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A retired nurse sent us a lengthy article, partially reproduced below,
that I'm certain some of you will find helpful. It advocates more
prolonged exposure to UVB, thereby absorbing higher amounts of Vit.D,
to combat colds and flu, and even cancers. It's almost too easy an argument. As a society we have almost totally reduced our exposure to sunlight because of cars, TV, computers, factory and office jobs, and melanoma scares resulting in cancer-causing sun blocks. S.A.D., flu, colds come on not just once the sun looses strength, but during the rainy seasons in warmer climates. The Inuit who follow traditional diets have avoided colds because of a high intake of fatty fish and ocean mammals in which concentrations of Vit. D are high; oddly, they're also benefiting from high amounts of Vit. C in whale meat, fat or eyes (can't remember which). Any way, see what you think. Natalia And check out this web site: Vit. D council web site http://www.vitamindcouncil.com Info. from the Vitamin D
council: Vitamin
D,
Sunshine, and Your Health
·
If you totally avoid the sun, recent research
indicates you need about 4,000 units of vitamin D a day! Which means
you can't
get enough vitamin D from milk (unless you drink 40 glasses a day) or
from a
multivitamin (unless you take about 10 tablets a day), neither of which
is
recommended. ·
Most of us make about 20,000 units of vitamin D
after about 20 minutes of summer sun. This is about 100 times more
vitamin D
than the government says you need every day. ·
The only way to be sure you have adequate levels of vitamin
D in
your blood is to regularly go into the sun, use a sun bed (avoiding
sunburn),
or have your physician administer a 25-hydroxy
vitamin D
blood test. Optimal levels are around 50 ng/mL
(125 nm/L). >>>>>> 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. 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 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 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? 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? The British
researcher, Dr. R. Edgar
Hope-Simpson, was the first to document the most mysterious feature of
epidemic
influenza, its wintertime surfeit and summertime scarcity. He theorized
that an
unknown "seasonal factor" was at work, a factor that might be
affecting innate human immunity. Hope-Simpson was a general
practitioner who
became famous in the late 1960's after he discovered the cause of
shingles.
British authorities bestowed every prize they had on him, not only
because of
the importance of his discovery, but because he made the discovery own
his own,
without the benefit of a university appointment, and without any formal
training in epidemiology (the detective branch of medicine that
methodically searches
for clues about the cause of disease). After his work
on shingles, Hope-Simpson
spent the rest of his working life studying influenza. He concluded a
"seasonal factor" was at work, something that was regularly and
predictably impairing human immunity in the winter and restoring it in
the
summer. He discovered that communities widely separated by longitude,
but which
shared similar latitude, would simultaneously develop influenza. He
discovered
that influenza epidemics in 18th century
occurred simultaneously in
widely separated communities, before modern transportation could
possibly
explain its rapid dissemination. Hope-Simpson concluded a "seasonal
factor" was triggering these epidemics. Whatever it was, he was certain
that the deadly "crop" of influenza that sprouts around the winter
solstice was intimately involved with solar radiation. Hope-Simpson
predicted
that, once discovered, the "seasonal factor" would "provide the
key to understanding most of the influenza problems confronting us." Hope-Simpson
had no way of knowing that
vitamin D has profound effects on human immunity, no way of knowing
that it
increases production of broad-spectrum antimicrobial peptides, peptides
that
quickly destroy the influenza virus. We have only recently learned how
vitamin
D increases production of antimicrobial peptides while simultaneously
preventing the immune system from releasing too many inflammatory
cells, called
chemokines and cytokines, into infected lung tissue. In 1918, when
medical scientists did
autopsies on some of the fifty million people who died during the 1918
flu
pandemic, they were amazed to find destroyed respiratory tracts;
sometimes
these inflammatory cytokines had triggered the complete destruction of
