Birthday for duration time I pray One Prayer for each wash as in Praying the Rosary.
Have got it up to two Prayers per wash in some intances when at the basin.
Star,
I am in the NE USA - not a lot of sun exposure in winter.
In regards to safety, you could take 100,000 for weeks with
not side effects.
For lurkers... make sure you take the D3 form.
Vitamin D bump!
I thought optimal was in the 20 something range.
My results are in the file, not going to go hunt them up per time issue.
My levels were 11. something obviously not good.
As I already posted KV and I both take V D3 and doc just bumped me up to 2000 as winter sets in.
PNW not enough sun is per usual.
Visit the tanning bed for 5 minutes a few times a week during the dark months. Never gonna get tan, but it is relaxing and ups the Vit. D.
BTTT
Vit D3, for sure. I wonder how your levels
were so acceptable ... however it is, good
for you. It’s incredible.
Excellent advice, Starwise.
Both of our DIL’s are R.N.’s and are NOT getting the H1N1 vaccination and highly reccomend vitamin D3.
We’ve been taking it for several months ourselves.
That was the article that totally swung me
into taking it and firmly recommending for
my Mom in a nursing home, where any sickness
can spread thru the group quickly.
THANK YOU FOR POSTING!!
Thanks for the ping, MamaDearest.
Can one buy Vit. D made anywhere but in China?
Thanks for the info, Joan.
I will check out the tanning beds. Pills and I don’t get along after a while. I start having strange reactions.
Excerpt:
*snip*
I guess our hospital was under luckier stars as only about 12% of our patients were infected and no one died. However, as the epidemic progressed, I noticed something unusual.
First, the ward below mine was infected, and then the ward on my right, left, and across the hall - but no patients on my ward became ill. My patients had intermingled with patients from infected wards before the quarantines.
The nurses on my unit cross-covered on infected wards. Surely, my patients were exposed to the influenza A virus. How did my patients escape infection from what some think is the most infectious of all the respiratory viruses?
My patients were no younger, no healthier, and in no obvious way different from patients on other wards. Like other wards, my patients are mostly African Americans who came from the same prisons and jails as patients on the infected wards.
They were prescribed a similar assortment of powerful psychotropic medications we use throughout the hospital to reduce the symptoms of psychosis, depression, and violent mood swings and to try to prevent patients from killing themselves or attacking other patients and the nursing staff.
If my patients were similar to the patients on all the adjoining wards, why didn’t even one of my patients catch the flu?
A short while later, a group of scientists from UCLA published a remarkable paper in the prestigious journal, Nature. The UCLA group confirmed two other recent studies, showing that a naturally occurring steroid hormone - a hormone most of us take for granted - was, in effect, a potent antibiotic.
Instead of directly killing bacteria and viruses, the steroid hormone under question increases the body’s production of a remarkable class of proteins, called antimicrobial peptides.
The 200 known antimicrobial peptides directly and rapidly destroy the cell walls of bacteria, fungi, and viruses, including the influenza virus, and play a key role in keeping the lungs free of infection. The steroid hormone that showed these remarkable antibiotic properties was plain old vitamin D.
All of the patients on my ward had been taking 2,000 units of vitamin D every day for several months or longer. Could that be the reason none of my patients caught the flu?
I then contacted Professors Reinhold Vieth and Ed Giovannucci and told them of my observations. They immediately advised me to collect data from all the patients in the hospital on 2,000 units of vitamin D, not just the ones on my ward, to see if the results were statistically significant.
It turns out that the observations on my ward alone were of borderline statistical significance and could have been due to chance alone. Administrators at our hospital agreed, and are still attempting to collect data from all the patients in the hospital on 2,000 or more units of vitamin D at the time of the epidemic.
Four years ago, I became convinced that vitamin D was unique in the vitamin world by virtue of three facts.
First, it’s the only known precursor of a potent steroid hormone, calcitriol, or activated vitamin D. Most other vitamins are antioxidants or co-factors in enzyme reactions.
Activated vitamin D - like all steroid hormones - damasks the genome, turning protein production on and off, as your body requires. That is, vitamin D regulates genetic expression in hundreds of tissues throughout your body. This means it has as many potential mechanisms of action as genes it damasks.
