I have been intrigued by the headline I have been seeing these past couple of weeks in the www.mercola.com newsletter: “What You Don’t Know about Vitamin D Can Hurt You…
Although vitamin D is essential to promote your healthy immune system, heart, and many other body organs and systems, too much or too little can have serious unintended health consequences…”
I made a mental note to poke around in this topic a little bit when I got the time. Today I decided to take the time….
First a little review about why Vitamin D is important – and why there is such a flurry of info surrounding it today.
The Role of Vitamin D in Your Body
The following information is provided by Dr. Mercola:
“There are only 30,000 genes in your body and vitamin D has been shown to influence over 2,000 of them. That is one of the primary reasons it influences so many diseases, from cancer and autism to heart disease and rheumatoid arthritis.
A study by Dr. William Grant, Ph.D., internationally recognized research scientist and vitamin D expert, found that about 30 percent of cancer deaths — which amounts to 2 million worldwide and 200,000 in the United States — could be prevented each year with higher levels of vitamin D.
Vitamin D has a protective effect against cancer in several ways, including:
• Increasing the self-destruction of mutated cells (which, if allowed to replicate, could lead to cancer)
• Reducing the spread and reproduction of cancer cells
• Causing cells to become differentiated (cancer cells often lack differentiation)
• Reducing the growth of new blood vessels from pre-existing ones, which is a step in the transition of dormant tumors turning cancerous
Beyond cancer, the researchers pointed out that increasing levels of vitamin D3 could prevent diseases that claim nearly 1 million lives throughout the world each year! And other studies showed that you can decrease your risk of cancer by MORE THAN HALF simply by optimizing your vitamin D levels with sun exposure.
Vitamin D even fights colds and the flu, as it regulates the expression of genes that influence your immune system to attack and destroy bacteria and viruses. In fact, it is very rare for someone with optimized vitamin D levels to come down with the flu.”
The problem is your body doesn’t produce vitamin D on its own. You need exposure to ultraviolet rays to stimulate the production of vitamin D in your body.
Despite all the Vitamin D supplements that are available on the market, the literature is pretty consistent that the sun is the best source of Vitamin D. Dr. Mercola explains: “Exposure to sunlight supplies us the majority of our vitamin D our bodies require. Darkly pigmented skinned people are the exception because they require 10 to 15 times exposure to the sun to get the same effect as lighter skinned people.”
When the sun is not accessible, Dr. Mercola promotes the use of a tanning bed system that provides the same beneficial UVA and UVB rays that you’d get from the sun, but with the potentially harmful emissions eliminated. Visit his web site to see the tanning bed that he recommends and sells.
The least desirable way to obtain Vitamin D is via supplements. Tomorrow’s article will focus on the problems associated with Vitamin D supplementation.
