The main way humans achieve healthy levels of vitamin D is not through diet but through sun exposure. (Eliseo Fernandez/Reuters)
Posted on 05/01/2007 10:46:22 PM PDT by neverdem
For decades, researchers have puzzled over why rich northern countries have cancer rates many times higher than those in developing countries — and many have laid the blame on dangerous pollutants spewed out by industry.
But research into vitamin D is suggesting both a plausible answer to this medical puzzle and a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren't caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations.
Those trying to brand contaminants as the key factor behind cancer in the West are "looking for a bogeyman that doesn't exist," argues Reinhold Vieth, professor at the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto and one of the world's top vitamin D experts. Instead, he says, the critical factor "is more likely a lack of vitamin D."
What's more, researchers are linking low vitamin D status to a host of other serious ailments, including multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes, influenza, osteoporosis and bone fractures among the elderly.
The main way humans achieve healthy levels of vitamin D is not through diet but through sun exposure. (Eliseo Fernandez/Reuters)
Not everyone is willing to jump on the vitamin D bandwagon just yet. Smoking and some pollutants, such as benzene and asbestos, irrefutably cause many cancers.
But perhaps the biggest bombshell about vitamin D's effects is about to go off. In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the sunshine vitamin. Their results are nothing short of astounding.
A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.
And in an era of pricey medical advances, the reduction seems even more remarkable because it was achieved with an over-the-counter supplement costing pennies a day.
One of the researchers who made the discovery, professor of medicine Robert Heaney of Creighton University in Nebraska, says vitamin D deficiency is showing up in so many illnesses besides cancer that nearly all disease figures in Canada and the U.S. will need to be re-evaluated. "We don't really know what the status of chronic disease is in the North American population," he said, "until we normalize vitamin D status."
Sunshine vitamin
For decades, vitamin D has been the Rodney Dangerfield of the supplement world. It's the vitamin most Canadians never give a second thought to because it was assumed the only thing it did was prevent childhood rickets, a debilitating bone disease. But the days of no respect could be numbered. If vitamin D deficiency becomes accepted as the major cause of cancer and other serious illnesses, it will ignite the medical equivalent of a five-alarm blaze on the Canadian health front.
For many reasons, Canadians are among the people most at risk of not having enough vitamin D. This is due to a quirk of geography, to modern lifestyles and to the country's health authorities, who have unwittingly, if with the best of intentions, played a role in creating the vitamin deficiency.
Authorities are implicated because the main way humans achieve healthy levels of vitamin D isn't through diet but through sun exposure. People make vitamin D whenever naked skin is exposed to bright sunshine. By an unfortunate coincidence, the strong sunshine able to produce vitamin D is the same ultraviolet B light that can also causes sunburns and, eventually, skin cancer.
Only brief full-body exposures to bright summer sunshine — of 10 or 15 minutes a day — are needed to make high amounts of the vitamin. But most authorities, including Health Canada, have urged a total avoidance of strong sunlight or, alternatively, heavy use of sunscreen. Both recommendations will block almost all vitamin D synthesis.
Those studying the vitamin say the hide-from-sunlight advice has amounted to the health equivalent of a foolish poker trade. Anyone practising sun avoidance has traded the benefit of a reduced risk of skin cancer — which is easy to detect and treat and seldom fatal — for an increased risk of the scary, high-body-count cancers, such as breast, prostate and colon, that appear linked to vitamin D shortages.
The sun advice has been misguided information "of just breathtaking proportions," said John Cannell, head of the Vitamin D Council, a non-profit, California-based organization.
"Fifteen hundred Americans die every year from [skin cancers]. Fifteen hundred Americans die every day from the serious cancers."
Health Canada denies its advice might be dangerous. In an e-mailed statement, it said that most people don't apply sunscreen thoroughly, leaving some skin exposed, and that people spend enough time outside without skin protection to make adequate amounts of vitamin D.
