New Vitamin D Requirements Condemn Americans To Chronic Illness

December 5, 2010

From Bill Sardi BSardi@...

other websites

The hidden agenda

And we get a hint at modern medicine’s real agenda in solving the

vitamin D-deficiency health crisis – vitamin D-like drugs! Forget

sunshine, it’s bad for you and might cause skin cancer. Forget

vitamin D pills, you might overdose on them. Instead, trust Big

Pharma to bring you patentable man-made analogs of vitamin D, at a cost

no one can possibly afford!

If you think I’m being overcritical, search here to learn more about

vitamin

D drugs in Big Pharma’s R & D pipeline. Glenville PhD,

a panel member on the 14-member committee that determined the new vitamin

D guidelines, and who is quoted to say most people

“

probably don’t have vitamin D deficiency,” is a

scientific advisor for a company developing drugs that mimic vitamin

D.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A Return To The Dark Ages: Nutrition Board Confuses

“Normal” With “Healthy” And Sets New Vitamin D Requirements

To Levels That Condemn Americans To Chronic Illness

By Bill Sardi

On a day that should have been heralded as “D-Day” for vitamin D’s

conquest over chronic disease, it is being called “disease day” by

critics of new vitamin D guidelines issued by health authorities

today.

Confusing the commonly-found range of vitamin D (20-30 nanograms per

milliliter of blood serum) with the healthy range (50-80 ng says

The Vitamin D Council), the

nation’s Food & Nutrition Board (F & NB) ignored experts who have

made strong appeals for higher doses in fortified foods and vitamin

pills.

What the F & NB cannot fathom is how widespread vitamin D-related

illness is. If 97% of Americans have a vitamin D level that falls

within the 20-30 nanogram range as the F & NB says, and most of the

people experience less than optimal health in this range, then this

certainly cannot be assumed to be a normally healthy range.

Dr. Grant of the Sunlight, Nutrition, and Health Research Center

(SUNARC) in San Francisco, suggests hundreds of thousands of Americans

would avert premature death if their blood levels of vitamin D extended

beyond the F & NBs normal range. He calculates an

estimated 400,000

premature deaths per year could be avoided if all Americans raised

their serum vitamin D levels just to the 45 nanogram level.

“This would reduce the mortality rate by 15% and extend life

expectancy by about 2 years.”

Adequate vitamin D food fortification would produce an unprecedented

rise in life expectancy, greater than that achieved by the introduction

of antibiotics. Since mean vitamin D levels in the US are around 26

nanograms, it would take an additional 2000 IU over and above what is

produced by dietary and solar-generated vitamin D to achieve that 45

nanogram level.

Eighty-eight years after its initial discovery, this overlooked vitamin

is still being shunned by modern medicine. Today is a day when the

opportunity to triumph over maladies that have historically plagued

mankind has been lost.

Instead of foods and vitamin pills being fortified with meaningful doses

of this sunshine vitamin, which would have ensured that children, the

infirm, the uneducated and disadvantaged would have obtained adequate

levels of vitamin D, the Food & Nutrition Board chose to take a baby

step when it should have taken a giant leap for mankind. Now, with this

disappointing pronouncement from the Food & Nutrition Board, it’s

every man for himself.

Two years ago I wrote the Food & Nutrition Board a letter which

indicated the current requirements for vitamin D were absurdly low ---

200 international units (IU) as a minimum for young children, which would

not prevent rickets in dark-skinned infants, and 2000 IU as a safe upper

limit, an amount that wouldn’t even raise blood levels.

A day of infamy

November 30, 2010 will go down in infamy in the history of modern

medicine. The It is the day the Food & Nutrition Board elected

to marginally increase vitamin D requirements to 600 IU (that’s just 15

micrograms or 15/1000ths of a milligram) and the upper safe limit to 4000

IU (100 mcg), the point where blood levels only begin to rise.

For comparison, 600 IU is equal to just 4 minutes of mid-day full-body

summer sun exposure. About 30 minutes of sunshine would produce

~4000-5000 IU of natural vitamin D, what the new F & NB guidelines

indicate may be an overdose. Of course, this is ridiculous since

millions of Americans do this at the beach every summer without side

effect. Knowledgeable health authorities have long recommended at

least 30 minutes of

sunshine daily.

