I have scanned through many articles this week on Vitamin D. The following all-inclusive article is among the very best I found: http://blogs.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2002/02/23/vitamin-d-deficiency-part-one.aspx.

For your own health, please read the entire 7 page article. Here are some snipits to give you a flavor of the significance of the article:

1)      Before considering supplementation with vitamin D, it would be wise to have your vitamin D level tested.

2)      Don’t Be Fooled — Order the Correct Test. There are two vitamin D tests — 1,25(OH)D and 25(OH)D. 25(OH)D is the better marker of overall D status. It is this marker that is most strongly associated with overall health. The correct test is 25(OH)D, also called 25-hydroxyvitamin D.

3)      Recommended ranges:

OPTIMAL 25-Hydroxyvitamin D Values 50-70 ng/ml or 115-128 nmol/l	NORMAL 25-Hydroxyvitamin D lab Values 20-56 ng/ml 50-140 nmol/l
Your vitamin D level should NEVER be below 32 ng/ml. Any levels below 20 ng/ml are considered serious defiency states and will increase your risk of breast and prostate cancer and autoimmune diseases like MS and rheumatoid arthritis.

4)      Make Sure Your Lab Uses the Correct Assay. There are a number of different companies that have FDA approval to perform vitamin D testing, but the gold standard is DiaSorin. It’s imperative that you find out if your lab has performed the appropriate recalibrations against DiaSorin’s assays. Otherwise your vitamin D levels may be vastly overstated, in some cases by as much as 40 percent, meaning you may get the green light that your levels are fine, when in fact you are deficient, or perhaps even dangerously low.

5)      Vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin and can be quite toxic. Once you have vitamin D toxicity you can’t easily turn it around. While vitamin D has enormous potential for improving your health, it has significant potential to worsen it, if you use it improperly.

6)      Overdosing on vitamin D from sun exposure however, is highly unlikely as your body has a built-in “failsafe” feedback loop, which will tend to shut down production when your levels are healthy.

7)      Sunlight Is Your Ideal Source of Vitamin D. Vitamin D from sunlight acts as a pro-hormone, rapidly converting into 25-hydroxyvitamin D, or vitamin D3.

8)      Window glass allows only 5 percent of the UV-B light range that produces vitamin D to get through your home or car. Sunblock can block UV-B penetration drastically or entirely.

9)      An equilibrium occurs in white skin within 20 min of ultraviolet exposure, at which point further increases in vitamin D is not possible, because the ultraviolet light will actually start to degrade the vitamin D.

10)   It can take 3-6 times longer for darker pigmented skin to reach the equilibrium concentration of skin pre vitamin D.

11)   Major Caution: Avoid Sunburn. It is important to stress that you should never get burned and should only implement sun exposure very gradually. While we all benefit from regular exposure to the sun, it is important to recognize that you should always limit your exposure so that you avoid getting burnt. Sunburn has been clearly related to an increased risk of skin cancer.

12)   Interestingly, if you avoid getting sunburned yet have regular sun exposure, you will have a decreased risk of the dangerous form of skin cancer, melanoma. Optimizing your sun exposure in this way also reduces your risk of 16 other common cancers!

13)   It is important to know that if you have sub-tropical or summer sun exposure on your skin it will be wise to avoid any oral vitamin D supplementation unless you regularly monitor your vitamin D blood level.

14)   What to Do in the Winter:  An alternative would be to frequent tanning salons that use safe equipment.

15)   If relocating in the winter or using tanning beds does not appeal to you, then you will want to consider an oral form of vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol). You should stay away from the synthetic D2 as it has been shown to be toxic at the higher dose ranges. 

16)   There are additional reasons why vitamin D2 has a greater potential for harm. First, vitamin D binding protein has a weaker affinity for the vitamin D2 metabolites than vitamin D3. Second, unique, biologically active metabolites are produced in your body from vitamin D2, but there are no analogous metabolites derived from vitamin D3.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 3:47 am and is filed under Hormone Balancing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.