However, the Canadian Cancer Society last year quietly tweaked its recommendation to recognize that limited amounts of sun exposure are essential for vitamin D levels.
Avoiding most bright sunlight wouldn't be so serious if it weren't for a second factor: The main determinant of whether sunshine is strong enough to make vitamin D is latitude. Living in the north is bad, the south is better, and near the equator is best of all.
Canadians have drawn the short straw on the world's latitude lottery: From October to March, sunlight is too feeble for vitamin D production. During this time, our bodies draw down stores built by summer sunshine, and whatever is acquired from supplements or diet.
Government regulations require foods such as milk and margarine to have small amounts of added vitamin D to prevent rickets.
Other foods, such as salmon, naturally contain some, as does the cod liver oil once commonly given to children in the days before milk fortification. But the amounts from food are minuscule compared to what is needed for cancer prevention and what humans naturally can make in their skin.
Vitamin D levels in Canada are also being compromised by a lifestyle change. Unlike previous generations that farmed or otherwise worked outside, most people now spend little time outdoors.
One survey published in 2001 estimated office- and homebound Canadians and Americans spend 93 per cent of waking time in buildings or cars, both of which block ultraviolet light.
Consequently, by mid-winter most Canadians have depleted vitamin D status. "We're all a bit abnormal in terms of our vitamin D," said Dr. Vieth, who has tested scores of Canadians, something done with a simple blood test.
How much is enough?
Just how much vitamin D is required for optimum health is the subject of intense scientific inquiry.
Dr. Vieth has approached the matter by asking: What vitamin D level would humans have if they were still living outside, in the wild, near the equator, with its attendant year-round bright sunshine? "Picture the natural human as a nudist in environments south of Florida," he says.
He estimates humans in a state of nature probably had about 125 to 150 nanomoles/litre of vitamin D in their blood all year long — levels now achieved for only a few months a year by the minority of adult Canadians who spend a lot of time in the sun, such as lifeguards or farmers.
For the rest of the population, vitamin D levels tend to be lower, and crash in winter. In testing office workers in Toronto in winter, Dr. Vieth found the average was only about 40 nanomoles/L, or about one-quarter to one-third of what humans would have in the wild.
The avalanche of surprising research on the beneficial effects of vitamin D could affect dietary recommendations as well. Health Canada says that, in light of the findings, it intends to study whether recommended dietary levels need to be revised, although the review is likely to be years away.
A joint Canadian-U.S. health panel last studied vitamin D levels in 1997, concluding the relatively low amounts in people's blood were normal. At the time, there was speculation vitamin D had an anti-cancer effect, but more conclusive evidence has only emerged since.
"There needs to be a comprehensive review undertaken and that is planned," says Mary Bush, director general of Health Canada's office of nutrition policy and promotion.
But Ms. Bush said the government doesn't want to move hastily, out of concern that there may be unknown risks associated with taking more of the vitamin.
Those who worry about low vitamin D, however, say this stand is too conservative — that the government's caution may itself be a health hazard.
To achieve the vitamin D doses used for cancer prevention through foods, people would need to drink about three litres of milk a day, which is unrealistic.
If health authorities accept the new research, they would have to order a substantial increase in food fortification or supplement-taking to affect disease trends. As it is, the 400 IU dosage included in most multivitamins is too low to be an effective cancer fighter.
Dr. Vieth said any new recommendations will also have to reflect the racial and cultural factors connected to vitamin D. Blacks, South Asians and women who wear veils are at far higher risks of vitamin D deficiencies than are whites.
Although humans carry a lot of cultural baggage on the subject of skin hue, colour is the way nature dealt with the vagaries of high or low vitamin D production by latitude.
Those with very dark skins, whose ancestors originated in tropical, light-rich environments, have pigmentation that filters out more of the sunshine responsible for vitamin D; in northern latitudes, they need more sun exposure — often 10 times as much — to produce the same amount of the vitamin as whites.
