50% of Americans Don’t Have Enough Vitamin D!

In a new article in Endocrine Today, Anthony Norman, MD, distinguished professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at the University of California, Riverside has said that "it is now widely appreciated by vitamin D scientists that 50% of people in North America and Western Europe are vitamin D insufficient. As far as the rest of the world, He went on to say in another interview  that "Elsewhere, it is worse, given that two-thirds of the people are vitamin D-insufficient or deficient. It is clear that merely eating vitamin D-rich foods is not adequate to solve the problem for most adults."

He also stated that "There is the emerging view that the relative daily intake of vitamin D should be increased from the currently recommended 200 IU, 400 IU, 600 IU per day to a significantly higher level of 2000 IU to 4000 IU per day. He further stated "Already, several studies have reported substantial reductions in incidence of breast cancer, colon cancer and type 1 diabetes in association with adequate intake of vitamin D, the positive effect generally occurring within five years of initiation of adequate vitamin D intake."

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Happy Summer! More and More Vitamin D Studies!

The amount of information coming out about vitamin D is exploding! There are currently more than 1000 ongoing studies looking at the benefits of vitamin D listed on clinicaltrials.gov.

From 1995 to 1999 the average number of papers with the term "vitamin D" in the title or abstract was about 700 to 900 annually. In 2009 alone over 2400 papers were published on vitamin D.

Prominent vitamin D researcher Anthony W. Norman M.D., who is a distinguished professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at the University of California, Riverside was quoted as saying "There has literally been an explosion of new data on vitamin D".
In his Endocrine Today blog Michael Kleerekpoer, MD, estimated that there are over 30,000 blood tests drawn for vitamin D done by laboratories every month in America.

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Where do You Buy Your Vitamin D?

http://www.drsoram.com/vitamind.mp3

I have been saying it for a long time but now a study has proven it. A lot of the Vitamin D at the health food store has the potency that is on the label and lot of it does not! All the labels are pretty and I personally would have no way to decide which brand to buy at the store.

Now an amazing study has proven this. Dr C. Eckstein and colleagues have published an article entitled "Vitamin D content in commercially available oral supplements" that was done at the Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers.

They bought 10 different brands  of  vitamin D  at the health food store and online and measured their actual potency and of course compared it to what it was labeled.

The findings are astonishing.

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Why Governments Do not Increase their Recommendation for Vitamin D

A very interesting article appeared recently in the Financial Times.

The article interviewed Proffesor Reinhold Vieth, a prominent professor at the University of Toronto and one of the major researchers who publishes articles on Vitamin D. In this article, Dr Vieth discussed his frustration that governments are not recommending a higher dose of vitamin D for all their citizens.

This article clearly discusses the three main reasons that higher dose vitamin D is not being recommended by governments..

1) The research that exists is primarily as I have pointed out epidemiological and not the classical double-blind crossover placebo type of study that is required to get the majority of medical organizations to recognize its importance.

2) Lack of money. Most new scientific discoveries are funded by drug company money. No drug company will fund research on Vitamin D because they cannot take a patent out on this naturally occurring substance. Therefore they will not fund research.

3) Most research is done in the "pharmaceutical drug company model". In this type of study, sick people are given a drug to see if it makes a difference to their health condition over time. In the case of vitamin D, we are looking to prove that taken over many years it will PREVENT disease. It takes a long time and a large group of people to look at healthy people and follow what develops in their lives. This is much more expensive and much more time-consuming, than a 6 to 12 month drug trial.

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Vitamin D again Shown to Protect from Colds and Flus. Are You Getting your Vitamin D This Summer?

Dr James Sabetta and colleagues  from Yale University School of Medicine, have published yet another article showing the benefit of vitamin D in protecting against colds and other respiratory infections.

This article which just came out followed almost 200 adults and did monthly vitamin D blood levels on all of the patients from September to early January. The patients were followed for the entire study time for developing upper  respiratory infections (common cold or flu).

The findings are completely consistent with what I talk about in my book and here on my blog as well as other articles on Vitamin D and viral infections.

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High Prevalence of Vitamin D Deficiency in Pre-Menopausal Women with Breast Cancer

In my book on vitamin D, I discuss the importance of vitamin D as observed from retrospective and epidemiologic studies in helping to prevent breast cancer and the recurrence of breast cancer.

