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good article.
thanx From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Darryl or Natalia Sent: Friday, October 13, 2006 6:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Vit.D protection against colds 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
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<!--[endif]-->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. <!--[if
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<!--[endif]-->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.
<!--[if
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<!--[endif]-->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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