Dr. Vieth says it is urgent to provide information about the need for extra vitamin D in Canada's growing non-white population to avoid a future of high illness rates in this group.
Researchers suspect vitamin D plays such a crucial role in diseases as unrelated as cancer and osteoporosis because the chemical originated in the early days of animal evolution as a way for cells to signal that they were being exposed to daylight.
Even though living things have evolved since then, almost all cells, even those deep in our bodies, have kept this primitive light-signalling system.
In the body, vitamin D is converted into a steroid hormone, and genes responding to it play a crucial role in fixing damaged cells and maintaining good cell health. "There is no better anti-cancer agent than activated vitamin D. I mean, it does everything you'd want," said Dr. Cannell of the Vitamin D Council.
Some may view the sunshine-vitamin story as too good to be true, particularly given that the number of previous claims of vitamin cure-alls that subsequently flopped. "The floor of modern medicine is littered with the claims of vitamins that didn't turn out," Dr. Cannell allowed.
But the big difference is that vitamin D, unlike other vitamins, is turned into a hormone, making it far more biologically active. As well, it is "operating independently in hundreds of tissues in your body," Dr. Cannell said.
Referring to Linus Pauling, the famous U.S. advocate of vitamin C use as a cure for many illnesses, he said: "Basically, Linus Pauling was right, but he was off by one letter."
Night-Shift Work and Risk of Colorectal Cancer in the Nurses’ Health Study
Not unlike Gorebull warming.
They ran the news on the ‘sunscreen study’ over and over again when it first came out and were telling people that sunscreen will block your production of vitamin D. The news missed the part about how this was really a concern for wintertime Boston, not Texas.
How about people who live in developing countries generally only live until their 40s and die of something else way before they can get cancer
Thanks very much, mewzilla!
Magnesium tells your bones to absorb the Calcium. It also affects over 300 bodily functions.
Unfortunately, there is no dairy industry behind it promoting its use.
I first learned of the importance of Magnesium from reading "Protein Power Lifestyle" by Dr. Eades. Here is a link to a summary, which goes into importance of several vitamins and minerals.
Protein Power in a Nutshell (see pg. 7)
Here is a quote from “Connective Tissue Disorder Site” It is the only one I could find quickly.
“Magnesium (Mg) is a trace mineral that is known to be required for several hundred different functions in the body. A significant portion of the symptoms of many chronic disorders are identical to symptoms of magnesium deficiency. Studies show many people in the U.S. today do not consume the daily recommended amounts of Mg. A lack of this important nutrient may be a major factor in many common health problems in industrialized countries. Common conditions such as mitral valve prolapse, migraines, attention deficit disorder, fibromyalgia, asthma and allergies have all been linked to a Mg deficiency. Perhaps not coincidentally, these conditions also tend to occur in clusters together within the same individual. A magnesium deficiency as a root cause would provide a logical explanation of why some people suffer from a constellation of these types of problems.”
Unfortunately, I'm located in "the Gret Northwest", where for about half of the year, sunny days are few and far between. Add to that that my work is pretty much all indoors, thus my exposure to sun is limited. I'd rather take a supplement and know that my level is adequate all year round. It seems that a level between 1000 and 2000 IU per day is sufficient. With my nutrient regimen, I currently get 1500 IU/day, so I think I'm OK.
You might as well be taking prednisone, it's chemical structure is very close to that of vitamin D, and it's cheaper and more effective. It's also more dangerous because it is more effective at suppressing the immune system.
If you really want to cure your Lupus and thyroid troubles, go to the Marshall Protocol site. The auto-immune diseases are an infection of the immune system by one (or usually more) pathogens. A long course of low-dose antibiotics is a cure.
The science in the cancer/Vitamin D link is statistical, they don't know what it actually does. We know that cancer needs inflammation to get started, so if you suppress the inflammation a bit you delay the cancer a bit. It would probably work with prednisone too. However, it's far better to get rid of the underlying inflammation.