Instead of throwing a game winning touchdown against chronic nutritional

deficiency-related disease, the Food & Nutrition Board elected to

kick a field goal and lose the battle against chronic ailments that

burden the nation with mushrooming health care bills. Americans are

big losers in this game while modern medicine drags its feet over

implementation of any true disease prevention plan.

Maybe it was too much to ask of a disease-care system that masquerades as

a healthcare system and addresses most health problems as a drug

deficiency. It is maybe too difficult to fathom that something as

cheap as solar radiation, or its stand-in -- a 10-cent vitamin pill -- is

essential for human health.

In a public health pronouncement that defies the latest published

studies, the Food & Nutrition Board increased vitamin D requirements

by such a marginal amount as to condemn North Americans to certain levels

of preventable chronic illness.

The advantage of modern humans is that, rather than waiting for weather

to improve, sunshine can be acquired from a pill, or fortified in foods,

when wintertime vitamin D levels are typically low and when there is a

dramatic seasonal increase in cancer, heart and infectious disease.

That modern man would shun the availability of vitamin D pills suggests

lunacy or intentional misdirection.

Widespread vitamin deficiency burdens America

A prevalent shortage of vitamin D, which

cannot be corrected

by the best diet, and which is not likely to be prevented in a

population that has been taught to be sun phobic over concerns of skin

cancer, is now linked to

widespread

morbidity and mortality.

There is not a chronic disease -- ranging from heart disease to cancer,

from the flu to tuberculosis, from diabetes to schizophrenia, from

rickets in infants to osteoporosis among older women -- that is not

exaggerated by shortages of vitamin D. Vitamin D deficiency is a

universal factor in all disease states, even for populations living in

sunny areas where natural vitamin D production is expected to be

high.

Savings in healthcare dollars

My guesstimation is that

$4 trillion of

health costs could be averted over a decade if adequate food

fortification and/or supplementation program were to be implemented,

which would save Americans ~$1300 per person per year, or ~$3900 per

family of 3 annually. These savings won’t be achieved now that the

Food & Nutrition Board has only taken baby steps to remedy a

widespread deficiency in a sun-deprived population.

Say again?

A report in The New York Times says the F & NB concluded a vitamin

D blood serum

“

level of 20 to 30 nanograms is all that is needed for bone health, and

nearly everyone is in that range.” But there is so

much more to vitamin D than bone health. What the level of vitamin

D that is normally found is not the healthy range. Studies show the

normally-found vitamin D levels in North Americans, even among those who

live in sunny areas, is not sufficient to maintain year-round

health. Many sun-phobic Americans enter the winter months with

little or no vitamin D stored in their liver for wintertime protection

from disease, especially those who live in northern areas where virtually

no vitamin D is produced from sunlight exposure in winter

months.

The hidden agenda

And we get a hint at modern medicine’s real agenda in solving the

vitamin D-deficiency health crisis – vitamin D-like drugs! Forget

sunshine, it’s bad for you and might cause skin cancer. Forget

vitamin D pills, you might overdose on them. Instead, trust Big

Pharma to bring you patentable man-made analogs of vitamin D, at a cost

no one can possibly afford!

If you think I’m being overcritical, search here to learn more about

vitamin

D drugs in Big Pharma’s R & D pipeline. Glenville PhD,

a panel member on the 14-member committee that determined the new vitamin

D guidelines, and who is quoted to say most people

“

probably don’t have vitamin D deficiency,” is a

scientific advisor for a company developing drugs that mimic vitamin

D.

Imagined risks of overdosing

An Associated Press news report

quotes Institute of Medicine authorities who warn “the nation’s

health craze” for vitamin D “could be risky.” Dr.

J. Gallagher, director of the bone metabolism unit at the

Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Neb., agrees, saying,

“The

onus is on the people who propose extra calcium and vitamin D to show it

is safe before they push it on people.”