Second, vitamin D does not exist in appreciable quantities in normal human diets. True, you can get several thousand units in a day if you feast on sardines for breakfast, herring for lunch and salmon for dinner. The only people who ever regularly consumed that much fish are peoples, like the Inuit, who live at the extremes of latitude.
The milk Americans depend on for their vitamin D contains no naturally occurring vitamin D; instead, the U.S. government requires fortified milk to be supplemented with vitamin D, but only with what we now know to be a paltry 100 units per eight-ounce glass.
The vitamin D steroid hormone system has always had its origins in the skin, not in the mouth. Until quite recently, when dermatologists and governments began warning us about the dangers of sunlight, humans made enormous quantities of vitamin D where humans have always made it, where naked skin meets the ultraviolet B radiation of sunlight.
We just cannot get adequate amounts of vitamin D from our diet. If we don’t expose ourselves to ultraviolet light, we must get vitamin D from dietary supplements.
The third way vitamin D is different from other vitamins is the dramatic difference between natural vitamin D nutrition and the modern one. Today, most humans only make about a thousand units of vitamin D a day from sun exposure; many people, such as the elderly or African Americans, make much less than that. How much did humans normally make?
A single, twenty-minute, full body exposure to summer sun will trigger the delivery of 20,000 units of vitamin D into the circulation of most people within 48 hours. Twenty thousand units, that’s the single most important fact about vitamin D.
Compare that to the 100 units you get from a glass of milk, or the several hundred daily units the U.S. government recommend as “Adequate Intake.” It’s what we call an “order of magnitude” difference.
Humans evolved naked in sub-equatorial Africa, where the sun shines directly overhead much of the year and where our species must have obtained tens of thousands of units of vitamin D every day, in spite of our skin developing heavy melanin concentrations (racial pigmentation) for protecting the deeper layers of the skin.
Even after humans migrated to temperate latitudes, where our skin rapidly lightened to allow for more rapid vitamin D production, humans worked outdoors. However, in the last three hundred years, we began to work indoors; in the last one hundred years, we began to travel inside cars; in the last several decades, we began to lather on sunblock and consciously avoid sunlight.
All of these things lower vitamin D blood levels. The inescapable conclusion is that vitamin D levels in modern humans are not just low - they are aberrantly low.
About three years ago, after studying all I could about vitamin D, I began testing my patient’s vitamin D blood levels and giving them literature on vitamin D deficiency. All their blood levels were low, which is not surprising as vitamin D deficiency is practically universal among dark-skinned people who live at temperate latitudes.
Furthermore, my patients come directly from prison or jail, where they get little opportunity for sun exposure. After finding out that all my patients had low levels, many profoundly low, I started educating them and offering to prescribe them 2,000 units of vitamin D a day, the U.S. government’s “Upper Limit.”
Could vitamin D be the reason none of my patients got the flu?
In the last several years, dozens of medical studies have called attention to worldwide vitamin D deficiency, especially among African Americans and the elderly, the two groups most likely to die from influenza.
Cancer, heart disease, stroke, autoimmune disease, depression, chronic pain, depression, gum disease, diabetes, hypertension, and a number of other diseases have recently been associated with vitamin D deficiency. Was it possible that influenza was as well?
Then I thought of three mysteries that I first learned in medical school at the University of North Carolina:
(1) although the influenza virus exists in the population year-round, influenza is a wintertime illnesses;
(2) children with vitamin D deficient rickets are much more likely to suffer from respiratory infections;
(3) the elderly in most countries are much more likely to die in the winter than the summer (excess wintertime mortality), and most of that excess mortality, although listed as cardiac, is, in fact, due to influenza.
Could vitamin D explain these three mysteries, mysteries that account for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year?
Studies have found the influenza virus is present in the population year-around; why is it a wintertime illness? Even the common cold got its name because it is common in cold weather and rare in the summer.
Vitamin D blood levels are at their highest in the summer but reach their lowest levels during the flu and cold season. Could such a simple explanation explain these mysteries?
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/51913.php
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