This works - it cured my sarcoid, and the complications of sarcoid which included diabetes.
If you are a computer science type, you can look up the genomic modelling used by the MP folks to find out exactly what vitamin-D does with the various nuclear receptors in the human cell. It isn't an antibiotic, and it doesn't activate the immune system. Vitamin D,1,25 activates the immune system. The kidneys in a healthy person keep levels of both in tight control. In a person with auto-immune troubles, the pathogens cause the levels to go wild, rapidly converting D,25 to D,1,25, and the high D,1,25 (or D2 and D3 in some texts) causes many of the common autoimmune symptoms.
So, low vitamin-D levels are a cause of the problems, but a leading symptom of the underlying disease.
The science is layed out in a talk linked to by this page.
The science behind the MP is not based on th e statistical correlation==causation paradigm, but on an analytical study of how vitamin-D can interact with the various nuclear cell receptors. The studies also covered how the antibiotics used affect the RNA of the pathogens, and how ARBs (angiotension-receptor-blockers) activate the immune system, and block the effects of D,1,25. We geeks have been waiting for the results of all that computing power used by the genomic modelling software, and here it is. See this page for a short video of one of the study results.
The research you allude to, by Dr. Heaney from Creighton University, should really not be surprising. In 1937, Dr. Sigismund Peller conducted cancer research on Navy personnel who either worked on the decks in the sunlight or worked below deck away from the sun. He found that those who worked in the sunlight had more common skin cancers, but that their rate of the deadly internal cancers such as prostate and colon cancers was reduced by 60% when compared with the “sunless” group. Extrapolating to today’s figures on cancer deaths from the major internal cancers, it can be seen that regular sunlight exposure and its corollary, vitamin D, might save over 300,000 lives per year. Dr. Heaney’s soon-to-be-published research will corroborate Peller’s findings from yesteryear.
The most complete and comprehensive book currently available on the health benefits of sunlight and vitamin D is SOLAR POWER FOR OPTIMAL HEALTH, by Dr. Marc Sorenson.
Dr. John Cannell (whom your article quotes) and Sorenson are currently writing a book that documents the beneficial effects of sunlight and vitamin D on athletic performance. The health advantages of maintaining an optimal level of this potent substance—not really a vitamin—are amazing.
I was warning about over-exposure to the sun in the attempt to get vitamins.
Too much sun causes skin cancer. No one wants that.
Which has artificial vitamin D.
I’ll ask my doctor about it. I’m getting Zoledronic Acid treatments & the calcium level in my blood is getting monitored.
I think the "skin cancer/sun exposure" issue is WAY, WAY overblown. I grew up in South Louisiana, and toasted myself pretty much "whole-skin" every summer, with quite a few "lobster-days" thrown in. I'm pretty "fair-complexioned" too. I'm pushing sixty now, and I've had a few spots frozen off various spots on my face, but other than that, I'm "doing good".
I suspect that the gist of the thread is correct---in trying to "do good" on the skin cancer front, doctors have inadvertently done great harm on the "other cancer" front by over-selling the warning.
bump for later
Some of the information I’ve read poses the question “Do you want calcium in your blood, or in your bones?”
If your body doesn’t have the rest of the nutrients to process the calcium, it will sit in your blood instead of being deposited in your bones.
I highly recommend the Protein Power books, just for their medical information on these types of subjects. The doctors have over 20 years experience. See if you can check them out of the library, or Amazon.com occasionally has used books for very cheap.
The affect of the Zometa is to keep my bones from releasing their Ca into my blood. I’m already dealing with a known chemical action, so it’s not a good idea to add a new affect without consulting my onocologist. I was supposed to be supplementing D as well as the Ca, but I screwed up when I bought my last supply of pills.
http://www.insinc.com/onlinetv/directms13oct2005/softvnetplayer.htm
It’s when the sun’s rays are the strongest.
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