But just how risky could vitamin D be? Toxicity doesn’t begin till

40,000 IU is consumed for many weeks. That would be equivalent to

ingesting one-thousand 1000 IU vitamin D pills each day!

Reinhold Vieth, a noted vitamin D researcher, notes that it

takes a blood

concentration of 240 nanograms to produce hypercalcemia, a condition

where there is too much calcium in the blood which results in headaches,

nausea, constipation and vomiting. A person

would have to

ingest 1 million units of vitamin D to induce hypercalcemia.

Physicians inject a quarter of a million units of vitamin D in a single

day for wintertime bone health in their aged female patients without a

reported side effect. The risk is overstated, while the

consequences of deficiency are downplayed.

Vieth suggests a

safe upper limit of 10,000 IU for healthy adults, which is “likely

to pose no risk of adverse effects in almost all individuals in the

general population.”

Holick, a professor of medicine at Boston University School of

Medicine, recommends that adults take 2,000 to 3,000 IUs per dayand

notes that he had done studies giving subjects 50,000 IUs twice a month

for six years and seen no harmful effects.

"

There is no downside to increasing your vitamin D intake, and

there are more studies coming out almost on a weekly basis, " he

said.

New York Times health reporter Kolata, in her report on the new

vitamin D guidelines, chose to quote dismissive doctors who claim

vitamin

D pills may cause kidney stones in older females. Had Kolata

done her homework she would have found the biases of modern

medicine. Since vitamin D is usually accompanied by calcium in

bone-building supplements,

it is calcium, or

the use of vitamin D drugs (calcitriol), not vitamin D, that induces

stones. This is how wives tales regarding imagined fears of

dietary supplement overdosing gets started. The New York Times

desperately needs fact-checking.

The buildup to the F & NB report

Follow along here in the scientific buildup to the long anticipated

update of vitamin D requirements by the Food & Nutrition Board,

released today (Nov. 30).

On Oct. 29 a report published in the

Journal of Internal

Medicine indicates individuals with vitamin D levels ~15 ng are 330%

more likely to be diagnosed with high blood pressure. This

report was followed by a report published on Nov. 8 where researchers in

Austria reported that

vitamin D

supplementation reduces blood pressure by 2-6 points (2-6 mg Hg

systolic pressure). This is equal to or better than most

blood-pressure lowering drugs.

On Nov. 23 investigators, reporting in the

Nutrition

Journal, examined the records of 2198 cancer patients and found they

were abjectly vitamin D deficient (their mean vitamin D level was 19.1

nanograms, which rose to 36 ng with 8000 IU vitamin D supplementation per

day). Low vitamin D levels are indicative of poor immunity to

cancer.

On Nov. 25, researchers at the University of California, , reported

that 30% of North Americans with metabolic syndrome (overweight, elevated

blood sugar and heart and blood vessel disease)

were deficient in

vitamin D (their blood serum levels were below 20 nanograms per

milliliter of blood serum), compared to just 8% among healthy

individuals.

In the November issue of the

Journal of the

American Medical Directors Association, vitamin D researcher

Grant noted that the disparities in measurable health parameters between

blacks and whites can largely be explained by differences in vitamin D

levels. African Americans have a vitamin D level around 16

nanograms compared to 26 ng for Caucasians. (The lack of an impetus

to correct this nutritional deficiency in African Americans may be

explained by their misdirected focus on gaining greater access to

high-technology medical treatments rather than preventive

medicine.)

In Finland researchers

compared blood

concentrations of vitamin D with death rates. The study

population included 552 men and 584 women aged 53-73 years who were free

of cardiovascular disease and cancer in 1998-2001. The study

revealed dramatically decreased death rates as vitamin D blood

concentrations increased. Vitamin D levels are a life-and-death

issue. Note that African Americans typically have vitamin D blood

concentrations ~16 nanograms versus ~26 nanograms for Caucasians, and the

difference in death rates is almost double.

Range of vitamin D blood concentration and

mortality

Source: European

Journal Clinical Nutrition Oct 26, 2010

Vitamin D blood concentration, nanograms per millilter

3.56-13.62

13.66-20.30

20.31-45.19

Deaths, percent

39 of 379 (44.8%)

31 of 378

(35.7%)*

17/379

(19.5%)

* African Americans are typically in this range and experience nearly

double the death rate compared to Caucasians.