I also mention in my book that as of the date of publication and even to this date I have not seen one breast cancer patient come to my office for immune support as an adjunct to their traditional breast cancer therapy who have had a vitamin D blood level measured by their oncologists.

Now a recently published study by KD Crew and colleagues looked at the frequency of vitamin D deficiency in premenopausal women who were diagnosed with breast cancer and undergoing adjuvant chemotherapy. Adjuvant therapy means therapy that is in addition to the primary chemotherapy that a woman would receive after a diagnosis of breast cancer.
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Give Your Newborn Vitamin D 400IU

A recent article that one of my readers brought to my attention looked at vitamin D levels in infants who were fully breast-fed and who took oral vitamin D supplements.

Other studies have shown that nursing mothers do not give their infants sufficient vitamin D. I've written about that as well previously.

In this nice article by my colleague Bruce Hollis and associates, the authors looked at vitamin D levels in newborn infants. At the beginning of the study the average infant at one month of age had  vitamin D blood level of 16 ng/mL. This is obviously low as less than 15 would be equivalent to rickets in the child.
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Childhood Asthma is Worse with Low Vitamin D Levels

Another article showing the relationship of childhood asthma and vitamin D levels in children has just been published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

In this article, Daniel Searing, Donald Y M Leung,  and colleagues at the national Jewish Hospital in Denver looked at the relationship between vitamin D insufficiency and childhood asthma and specifically the relationship with the use of corticosteroids.

They evaluated 100 asthmatic children for vitamin D levels and their degree of asthma.

There was a significant positive correlation between the vitamin D blood level in the children and their FEV levels. FEV stands for forced expiratory volume and is a measure of how quickly and how forcefully, a child can blow out air from his or her lungs. With asthma, a child has difficulty in blowing air out quickly.
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Vitamin D Protects Children from Influenza A

I am delighted to see a new article in the May issue of the prestigious American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which confirms advice I had been giving my patients last fall in the flu season.

In this amazing article by Hiroynik Ida and others, from December 2008 through March 2009 they researchers conducted a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial of vitamin D3 supplements in schoolchildren. In one group of children they gave the children 1200 IU of vitamin D3 every day and the other group of children received placebos.

They then specifically looked for influenza A infections in the two groups of children. The H1NI flu of this past winter is an Influenza A virus. In children who were sick they specifically diagnosed influenza A with nose swab cultures, the classical way of diagnosing these infections.

The findings were that the children who were given the vitamin D3 had a 42% reduction in the frequency of influenza A infections. This is obviously a major reduction.

Another significant finding, which I have spoken about in my book and in this blog, was that in children who had a previous diagnosis of asthma, asthma attacks were reduced by 83% in the group of children taking the vitamin D3.

I am delighted to see these type of  studies coming out, confirming what I have discussed in my book and what I have been telling my patients in my practice.

The wonderful thing about this study is that it was not an associational study. Rather they used the gold standard-double-blind crossover placebo-controlled type of trial. This is the only type of research that many conventional physicians will accept as valid. Most previous studies on the effect of vitamin D in relation to influenza were associational only.

All children over the age of 1 in our country, until their early teens, should be on at least 1000 IU of vitamin D3 every day. With blood tests even higher levels can be taken to optimize the children's health.

Please help me spread the word about this to your friends and family.

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Vitamin D Helps Protect against Colon Cancer

Colorectal cancer is the third most common type of cancer in men and women in the United States according to data from the American Cancer Society.

A recent study published in the British Medical Journal looked at the association between people's vitamin D blood levels, their dietary intake of vitamin D and calcium, and their risk of colorectal cancer in European populations. 520,000 people from 10 Western European countries participated in this study. This is an enormous number! The people who were in the study gave blood samples and completed dietary and lifestyle questionnaires between the years 1992 and 1998.

The findings confirm what other studies, which I talk about in my book have shown us. Lower levels of vitamin D in the blood were associated with a higher risk for colorectal cancer. Higher concentrations of vitamin D in the blood were associated with a lower risk for this cancer. Specifically, people who had the highest blood levels of vitamin D in this study, had a 40% lower risk of colorectal cancer than those in the lowest levels of vitamin D in the blood.

In my opinion, this is just one more reason, further confirmed why everybody should take a basic dose of vitamin D, and should try to optimize their levels of vitamin D if they are able to get blood tests.

For people who do not have a blood test, and who are otherwise healthy adults I recommend 2000 IU of vitamin D daily.

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