the normal
epithelial cells lining the respiratory tract. It was as if the flu
victims had
been attacked and killed by their own immune systems. This is the
severe
inflammatory reaction that vitamin D has recently been found to
prevent. In the paper,
we propose that vitamin D
explains the following 14 observations: 1. Why the flu
predictably occurs in the months
following the winter solstice, when vitamin D levels are at their
lowest, 2. Why it
disappears in the months
following the summer solstice, 3. Why
influenza is more common in the
tropics during the rainy season, 4. Why the cold
and rainy weather
associated with El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which drives
people
indoors and lowers vitamin D blood levels, is associated with
influenza, 5. Why the
incidence of influenza is
inversely correlated with outdoor temperatures, 6. Why children
exposed to sunlight are
less likely to get colds, 7. Why cod
liver oil (which contains
vitamin D) reduces the incidence of viral respiratory infections, 8. Why Russian
scientists found that
vitamin D-producing UVB lamps reduced colds and flu in schoolchildren
and
factory workers, 9. Why Russian
scientists found that
volunteers, deliberately infected with a weakened flu virus - first in
the
summer and then again in the winter - show significantly different
clinical
courses in the different seasons, 10. Why the
elderly who live in countries
with high vitamin D consumption, like 11. Why
children with vitamin D deficiency
and rickets suffer from frequent respiratory infections, 12. Why an
observant physician (Rehman),
who gave high doses of vitamin D to children who were constantly sick
from
colds and the flu, found the treated children were suddenly free from
infection, 13. Why the
elderly are so much more likely
to die from heart attacks in the winter rather than in the summer, 14. Why African
Americans, with their low
vitamin D blood levels, are more likely to die from influenza and
pneumonia
than Whites are. Although our
paper discusses the
possibility that physiological doses of vitamin D (5,000 units a day)
may
prevent colds and the flu, and that physicians might find
pharmacological doses
of vitamin D (2,000 units per kilogram of body weight per day for three
days)
useful in treating some of the one million people who die in the world
every
year from influenza, we remind readers that it is only a theory. Like
all
theories, our theory must withstand attempts to be disproved with
dispassionately conducted and well-controlled scientific experiments. However, as
vitamin D deficiency has
repeatedly been associated with many of the diseases of civilization,
we point
out that it is not too early for physicians to aggressively diagnose
and
adequately treat vitamin D deficiency. We recommend that enough vitamin
D be
taken daily to maintain 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels at levels normally
achieved
through summertime sun exposure (50 ng/ml). For many persons, such as
African
Americans and the elderly, this will require up to 5,000 units daily in
the
winter and less, or none, in the summer, depending on summertime sun
exposure. By: J. J.
Cannell Acknowldegement:
We wish to thank Professor
Norman Noah of the -- Dr. John
Cannell, Atascadero State
Hospital, 10333 El Camino Real, Atascadero, CA 93422, USA, 805
468-2061,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<../../../../WAPFchapterleaders/post?postID=k0SobYgZVwEahRcErqYgfCKlT8FY\
Dacdz3QFQV7xKGNDVna8WjIy4mcUcimSkEuH_HNyQLSYmDYoev0Um2NQWK16Fb3y> --
Professor Reinhold Vieth, Mount Sinai Hospital, Pathology and
Laboratory
Medicine, Department of Medicine, Toronto, Ontario, Canada -- Dr. John
Umhau,
Laboratory of Clinical and Translational Studies, National Institute on
Alcohol
Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD --
Professor
Michael Holick, Departments of Medicine and Physiology, Boston
University
School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA -- Dr. Bill Grant, SUNARC, San
Francisco,
CA -- Dr. Sasha Madronich, Atmospheric Chemistry Division, National
Center for
Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA -- Professor Cedric Garland,
Department
of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of California San Diego,
La
Jolla, CA -- Professor Edward Giovannucci, Departments of Nutrition and
Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA http://www.vitamindcouncil.com
<http://www.vitamindcouncil.com/> |
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