While the Institute of Medicine report maintains that most Americans are

sufficient for vitamin D, a

University of

Tennessee Health Science Center study contrary data, with 87% of

patients being mildly to severely deficient.

Severe (less an7 ng/ml) 17%

Moderate (7.0-20.9 ng/ml), 53%

Mild (21-31.9 ng/ml) 17%

Sufficient (more than 32 ng/ml) 13%

The Nov. issue of

International

Archives of Medicine published a study showing persons with vitamin D

blood concentrations below 20 nanograms were 85% more likely to

experience mental depression compared to individuals with blood levels 30

nanograms.

So, in the face of these recently published studies cited above, how

could the Food & Nutrition Board have come up with its errant

conclusions? None dare call it what it is – modern medical

racketeering, or what has been called

disease mongering,

only in reverse – there is disease everywhere except

nutritional-deficiency diseases. All of this misinformation is

delivered under the guise of authority by public health officials.

Researchers outside the US are not as conservative as the US Food &

Nutrition Board. For example, while European researchers concede

that more studies are needed to conclusively determine whether low

vitamin D levels are related to strokes, they say “we do, however,

believe that currently published data on the multiple health benefits of

vitamin D and the easy and safe and inexpensive way by which it can be

supplemented

already argue for

the prevention and treatment of vitamin D deficiency in order to

reduce stroke associated morbidity and mortality.” In other

words, they aren’t waiting for conclusive science that is years

away.

More biases revealed

While the F & NB is said to have reviewed over 1000 scientific reports

involving vitamin D before it drew its mistaken conclusions, one wonders

how many of those published reports were like the blatantly biased report

published in a recent edition of the ls of Internal Medicine

P. Heaney MD, a noted authority on vitamin D at Creighton

University, in a

letter to the

editor of that journal entitled “Does inconclusive evidence for

vitamin D supplementation to reduce risk for cardiovascular disease

warrant pessimism?,” demanded to know how a journal of such prestige

(the world’s leading journal of internal medicine) could have published

such “such poorly conceived systematic reviews of vitamin D’s effects on

the cardiovascular system.”

Dr. Heaney points to a

review of six prior

studies, only 1 which used actual vitamin D. The review

concluded that supplemental vitamin D only provided modest risk reduction

for cardiovascular disease. The other 5 studies that were reviewed

employed a vitamin D-like drug (calcitriol), which is in some ways

inferior to vitamin D itself. Ultimately, vitamin D converts to

calcitriol in the body, but this requires that the prevalent form of

vitamin D in the blood circulation (serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D) is in a

1000-fold greater concentration than calcitriol, explains Dr.

Heaney. Then cells can naturally produce as much calcitriol as they

need in local tissues, without inducing systemic toxicity.

Dr. Heaney dispels concerns about over-dosage and points to the

fact that outdoor summer workers commonly exhibit blood levels between

48-80 nanograms, without report of sun poisoning. He indicates 4000

IU of oral vitamin D is required to produce blood serum concentrations of

48 nanograms. Dr. Heaney says these are not high doses since they

are achieved by outdoor workers and should be considered within the

natural physiologic range.

Requirements to

raise blood

concentrations of vitamin D:

To raise blood levels of vitamin D by 1 nanogram/milliliter of blood

serum requires 100 IU (2.5 mcg)

To raise blood levels of vitamin D by 10 nanograms/milliliter of blood

serum requires 1000 IU (2.5 mcg)

To raise blood levels of vitamin D by 20 nanograms/milliliter of blood

serum requires 2000 IU (2.5 mcg)

Chart adapted from: P. Heaney, Functional indices of vitamin D

status and ramifications of vitamin D deficiency, Am J Clinical

Nutrition; 80 (supplement): 1706S-9S. 2004.

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Sheri Nakken, R.N., MA, Hahnemannian

Homeopath

Vaccination Information & Choice Network, Washington State, USA

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